The Voluntary Virus

Fire and Rain - James Taylor (mp3)
Ghosts - Fanfarlo (mp3)

Most of the time, when we talk of the Internet and things “going viral,” there’s this sense that those of us who get sucked in are somehow victims. As if we unwittingly or unknowingly caught this contagion that’s out there in the open, like germs floating through our shared cyber-oxygen.

This week, however, I have witnessed the singularly biggest voluntary virus of my techno-life. A fellow high school alum, two years my junior, started a Facebook Group (newly redesigned to show up in your stream) with the title of “If you went to (our school), you remember when...”

He started this group last Saturday night. July 30. As of Monday morning, it had over 300 members. As of Tuesday afternoon, it was quickly approaching 500.

This isn’t a public page. It has a moderator. The only way you can get in is to be invited or to request, and he’s only accepting members who attended one of two local high schools.

This one group is the single most explosive and dangerous and amazing and successful social media outreach campaign our school could never have ever devised on its own because we are, as an entity, afraid that exactly what is happening might happen.

Which is to say, at least ⅔ of the memories and stories and commentaries which populate the group are grossly unflattering. They talk of drinking, smoking, partying. They talk of bad teachers, awful teachers, incompetent teachers. They brag of illegal activities, immoral activities, merely wild and crazy activities.

And we’re not talking a few pages. On Monday, I expanded all comments and opened all posts so that every comment to every entry from the start of the group onward was exposed, and it became an 86-page PDF. By Tuesday night, it was closer to 130 pages. Members are adding comments and “starter memories” to the site at the rate of 10-20 each hour.

A vast majority of the group’s members are graduates between 1986-1996, although as the group grows, so does the age range, little bit by little bit.

It’s become this huge, instant, online, multigenerational campfire.

We’re all sitting around it telling stories and naming names from our memories, and everyone else is reacting to them. It’s bigger than the biggest church camp campfire I’ve ever seen. Firewood keeps piling on, and the flames keep generating plenty of heat and sparks, and the marshallows keep roasting, and the cheesy Kumbaya songs keep playing (sometimes in rounds!).

Best of all, there’s no counselors. It’s just campers, free to say whatever the f*#k they feel like without giving a flip what the stupid adults say.
Unfortunately, I’m one of the adults. I’m like that camper who had to grow up and become one of the camp’s leaders, and I’m squatting behind one of the trees on the fringes of the crowd, hiding from the heat and the light, but enjoying the ecstatic communal nature of the event as best I can from my secret vantage point.

If I reveal myself, I’m required to represent the school rather than my former student self and my former student memories.

The longest single thread, by far, had reached 110 comments by Tuesday night and focused on the surreal suicide of a student some 20 years ago, an event that was simultaneously very public yet also shrouded in mystery and rumor and myth. I’ve read every comment, many of them twice. Some are grossly inaccurate. Others come in and try to correct, to offer their versions, their memories. The collective, amazingly, gets close to the truth of things once you read them all together, even if some of them prove to be either naive or insensitive or just excruciatingly idiotic.

Several guys confessed that they got very emotional just reading through the comments, as did I. I knew the boy, and I remembered hearing about it as a freshman in college, and I remember reading the detailed confidential investigative reports when I started my job. I wanted so badly to tell some guys they were full of crap and others that they had most of it right, but instead, I had to just read, and take quick, gaspy breaths, and stay hidden behind that tree.

I don’t know how long this campfire will last, when the kindling will disappear, when the campers will yawn and dissipate, making their ways back to their cabin beds before their parents come to pick them up in the morning.

I only know that, no matter how long it goes, it’s been the single most amazing cyber-campfire I’ve ever seen ignite on my computer screen, and it’s been absolutely, perfectly imperfectly beautiful.

I Like God

Taffy - Lisa Loeb (mp3)
Just Like Zeus - Jenny and Johnny (mp3)

God is on Facebook. Almost 3 million people Like Him.

Jesus is on Facebook. He takes many forms. His most popular is called Jesus Daily. 5.6 Million people Like Jesus Daily.

The first thing worth noting is that, on Facebook, Jesus is more popular than God.

Maybe it’s a generational thing. Maybe God doesn’t really quite understand how the Internet works, or how to use those newfangled smart phones. Maybe Jesus is sitting in his wing of their palatial estate in Heaven, with his netbook and Xbox and iPad, checking out the entire world with the electronic powers of modernity. God, meanwhile, watches us the old-fashioned way, with hard work, sweat, and the perfect Omniscient Eyeballs app He uploaded to his own hard drive at the time of Genesis 1:1.

Or maybe this is one more moment where God is a jealous God, and he’s trying not to get too worked up that his Son is more popular than He is.

Jesus was a pretty nice guy in the 33 years he lived, so I imagine God would have a tough time being too angry about it. He would likely be proud of his only begotten son, that whosoever should Liketh him might have everlasting Facebook status updates.

But enough of the cute easy jokes.

In truth, I was strangely troubled that God was on Facebook. I was bothered at people Liking God.

Ultimately, I’m a believer. I believe in God. I can make jokes and trip the sacrilige fantastic because I kid the ones I love. Just ask my wife or anyone else in my circles of affection. I can joke with and about God because I love Him. Which is to say, I don’t Like Him.

And yes, there is a big, big difference.

It just so happens I have a prize-winning author supporting my point. The morning after I encountered God on Facebook, my BOTG pal Bob showed me the NYTimes op-ed from Jonathan Franzen, more or less the message he delivered at Kenyon College’s commencement. Please don’t let the following awesome excerpt keep you from reading the whole thing::

If you dedicate your existence to being likable, however, and if you adopt whatever cool persona is necessary to make it happen, it suggests that you've despaired of being loved for who you really are. And if you succeed in manipulating other people into liking you, it will be hard not to feel, at some level, contempt for those people, because they've fallen for your shtick.


...A world of liking is ultimately a lie.

It’s fair to accuse me of overthinking the whole Like & Love & God thing, especially in Facebook terms. But I can’t get past it.

You can’t Like a deity.
You can’t Like Ganesha.
You can’t Like Anubis.
You don't invite these folks to the local bar for a few brewskis. They’re not peeps you run into at the office Christmas party. They’re friggin’ gods. Take ‘em or leave ‘em. Love ‘em or don’t. But neither they nor us benefit a whit from us Liking them.

Maybe some people think it’s better to invite the focii of their faith to Facebook. Better to include them in the party than leave them in the cold, right? Besides, if the language of Facebook excludes that silly overrated word "Love," then when in Rome... We’ll settle for Like.

I have several beloved relatives and friends who incorporate their faith into almost every status update. Bible verses. Mentions of Jesus. (Yeah, it’s only Christians who seem to feel this obligation.) I’m not the biggest fan of this approach, but at least it feels more real and from a more genuine place than clicking that I Like Jesus, as if that’s accomplished a damn thing.

Using what is a painfully superficial computer program to release a warm and fuzzy Jesus vibe feels like trying to explain a supernova using a pen light. If the catch phrase is “Don’t Limit God’s Power,” how much more limiting and sad can a deity get than to have their own page on Facebook?

I can see Jesus up in Heaven, holding a statue and crying, "You Like me! You really really Like me!"

* -- Side note: The Holy Spirit only has 97 friends. Holy Ghost! has 15,000, but that’s the name of a band, not the third part of the Holy Trinity.

Scorched Earth

Fire Escape - Fanfarlo (mp3)
Mean to Me - Tonic (mp3)

Any reasonable, average, non-celebrity person should find the latest adventures of Charlie Sheen great and terrible entertainment. He is a walking cautionary tale reminding us that being reasonable, average, and non-celebrity ain’t so bad.

Lest we lose our own bearings, Charlie Sheen is only the latest and most buzzworth cautionary celebrity tale du jour. He is not some weird outlier. He is one of a legion of stars whose lives mirror the melodramas and poorly-scripted flicks and shows in which they “perform” fictitiously.

The sobering realization I’ve had recently is that these moments of abject public idiocy are not restricted to celebrities. The Average Joes and Josephinas in my life are, within the confines of our more limited budgets, just as susceptible.

My acquaintances don’t generally pass out on rehearsal dinner tables or vomit from alcohol poison at trustee meetings. Most of my acqaintances are smart enough to avoid doing something on a camera or before a live audience. Unfortunately, we have another sort of public venue that’s open even more often than Waffle House: Facebook.

The most recent Facebook car wreck involved very recent graduates from the lovely school where I work. One of our more respected and esteemed grads, a very devout Christian from a very devout family, knocked up his girlfriend. The two of them began owning up to this fact through semi-subtle Facebook status updates. She wrote that her boyfriend would make a great father. She wrote that after much soul-searching, she and her boyfriend were prepared to take on greater responsibility and that God had blessed them.

I’ve never read a handbook on how to best handle the marketing and public relations challenge of knocking up a teenage girl. Perhaps hiding away from the rest of the world is cowardly or unrealistic. I doubt there’s a good way to handle it, especially if you’re going to have the baby and possibly get married.

(Abortion, on the other hand, makes these decisions easy: pretend like everything is normal, that nothing happened, and suffer behind a lonely wall of shame and guilt for as long as it takes to forget about the entire thing.)

Anyway, the fit hit the shan when one of this boy’s classmates posted a status update that basically celebrated this turn of events. “I love it when a Christian kid has his come-uppance,” was the general gist of the message.

Three days later, this one glib smirky smart-assed moment was the centerpiece of 115 comments and unknown, untold hours of conversation between unknown hundreds of adults, former classmates and various other connections lucky or unlucky enough to be “Friends of Friends” of this young man.

The slings and arrows thrown inside this string of commentary were barbed and brutal. A Christian girl coming to the defense of the to-be-parents tells the author about 10 different ways he could make love to himself or a farm animal. The author tells the girl she has developed especially good skills at pleasuring boys with her mouth and publicizing the events.

Another Christian friend offers numerous different ways the author can have intercourse with himself or other inappropriate objects. The author retorts that he loves the Christian hypocrisy and then follows with a string of well-spelled expletives of his own.

And so it goes. The author gains several dozen friends in 48 hours, all hoping to jump in with their commentary. The Christians the author seeks to damn with claims of hypocrisy serve his aims by proving their own very unChristian responses. They think they're defending their friend, but they're damning their faith.

Meanwhile, the author's current freshman college classmates view it all with ironic Yankee glee, mocking the predictable small-minded small-town Intelligent Design pregnant couple on a tractor and the Footloose homebound high schoolers who come to their rescue.

As I rubbernecked from the comfortable remove of an adult on the fringes, I found a few silver linings. All of the comments were remarkably well-composed for cyber-vitriol. One of the boys who managed to prove himself so chronically self-involved as to live on his own planet showed up near the end and wrote some of the most reasonable and measured commentary.

And then, the father to be, the fallen Christian soldier who sullied his name and his religion, showed up. I can't imagine scripting a better response for him than he wrote for himself. It was apologetic and humble and calm and completely absent of all foul language. Maybe I wouldn't have gone quite so over the top with the Jesus references, but that's a nit-pick.

In the crisis moment, the father to be in three responses kept holding fast to the kinds of words that made you realize why so many went to bat for him.

Sure, he comes from a wealthy family. He and his likely soon-to-be-wife will both likely have the opportunity to finish college. Their newborn child will likely be raised as much by grandparents as parents for the first couple of years. These advantages are indisputable, but that shouldn't discount the fact that plenty of others facing this situation would fall terribly short of impressive or fail outright.

He made lemonade out of lemons.

The author proved himself shallow and far too giddy at the very real nightmare of someone he knew well. He clearly didn't understand how someone as intelligent and witty as himself could have fallen shy of being worshiped by his high school classmates, and even if those who had such respect had earned it with sincerity, he was going to enjoy watching them fall regardless.

I doubt he'll be back for the 5-year reunion. But I suspect his one flippant comment of some seven words will still be discussed in his absence, even four years from now. He won't be missed. I suspect he'll still have plenty of burdensome chips on his shoulders.

He's our own little Charlie Sheen.

"...But I Don't Like You Like You"

Tell 'Em - Sleigh Bells (mp3)
Falling Out of Love - Ivan Neville (mp3)

"I like you, but I don't like you like you."

Between fifth grade and my engagement in 1996, I heard these words or some variation, from the mouths of a dozen of girls and young women, approximately 2,454 times. (This is a rough estimate culled from my many journals over the years.) Another few hundred thought these words but never said them aloud. What these wonderful, adorable females were trying to tell me, without breaking my poor and fragile heart, was that they didn't really see much need for us to kiss or bump fuzzies. When it came to them and Billy, the Platonic notion of "like" was plenty. Plentonic, I guess.

The value of Facebook is and has always been right in that area of "like."

It's most useful in keeping up with the people you like but don't necessarily like like, and definitely not with the ones you love. It is, and has always been, to cultivate lazy friendships.

This isn't meant as an insult to Facebook. This quality is precisely what made the service so perfect, because it's an easy, harmless, lazy way to reach out to hundreds of people you don't particularly dislike. And, occasionally, it can do even more.

Guys, for example, can go looking around in the picture galleries of their female friends and jerk off, or so The Daily Beast would have you believe. If you haven't properly adjusted your privacy settings, guys you've never met and don't know can stare at you, jerk off, and then send you a private message telling you how hot you look. (Let's face it. Porn is now so easily-accessible and ubiquitous that it's blase. Men in 2010 are in a Reality-Based world! Better a clothed real normal person who lives near them than some skanky surgical oddity somewhere in the bowels of Los Angeles!)

One of the parts of my job that is both fun and a little sad is when the students who get to know me well, as they approach their final days as a student, come up to me and say, "I get to Friend you after graduation, right?" And I say, "Yup." And they say, "Oh that's so cool. Can't wait, Uncle Billy!" (Yes, that's one of my nicknames. I promise I don't let them sit on my lap or anything.)

It's fun to see that they Like me, to see their excitement of venturing into uncharted adult waters. It's depressing because they're gonna Friend me and realize that I'm not really all that entertaining in the Facebook world. And, lately, college guys don't much give a flip about Facebook.

But here's what I started to realize in the last month, as Facebook has continued to prove that it doesn't much give a shit about its users, their privacy, or the never-ending learning curve of adjusting to what seems like major changes in how they do things every other friggin' month. Here's the quick summary:

• Facebook will be fine because we don't really care about our privacy.
• You can quit Facebook without quitting.
• The Great Facebook Exodus will occur May 31.
• Another option on quitting Facebook without quitting.
• Facebook's 313th realization that its customers care more about privacy than Facebook does, followed by its 313th apology, followed by secret meetings to arrange the next unannounced expansion into your privacy.
• And don't even get me started on this "Community Page" crap, otherwise known as "more work and more headaches for school marketing idiots like me.

And you know what I'm thinking this whole time?

Facebook? I like you. You're a nice guy. But I don't like like you. And when you keep trying to stick your grimy thumb up my ass? I don't really need to put up with that. I don't care how drunk you are when you try. I'm not Arnold Babar (with two B's... just not together), and you're not my proctologist. It's not appropriate, and I haven't allowed it since that huge suppository I took when I was 24.

I'm good enough. I'm smart enough. And gosh darn it, people in the real world can like me without you.

May 31.

Think about it.

The new Sleigh Bells album Treats is the most refreshingly awesome uncategorizable new album I've heard since The Go! Team's debut album first hit my ears in 2004. It's a sonic distortion assault and utter nonsense and absolutely delicious.

My Facebook Random 25 Facts (a.k.a. "TMI")

Throwing Things - Ned's Atomic Dustbin (mp3)
21 Things I Want in a Lover - Alanis Morrissette (mp3)

Facebook has this virus going around where people are composing "25 random facts not everyone knows about me" and then sending them around to an assortment of their "Friends." While I dodged this virus for a few days, I ended up being so goaded by certain pals (and given great suggestions for the list!) that I ended up putting one together. Seemed like a damn good post for a lazy Sunday.

My goal -- and I think I managed it -- was to be amusing and honest, yet also make sure I wrote nothing that could get me fired.

(I have 26 because, gosh darn it, I'm good enough, I'm smart enough and people like me.)

1. I smile -- without a hint of irony -- everytime I hear "Walking on Sunshine" by Katrina and the Waves.

2. The only two times in my life I tried smoking an entire cigarette, I puked. (Apparently I thought the first time might have been a fluke.)

3. I enjoy watching "Kim Possible" with my daughters.

4. I'm so jealous of his skills as a writer, I would have Richard Russo's babies. If I could have babies. And if he would take me as his bride. And love me, truly love me, for more than just my looks.

5. Feet? Don't like 'em. Don't find 'em attractive or appealing. Everything below the ankle is pretty icky.

6. Facebook status updates are little rays of sunshine in my life. The more they raise my eyebrow, the happier they make me.

7. Olivia Newton-John was, is, and might well always be my biggest celebrity crush.

8. In third grade, a neighborhood friend and I, on several occasions, played a game where we tossed actual darts at one another.

9. World Class Chocolate. Gold Medal Ribbon. Cherry Garcia. Nothing else counts.

10. If you're underage on the beach and drinking beer, and a police officer asks you what you're drinking, don't tell him "Mello Yello." They don't like that.

11. I once ran around an outdoor basketball court covered in toilet paper that was on fire.

12. I've only locked my keys in the car three times. All three times, the engine was running.

13. Over Easter Break 1991, I adopted a dead jellyfish as a pet. I named him George. He smelled really bad. George was not nearly as successful for impressing the ladies as Drakkar Noir.

14. Cereal is the best dessert. Particularly Boo-Berry or Crispix.

15. Every girl I ever dated but one (no, the list isn't terribly long) went out with at least one other friend of mine after we broke up.

16. I once hooked up with a girl inside a pitch-black tunnel, except when we emerged into the light, it was a different girl than the one with whom I thought I was hooking up. "Awkward Turtle!"

17. UNC's Chancellor sent me a personal note saying my columns made his day brighter.

18. Living in Warner Robins, Ga., made me appreciate every other place on this planet just a little bit more.

19. When I asked Jenni to marry me, I went into her bookstore in the mall dressed like Barney. By the time I entered the bookstore, I had a small army of children trailing me. It kinda freaked 'em out when I got on one knee. Apparently dinosaur-human intimacy made them uncomfortable.

20. I once commandeered a security guard's golf cart while camping out for Dook tickets at the Dean Dome. We returned it. Eventually.

21. Me, on stage at Cat's Meow on Bourbon Street, the mic in one hand and a Hand Grenade in the other, singing my heart out to some crap like "Little Red Corvette": That's my idea of true (if temporary) bliss.

22. I have become incredibly lactose intolerant in the last five years, and this single change in me has made me a more bitter and angry human being. (See #s 9, 14)

23. When I was 10, I stopped on my bike so quickly that I fell forward and my crotch rolled through the frame's front wheel fork, requiring stitches so close to my personal bits that not even Kim Catrall has had a Brazilian Wax job this personal. I think all relationship problems I've ever had can be traced back to this traumatic moment.

24. I dressed as a woman for Halloween in 1991, and when my girlfriend saw me and realized who it was, she threw up violently. We broke up a week later. But we're still friends!!

25. Nothing in my life is guaranteed to make me more consistently happy than the feeling of two excited daughters rushing to hug their daddy when he comes home from work.

26. I've spent half my life trying to prove Ronald McDonald is the Anti-Christ.

I Have 149 Friends

Nobody Knows Me - Lyle Lovett (mp3)
Friends/Sigmund + the Sea Monster - Tripping Daisy (mp3)

In the film The Princess Bride, criminal mastermind Vezzini (Wallace Shawn) repeatedly uses the word "Inconceivable!" when reacting to the Dread Pirate Roberts overcoming obstacles set in his path. Finally, after the umpteenth use of this word, Vezzini's swordsman, Inigo Montoya, says, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Facebook keeps using the word "Friend." I do not think it means what they think it means. "Friend" has been Vezzini'd by Facebook.

As of Wednesday, September 24, I had 149 Friends on Facebook. To risk coming across like a complete and total ass, I haven't had 149 Friends in my whole entire life. Even more awkward, at least half of the people I consider true friends are either not on Facebook, or we're just not friends on there. (The latter is entirely possible, because I have only twice ever searched for anyone on Facebook, and neither time was for one of my true Friends.)

The reality is, when you make a Friend on Facebook, you're really acknowledging an acquaintance. But even that's not quite accurate, because at least a dozen of my Facebook Friends aren't even people I particularly like. They're not bad people. They don't waterboard detainees or molest small children. But I've never even had what could be considered a "friendly conversation" with them. No small talk at all, not even about the kids or our favorite sports teams or anything.

But there they are on my Facebook. People who don't even rank as acquaintances. And now they're my Friends. Are Amigos falling from the sky?

As best I can tell, Facebook is really good at letting you feel more connected to people you're not all that connected to, but shitty at making you feel more distant from people who are actually your friends. Put another way, if I already know you really well, I don't get much from being your Facebook Friend. If I don't know you really well, or if you've moved away, then maybe I get little tidbits of friendly information that allows me to feel closer.

Maybe this is proof that I'm now older, that advances in technology has passed me by. But I don't think so. Why use Facebook to communicate with someone you'll see later that day, or the next day, unless they're not worth going out of your way for to begin with?

I'm not pooping on Facebook. I actually think it's a pretty brilliant creation. But when I scroll through that list of Friends, I find myself shaking my head and wondering, Why would you remotely care what my "status" is, or what my favorite '80s movie is? Why did you ask me to be your friend? When are we allowed to finally acknowledge that we don't care about one another and break this utterly superficial and meaningless cyberbond?

No seriously. Can you ever break up with a Facebook Friend? What are the requirements? Or are Facebook Friends like unsavory relatives, and we're forced to silently coexist with one another until one of us passes?

CLARIFICATION: If you're reading this, and you're a Friend of mine on Facebook, then allow your common sense to determine that you're probably not one of the people I consider a mere "acquaintance," since only about 20 people we know read this silly thing.


"Nobody Knows Me" is from Lyle Lovett's second album, Lyle Lovett and His Large Band. "Friends/Sigmund + the Sea Monsters" is from Saturday Morning, a compilation of classic Saturday morning show theme songs performed by various artists. Both are available at Amazon.com's mp3 site.