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Best to Leave the Past in the Past

I was going to write a short “Twenty Years Today” post because occasionally I find something worth sharing when looking back, but after actually reading a few of my Journal entries from March 1999—and then going down the rabbit hole of reading all the entries from 1999—I decided I really didn’t want to subject you to any of that.

There’s nothing lurking in the past that needs to be regurgitated now.

What stands out the most from twenty years ago is how profoundly unhappy and lost I was. While it wasn’t clear to me at the time (at least consciously) in hindsight, it screams off those pages. It’s no exaggeration to say (as I have many times) that the Mark prior to the cancer diagnosis was someone completely different from the Mark who emerged after treatment. When I think of the hundreds—no, thousands—of dollars I threw away on stuff, trying to fill the very obvious emotional hole in my life that leaps off those pages, well…I’m not here to judge that past self or anyone else, but damn gurl, I was a mess.

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Quiet Time

The doggies don’t know it’s the weekend, so almost without fail they’re dancing on me at 5:30 am, wanting to go out. I can’t sleep in the way I used to when I was younger (last Sunday returning to bed after letting them out and sleeping until 2 pm was a very rare exception), but occasionally instead of immediately feeding them after they come back in we all head back to bed for another hour or two.

Most of the time, however, I stay up and utilize this quiet time (Ben can—and does—still easily sleep in on the weekends) to write or organize the week’s downloads accumulating on my computer, or post nekkid menz while the doggies sleep on the couch in the den beside me. These seem to be the few times during the week when I can actually focus and not be distracted by every shiny object that crosses my path.

Squirrel!

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Speaking of Television Programs…

…I’d rather not publicly admit to watching.

Just once I’d love to see the outtakes from Texas Flip ‘n Move where the potential buyers/paid actors touring the finished homes prior to auction blurt out, “WTF is this crap? What were they thinking?!”

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The Best Thing That Could Happen To This Country Right Now…

…would be for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to all go out of business. Shuttering Twitter especially would finally silence The Orange Russian Menace in the White House and starve him of the attention his malignant narcissism demands. It might also go a long way toward restoring some semblance of civility in society when the ignorant among us no longer have such a ready venue to spew that ignorance like monkeys flinging feces and make it that much more difficult for foreign actors to influence our elections.

(I used to respond to at least the particularly egregious tweets by the Shitgibbon, but then I realized that any response—positive, negative, or neutral—simply feeds his sociopathy. So I’ve stopped. “Do Not Feed The Trolls” is a perfect strategy.)

I know people say, “Facebook is how I keep in touch with my grandchildren!” or “Twitter is how I stay abreast of events in the world!”—neither of which were apparently possible before the advent of these platforms.

I think social media in general—once a fun, positive way of bringing people together—has become a scourge. We’ve become so addicted to the release of adrenaline and noradrenaline from being outraged at what other people are saying or doing online that we can’t tear ourselves away from our devices long enough to remember that there is real life outside the confines of our screens. Nope, we have to tap-tap-tap that vein.

And as I recently reminded Ben—after he was called to the carpet professionally because of something he posted on Facebook—not all the “friends” in your social media circle are truly your friends, or even have your best interests at heart.

I quit Facebook nearly 5 years ago and it took months for the itch to reactivate my account to go away. Nowadays I go onto Twitter maybe twice a week for only a few minutes at a time before I’m overwhelmed by the overwhelming stupidity of humanity on display. (But TBH I do enjoy the comedic antics of the residents of Vaca Muerta Estates so I keep it around just for that.) While I have loved the photography on Instagram all these years, I’m ready to drop it as well because it seems that lately all I do there is block bots and unwanted ads for crap that wouldn’t sell from a Sharper Image catalog.

So if all those “services” dropped off the face of the earth tomorrow I’d undoubtedly go through a bit of withdrawal and I might feel a small tinge if loss at not being able to easily ogle handsome men showing off their impossibly toned bodies in trendy worldwide locations, but my life would go on.

Your thoughts?

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