Facebook

It was with great joy that I first signed up for a Facebook account. I was promised the opportunity to reconnect with old friends, meet new people with interests similar to mine, stuff like that. It was going to be a total reworking of my social life. I am not the friendliest person and I wanted to abandon my misanthropic ways, reach out to people, be normal.

It was not long after reconnecting with some long lost acquaintances that I started to realize why it was that I lost contact with these people in the first place. People drift in and out of your life all the time, it happens. I really do not have a lot in common with someone I was friends with in grammar school. Maybe we used to be close, but life has taken us on different journeys. There are people with whom I am very glad to be talking to or writing to again but for the most part I really find the whole Facebook experience to be a waste of time, do I really care if someone who I have not seen for years has found an imaginary lonely cow on a farm that does not even fucking exist? No, not really.

On another front winter is here, I live in the northeast. People bitch and complain about the snow, but it is what it is. We choose to live here, it gets cold, it snows. If people do not like it there is a whole country to live in, and there are places where shit like that does not happen. I love the first snowfall, when the trees get all covered, and you stand outside in the silence where the only sound is the almost imperceptible hiss of the snow falling. This year the first snowfall came during a full moon, I stood outside in the blue light, and it was almost spiritual, and I am usually not a sappy person but it was nice. Of course, not the snow is all just grey shitty sludge, filled with dirt and pollution that you track all over the house.

Winter has also brought chipmunks back into my life. I live in a pretty rural area, and I am constantly trying to fend off nature from intruding itself into my little area of the world. It is a continuous epic struggle, with wins and losses on both sides. But, I am constantly trying to keep stuff from growing on my roof or doing battle with some woodland creature who has made its' way into my house. This past weekend my youngest son found a chipmunk sitting on the stairs. Now there is currently a movie in the theaters that depicts having chipmunks in the house as a hilarious affair with a lot of singing and dancing and general shenanigans going on. In reality, it is not like that. First of all it is very very hard to get the little bastards to sing. Oh, they will wear the sweaters and dance all right, but just try to get the little fuckers to sing. They really hate it. So, I captured the offending creature, and I would like to say that I released it gently back into the wild, but in reality I made an example of the fucking thing, hoping that the other chipmunks would see what happens when you mess with me. I won the battle but not the war, because yesterday I noticed my cat playing with something, something that was dead, another goddamn chipmunk. They are now throwing themselves at me like cannon fodder. They know that I have the size and certain advantages like technology and thumbs, but they have numbers. They know this and they are using it to chip away at my fucking sanity.