Mama Needs a Moment

Three Ways to Totally Fuck Up a Kiss

 

I think we can safely say at this point that Facebook occasionally acts like the sliding floor from "Drag Me to Hell," except in the opposite direction, where instead of being Shop-Vacked by Satan into the netherworld for eternity, the forgotten hellbound–perhaps catching a glimpse of daylight through a crack in the portal or something– rise again like reflux for a last-ditch shot at romance. I'm not sure what the deal is; probably some conflagration of alone time, the altogether too-easy Zen of cyber-stalking, and that third glass of wine, but Facebook seems to be, of late, the milkshake that brings the boys to the yard.

The thing is...ugh–GET OFF MY LAWN!

Damn kids.

Anyway, every couple of weeks seems to find some gent (or, on very rare occasions, some fuckwad) from my past (significant or otherwise) emerging through the northbound hell-chute to drop me a line of inquiry. On occasion it will be someone with whom I had, say, one neutral date in the not so recent past. Such was the case rather recently; I was contacted over that twitchy little, oft-freezing Facebook chat window.

Though I was caught off guard (Facebook chat *always* catches me off guard, but then, I don't really enjoy instant messaging, for the most part) the talk did turn flirtatious, leading me to question why the date was a bust...but it came back readily. The date was a well qualified one, but utterly lacking in chemistry (this was the mutual take). More specifically, though, I remembered the kiss as being...well, calamitous. In addition to being disappointed by such a flat and displeasing kiss, I remember also being fascinated that a kiss could indeed even be so terrible. Is it really that subjective?

While an atrocious kiss could, I suppose, be attributed to nervousness, it seems that if the kiss is anticipated and desired, that tension might serve only to heighten the exquisite sensations of an "all-systems-go" first kiss. But that's not what I'm going to talk about here, because I seriously can't even recall my last good first kiss. It feels abstract at this point, like something read in a waiting room article.

No. The sucky first kisses (which coincidentally are also the sucky LAST kisses) are right here still, with the unsorted mail, because the last two years have been that kind. So in an effort to educate (or at least educate from my highly subjective platform) en masse about kissing, I will recap these horrors:

1) The metronomical mouth raper. Yes, the man who seems to want to emulate coitus with his tongue, doing the WAH--oh WA-oh, WAH-oh soulless, tongue penetration of one's mouth. The only survival skill I can offer here is GET AWAY IMMEDIATELY. Also, the "long hot shower" rape standard might come in handy: I had to shower–and shake my head repeatedly WHILE showering–to purge this one from my consciousness. What horror. This was an all-time worst-case scenario. I do think I had a kiss like that around sixth grade, but did not know any adults kissed like this. I'm feeling a little skeeved out even telling you about it, but I do it in the hopes that if you kiss this way, you'll do everyone on earth a favor and stop! in the name of love God.

2) The chin licker. Ew. What is with this guy, who on the first kiss seems so spazzed out about confirming his passion factor that he begins to tongue-bathe your face? Fuck, man, please! That's why god made golden retrievers, and even THEY have to play by SOME rules of etiquette. I had a couple dates with this one guy and I was pretty on the fence, but I sort of loosely followed that "unbearable lightness of being"-type logic...he'd passed all the usual hurdles and there was no good reason NOT to kiss him, and it might (I reasoned) have gone either way...but two minutes later my chin was apparently being digested. I am pretty sure he had, like a python does to better swallow larger prey, dislocated his jaw in order to submerge my forehead in a slobbery cave of regret before I pulled what was left of my face away, suddenly wet and cold. On the two-block walk back to my car I scanned recent memory for any severe karmic violations which brought this type of thing upon me.

3) The wet sad face-hole. Ever kissed someone whose tongue seems to recede into nonexistence? Gawwwwd damn! I really did not think there were this many ways to fuck under a good old French kiss, but maybe I'm just rilly rilly lucky. The brush of lips started off positively, but then on the immediately subsequent wave...no tongue to be found. I went investigating. The shuttle broke off from the mother ship on a reconnaissance mission. We went pretty deep, imperiling ourselves and our property...nothing. Just a wet void. Disconcerting. Also oddly gross.

Having contemplated the depth of scarring across all columns, I'd probably conclude that the mouth rapist was the most egregious offender (using the length of shower needed afterward as a guide).

No wait.
It's a three-way tie.

In the end I'd totally rather fall asleep to Rashomon for the 400th time, waking up only when my wine glass tips over onto my chest.

 

Facebook doesn't love you...that way.

Privacy rapists? Probably. But I'm not going anywhere.

There's a symphony of caterwauling going on of late about Facebook's ongoing plundering of demographic data for what I'm guessing must be rather lucrative data mining and advertising contracts. My initial reaction was surprise...not surprise that they're doing it– they've been doing it all along (or did you think it was just a really REALLY lucky guess that when you visited Facebook you'd get ads that said things like "Deep Discounts Only for 39-year-old Women!" or "33 and Single?!")–but that anyone is surprised.

There are a couple of issues here. The first and most obvious is privacy. Internet privacy, almost a contradiction in terms at this point, is determined by how low we keep our own profile–literally. The more you share, the less you should be surprised when it's "outed" by sites like Spokeo, an aggregator that's creating quite a flap lately because of its invasive-feeling summaries about us–which incorporate everything from addresses to approximate income and credit scores.

However, Spokeo isn't the first, not by a long shot, and certainly won't be the last. Most of the info Spokeo's compiling is readily available through search engines like Google and Bing. The difference is that it's more focused (though hardly more precise;  it was startlingly inaccurate in the tests I performed on myself and a few of my friends). Somehow seeing all one's data presented at once–like a rather sensitive personnel file complete with photos, links and financial records–after entering just a name, is disconcerting.

Like Spokey, Facebook is a business, and like any business it wants to grow, which in turn requires capital. How to monetize their offering has been a priority ever since they started taking off, and using demographic information is the most obvious path they could have pursued. Of course they're going to want to traffic your information...it's their only commodity.

The other issue is entitlement. The indignation some Facebook users are expressing ("If this keeps up, I am OUTTA HERE!") suggests users feel they were deceived or defrauded, as if there were a breach of trust. This may well be the case, but I'd argue that trust was misplaced right off the blocks.

While I understand being displeased with new, previously undisclosed practices that have us by default, wholly involuntarily denuding ourselves–even highly identifying, and perhaps even compromising, information–to third-party sites we may not be, ahem, "in a relationship" with...I also think we are partially to blame for a) posting way too much, and way too revealing, information online in the first place; and b) believing Facebook is going to behave like a trusted friend rather than an outside-funded social networking site for which we pay absolutely nothing to use–and with ever-increasing frequency.

We should get one thing clear: Facebook doesn't owe you a goddamned thing. Facebook isn't some kind of celestial Internetz "right" in a cosmic meritocracy. What did you, or any of us, do to "earn" our constantly-accessible (ample hiccups aside) platform for blogs, thoughts, and friendships (new, old, or hypothetical)? This no-cost hub that so many of us use daily–whether sparingly or copiously–to blather, bemoan, spam, self-promote, champion, persuade, edify, request information, declare, glean opinions, decry, boast, apologize, confuse, thank, solicit employment, or informally survey one another...from nearly any medium (via email, SMS, iPhone/Blackberry)--this is free, remember? Yet someone made a (free!) application for you to use on your iPhone, and someone is changing things, writing code, and making updates (plenty of which may be highly invasive and objectionable).  Storage space is required for your video clips of little Ashton spitting out peach puree, and for photo albums–posted by millions of users!– which appear (so far) to be retained indefinitely. Could there be a better solution than Facebook? Probably. But, so far, there isn't.

And what was that other thing? Oh, yeah. It's...free.

It's also a forum which, if you care to learn about it, can be administered rather strictly (drastically limiting access to even just a mere handful of people if you so desire) or you can leave it alone and let it pass along all your vitals to anyone who will pay for it; it's up to you. But at the end of the day, it can't tell anyone any stories that you didn't reveal in the first place.

I won't be leaving Facebook anytime soon; buggy and unscrupulous? Yeah, probably. But it's too widely adopted–nothing else out there has its sweep. Sometimes I use Facebook passionately, and other times I ignore it for weeks. But I've never reviled it for being what it is: a business, surfing slippery slopes, and sniffing out ways it can make money from what would otherwise be a losing proposition.

"Just go around..."

This morning, en route to the bus stop: a homeless guy frozen upright in position: head listing far to one side, eyes closed (seemingly asleep?) arms jutting stiffly out in an a-frame, mouth agape. Maximo: "Just go around the zombie, Mama." My parental side (teach them about compassion and cruel circumstance) at harsh odds with the scantly evolved adolescent side, which is laughing too hard to breathe, let alone parent.

Greenlake

It's inevitable that the boys and I will soon have to move; I'd intended to buy this place, but given my encumbrances with the IRS and my stubbornly immovable Portland house, making yet another towering structural purchase would unleash more financial minions than I feel like reckoning with. But I'll regret a move away from Greenlake, which has been a sanctuary of late. It's replaced the bathroom as my one inviolate sanctuary; the boys are bored with Greenlake and leave me alone to it.

How anyone could tire of Greenlake I am not sure, though, as it changes its surfaces with the seasons, and I would love it for its complex and ionic sky alone--a sky that opens wider and brighter by tenfold, folding clouds into striated ribbons of pink and endless tones of grey without the darkness that seems omnipresent everywhere else except the Seattle coastline proper.

I am a little in love with the bleached birch trees, which stand in bamboo-like rectitude in winter, the bark as stark-white as the steam from your breath--or so it seems from a distance--but buttery white, or discolored--almost coffee-stained--upon closer inspection. The smooth bark like bone, the bleakness and also the stoic posture. I run past them but always relish them; they move me somehow.

In the spring (and it is spring now), Greenlake explodes into soft, sexual blossom: pink and white cherry blossoms that burst open and drift indolently down on us joggers, and carpet our path underfoot. Upon the lower branches, as I run by at a blur, I see the occasional dropped hat, missing baby shoe, bib or cloth, draped visibly so it might be reunited with its owner. New plantings have been initiated, I noticed tonight, of simple, hardy flowers, in small patches within the outer loop.

The outer loop is where more "serious" runners circle. Although I am not one of those. I merely wish to not have to leap dog leashes, park benches, or weave between two-abreast, double-wide strollers pushed by women with crisscrossed shih tzus on the more congested (and more bucolic) inner path. On spring days, I forgo the beauty of the lake's edge path and stick to the gravelly outer loop for its economy, and because it gives me more mileage with which to exorcise my daily demons.

In the summer, and in fact even the winter and spring of what has been an unusually temperate year, I often run the path at night, which may be dangerous; I don't know (and I suppose I don't care as much as I should.) Lately I have opted not to play my usual workout mix, preferring to let my player choose a soundtrack, and the moon hangs always brightly and accessibly over the lake; it's as if it's always lit for company. One such night, Tom Waits' "Waltzing Mathilda" came on, as the moonlight fell loosely over the lifeguard tower before fracturing itself across the lake's chop, and that's when I learned that it's entirely possible to run with your heart at your throat.