BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

Yep, social networking is a part of our lives. How’s that for title-content disagreement? Well, read on…

Like I said, social networking is a part of our lives. You can’t get away from it. Oh, I suppose you CAN get away from it if you are an off the grid sort of person. Perhaps you can even get away from it if you are a somewhat-on-the-grid but not-on-the-griddle sort of person. Fact is, I have a buddy who is not on Faceborked. He even refuses to be on Faceborked. I’m not sure if it’s because he fears getting borked, or if he’s just afraid he’d get addicted to Farmville.

The thing is, if you are like me, you don’t really have any choice but to be “into the social networking scene.” Honestly, I’m one of those “on the grid off the griddle” types. If I had my druthers, I wouldn’t poke social networking with an elebenty foot pole. I have too much other stuff that needs doing—but, again, I chose my career and with it comes the pain of social networking, which is why you can find me on most every social network out there.

Well… You “yoosta could.”

Over the past few months I’ve done some informal analysis of my own. I’ve taken some scrapings from the various social networks, dissolved them water, then proceeded to experiment with various acid/base titration setups, whirl crap around in a centrifuge, and even grow a few cultures in Petri dishes. (The little, round Pyrex dishes, not Rob and Laura Petri… Although, Laura was definitely a dish… but I digress…)

Here’s the thing – I’ve found that there are some social networks out there that are more or less worthless to me. This revelation, of course, prompted me to jettison said networks. The other thing I discovered is that on certain networks – Faceborked, for instance – my presence was split in such a way that I was ending up doing double work for half the benefit. This wasn’t helping my productivity in the writing arena at all. So, while jettisoning Faceborked wasn’t an option, consolidating it a bit was.

Therefore, if you are a “friend” of my Faceborked “profile” you have probably been seeing this message (or one very similar to it) lately:

I’m streamlining my social networking, therefore the M. R. Sellars PAGE: http://facebook.com/SellarsMR will soon become my PRIMARY Facebook presence. This Murvel R. Sellars “profile” will be DELETED at the end of AUGUST. To stay connected go over and LIKE the M. R. Sellars PAGE.

I will be repeating myself, on Faceborked, daily, right up until the end of August. Why? Because I want this to stay current in the newsfeed, and because not everyone logs onto Faceborked daily, therefore I don’t want to be receiving strange emails in the middle of the night from people I don’t really know, all asking me WTF happened to my profile and why did I leave Faceborked.

I didn’t. I just moved into a bigger house.

Who am I kidding? I’ll get a truckload of those emails anyway. At least I’ll be able to respond with a link to this blog entry instead of explaining myself 4617 times.

More to come…

Murv

I was going to call this “It’s Just An Egg Sandwich…”, but then I had one of those moments of inspiration. Either that, or gas, I’m not sure which. In any event, I’m hoping Kurt Vonnegut will forgive me for throwing down some massa-cree on his title. After all, I did use the short version*. That should count for something.

So it goes**… Why was I going to call this entry “It’s Just An Egg Sandwich…”? Well, that’s fairly simple, actually. Mostly because I happened upon the idea of writing it while I was in the middle of fixing myself an egg sammich… On whole wheat… With cheese… And ‘mater. Kinda makes you hungry, eh?

So it goes…  The whole egg sammich thing was one of those, “Oh yeah, that again… maybe I should write about it,” moments. You know, sort of like Deja Vu, but not. Mostly because I don’t allow my deja to be vued.  It’s way too personal.

So it goes… I was standing there fixing myself an egg sammich when it suddenly dawned on me that at some unknown point in the future I would be doing something equally mundane, but that I would just as suddenly flash on the fact that I had once been standing there fixing myself an egg sammich and thinking about the fact that at some unknown point in the future I would be thinking about this moment in time and wondering where all the time that was in between had gotten off to; whereupon I would then think about the fact that I was standing there fixing myself an egg sammich and… Well… I think you get the idea.

And why did I suddenly flash on all that? Well, because in the instant prior to that flash there had been another flash. Not the expose yourself kind, mind you… Although, in a way I suppose it was. Nope… This was another of those flashes in the brainpan.

So it goes… I was standing there fixing myself an egg sammich and thinking about the fact that at some unknown point in the future I would be doing something equally mundane, but that I would just as suddenly flash on the fact that I had once been standing there fixing myself an egg sammich and thinking about the fact that at some unknown point in the future I would be thinking about this moment in time and wondering where all the time that was in between had gotten off to, because I had just flashed on something I had done in the past that was equally mundane while having the very same sort of thought…

And… So it goes… My world falls in upon itself like a shattered mirror, reflecting back what was, what is, and what will be.

Maybe I should change my name to Billy Pilgrim… But then I’d have to get killed by a gullible moron – of course, that’s Kurt’s story, not mine…

I think maybe I should just keep writing. It seems Kurt and I have a lot in common where style and satire are concerned. Hell, we both even have critics that hate us because we don’t follow their rules, and you know what? That suits me just fine… I bet it did Kurt, too. I’ll ask him when I get to the other side. I suspect that is a ways off yet, however, I’m willing to bet I’ll by lying there in my bed thinking about the time I was fixing myself an egg sammich and flashing on the thought that I would one day be doing…

So it goes…

More to come…

Murv

* The actual full title of Slaughterhouse Five is: Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death.

** “So it goes” is a commonly repeated expression employed by Vonnegut in the book, Slaughterhouse Five.