Just say no to the smokehole

Subtitle: Quentin still has not shown up yet on Dark Shadows even though there has been a tremendous build-up for him and it's making me cranky.


Haven’t had much time to blog this past week. But it has definitely been a time of mind-blowing, bizarre revelations. I really cannot believe how many people are opting to announce intimate, personal experiences over the internet. I have seen people in my own life breaking news through MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc., that they would never before have thought it appropriate to announce online. I’m not saying I think people should never discuss their thoughts or experiences online—obviously if I did, this blog for me to rant would not exist. I think the part that gets stuck in my craw is the concept of breaking personal news to people in such an impersonal, cold manner. I will not divulge names but someone I know announced the death of one of his parents on his Twitter account. I was shocked, disgusted and baffled by this. Would it not be more appropriate to post a message like, “I’m going through a personal issue right now and will not be available for a while” . . .? Would you not want to spend some time notifying friends and family members of this person’s death before you announced it for the world on Twitter? Can you imagine if you were a friend of the family and you had to read about this person’s death on Twitter? God, I would be both furious and heartbroken to find out that way.


On a much less serious note, I am still going through my own “you have exited the social networking world and now we will punish you” fallout. Still have people not speaking to me, still have people not telling me how life is going on the grounds that I should just check their MySpace/Facebook/Twitter instead. I stumbled across an article by Janet Street-Porter on this very topic and it made me strangely optimistic. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1138445/Janet-Street-Porter-Why-I-hate-Facebook.html) I say that because it makes me relieved to know that I am not the only nomad in the desert going through social networking ostracism. People with a couple of decades of life experience more than I have can still be reduced to high school kids playing games on MySpace like teenagers. It’s still sad, of course, to picture someone who’s 50 years old acting 15. I am frustrated with a couple of friends right now who seem unwilling to mature out of the wild party phase. I still enjoy drinking and I still enjoy going out. But drinking to the point of puking all night long or losing control of motor skills or feeling like hungover ass for 3 days straight . . . fuck that in a big way. One of them is drinking to the point of being unable to walk or function every single weekend. The other one seems to be in a “make any excuse to go out to the nightclubs until 2am” mode. It seems that some people get dragged into adulthood kicking and screaming. And I’m not sure why that is. There’s a time and place in life for partying and clubbing and going out a lot. Then the time comes when you go, “Eh, not so much.” Not so much on smelling like cig smoke from your hair down to your shoes. Not so much on getting hit on by sloppy, creepy, drunky dudes. Not so much on having to figure out transportation issues so as not to get a DUI. Not so much on trying to “act sober” in public to avoid a public intox bust. Not so much at spending a small fortune each month on bar tabs, restaurant meals, late night runs to McD’s, Whataburger, IHOP or whatever other grease-tastic place is open. Not so much anymore. Not feeling it. At some juncture, people have this realization that it’s not that great. It is when you’re 21 through, say, 25 or 26 but not after your brain has finished growing. It was somewhere in that timeframe for me that my body said, “I am slowing down now. And ha-ha on you if you think you can stop me!” When you stop for a second and think about it, you realize that you’ve seen all there is to see at these places anyway. I can drive by any bar in this area and tell you what type of place it is and what type of people frequent it. Even if I have not been there in years, I can tell you. For me, that was a light bulb moment. I would rather spend my money on better, more lasting things and spend my time with a better quality of people than immature kids in a smokehole. My hope is that once the friends I have who are still caught up in this lifestyle wake up, we can reconnect. It’s a hell of a lot better to have a nice meal with a couple of martinis and then go down the street to the movie theater (preferably to see something in 3-D since that process is only enhanced by a little vodkee in the bloodstream) to relax for a couple of hours (OFF THE ROADWAYS) than it is to sit in a shitty bar with shitty people. I hope they catch on to this before something tragic happens to one of them.