by Jeff Somers

I'm not proud, no.

AS MANY OF YOU know, for a very long time I had nothing but disdain for social networking on the Internet, and even wrote essays about how I did not and would not have a Facebook account or a Twitter account. Of course, today I have both a Facebook and Twitter account and actually do use them, somewhat. I am not proud. If I didn't obsessively record all of my stupid opinions in this zine, I'd deny everything and pretend I was on board with Facebook from day one. Since I can't do that due to the huge pile of steaming evidence I leave behind, I will simply ignore the issue altogether.

As I'm late to the game of social networking, a lot of its quirks are brand new to me. The phenomenon of old friends crawling out of the Dustbin of History to assail you with Friend Requests and insistent photos of their children remains fresh and horrifying to Your Humble Editor here. I would have thought the 20 years of Complete Radio Silence on my part would have been a hint to them that I Do Not Want to be friends with them, but the assumption rather appears to be that I have been pining away for my old school chums and completely at a loss as to how to contact them.

That isn't a completely crazy idea, of course; even in today's day and age you cannot always easily locate people you haven't spoken to in decades. Although I maintain that the idea that not speaking to someone in decades is an indication, somehow, that they wish to speak to you is fucking batshit crazy.

The only explanation I can imagine is that a lot of people, from what I've observed, spend an awful lot of their time wishing they were older or younger—in a different place in their lives. For a lot of people who have made it out of their twenties without killing themselves, looking back on high school or college is an attractive daydream: Forgotten are the heartbreaks, the hangovers, the lack of money and automobiles that required you to jam a screwdriver into the air intake in order to start them on cold winter mornings. Instead all you remember are the love affairs, the great parties, sleeping late and having no responsibilities. Sometimes when paying the mortgage such times seem pretty fucking compelling.

That makes sense to me: People reach out to old friends they haven't thought of in decades because they're really reaching out for the times they inhabited together. They want to be 21 again. Since I've never, in my whole life, wanted to be any other age than I currently am, that doesn't make any sense to me.

It's absolutely true: I've never wanted to be older or younger. When I was thirteen, and a lot of my friends wished to be older—so they could drive, so they could buy beer, so they wouldn't have to go to school or listen to their parents—I didn't. I'm not saying I didn't want to do those things, because I did. And I'm not saying I was universally happy, because I wasn't. What I'm saying is, if my Future Self had appeared naked in a flash of lightning and told me I could time-travel and become 21 years old, able to do all those things, I would have kneed my Future Self in the groin, probably because of the haircut, possibly because of the whole naked thing.

Looking at myself in the mirror, I'll have to go with the haircut.

I'LL HAVE TO GO WITH THE HAIRCUT.

I guess I never saw the logic in wanting to be in a different time, a different age, but mainly I think it's my unwavering optimism: I'm a glass-half-full kind of guy, definitely, and for me I can always see the advantages of the situation I'm in. When I was a kid, I was aware of the advantages of being a kid: School was easy, I didn't have a job, my home life was pretty good, and I spent my huge tracts of formless free time doing whatever the fuck I felt like, mostly. Being a kid was awesome. There were video games, and Little League baseball, and Whoppers at Burger King without any thought of fat or cholesterol. There were games of manhunt throughout the neighborhood at night, and ice cream cakes on my birthday. I rocked being a kid.

Artist's rendition of my brother.

So why would I want to be older? Sure, there's good stuff in being older, too, but I was sort of into enjoying the moment. I always have been. The past is kind of vague and smoky to me, and not only because of the brain-damaging amount of alcohol I've ingested in my time; it's just the way my brain works. My brother is the exact opposite: He has the precise steel-trap mind of a computer when it comes to memories (either that or he's a psychopath who makes up detailed fake memories just to fuck with me—equally possible, actually, now that I think about it). We have a conversation like this about once a month:

ME: Did we see The Rescuers when we were kids?

MY BROTHER: We went on Sunday, April 21st. It was about 70 degrees that day. I wore courderoy pants and they made me sweaty. You wore cutoff jean shorts. We got to the theater five minutes late and had to sit too far in front. The theater smelled like popcorn and caramel. There were thirty-four other people in the theater. My seat had a spring sticking out that hurt me. Afterwards you wanted to play video games in the lobby and I wanted to go home, but Mom let you play for ten minutes and you spent $3.50.

ME: Wow. All I remember is ... that you're my brother. And we saw a movie, once. I think.

DAMN YOU, SOMERS!

I'm incredibly present-oriented. The past is vague, and the future doesn't exist yet, so I've never really wanted to be anything but what I am. At my age now, of course, most people start to wish to be young again, or at least that's the cliche. And it's easy to see why: In addition to our slow physical breakdown, there's the slow, horrifying accumulation of responsibility and requirement: We have kids, buy houses, get married, get divorced, declare bankruptcy, have surgeries, attend funerals. The past, as remembered, is usually remarkably responsibility-free, even though we had chores and homework and school and part-time jobs and organized activities like Little League and Boy Scouts. The past gets idealized as we move beyond it, until eventually any period from our lives gets bowdlerized into The Best Years of Our Lives.

Similarly, the Future is blank: Even if there are no obvious signposts we want to get to (the drinking age, losing our virginity, buying our first car) it's a formless, empty mass of time that might turn out exactly as we wish. We might win the lottery. We might sell that screenplay. We might meet the person of our dreams—the Future is nothing, and thus remains more attractive than our present, which is real.

Sad, really.

Of course, the Future is changeable, unless you're a determinstic freak, in which case how you drag your doomed ass out of bed every day despite having no free will at all is a mystery. The Past is done and cannot be changed, but theoretically you can still alter your future, bubba. Of course, altering your future requires that you do something now, in the present, and that brings us back to me: I am totally focused on my present. I don't think much about the future except in terms of vague goals, and I don't think much about the past. In another essay in this issue I talk about my old memento-hoarding behavior; when I discover, say, a bunch of letters written to me by someone during our college years (just prior to throwing them away, as I have recovered my hoarding tendencies, thankyouverymucha) I am often amazed at what I don't remember about my own past. Oh, I mean, when I lead through the letters I'll remember just fine. The memories are there. I simply don't retrieve them. And now that the letters are gone, I likely never will again.

Past glories, indeed.

Unless, of course, the letter-writer tries to Friend me on Facebook.

This doesn't, of course, make me special. I'm not selling this as an Objectivism-style philosophy of life. Say, Swine-ism. But I do think my ability to stay in the present has made me happier, because I'm not fixated on past glories and I'm not comparing my life with imagined future glories. If I could get away with it, I'd steal the Coen Brothers' line from The Big Lebowski and say that The Swine Abides, but of course that would be wrong.