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REALLY skeptical of Facebook’s “reach” statistics.

Facebook-as-anthropology as opposed to Facebook-as-human-connection

Consecutive posts this morning:

• “Looking out onto the magestic waters of the Carolina’s I ponder to myself what indeed my life has come to. The suns rays are beautiful casting down upon the cool waters which makes me think what God has in store for me in the future. I think about what my life has come to. The future is somewhat scary but I know THAT IF I CAN PRESERVERE THAT I WILL INDEED MAKE IT”
• “DAY OFF TMRW IN LA WHO’S TRYNA HANG”
• A photo of two girls making out, one of whom I had a crush on in freshman year
• “A little to much jubilee spirit…”
• A Socialcam 9/11 conspiracy video

jrnny:

One day my great-grandchildren will be looking through my library and be like “wow look at the discoloration of this novel’s pages, so old and vintage-y” and I possibly won’t be there to explain that that’s where I spilled tomato sauce as I was eating lunch.

Los Angeles Is Strange

Los Angeles is a strange place. I know it’s obvious to say that, living in New York, but Los Angeles is strange. Self-consciously and inorganically strange, like a middle-schooler who highlights her hair purple just to stand out. The difference is that Los Angeles is twenty-six at heart, at soul, at first glance and a closer impression, and will look twenty-six until the water runs out. And until the water runs out, Los Angeles is a strange place.

Take the horizon. There is no horizon. When you drive at night, and look off in the distance, there is only curious empty space—not even stars. The mountains and smog are everywhere, and cut off the view—cut off Los Angeles from the night. The buildings of downtown Los Angeles are silhouetted against nothing, and seem to hang into space as the highways drive by. The moon is shattered, and hovers above the buildings, swaying silently. It’s a strange place.

I have family in Los Angeles. My grandmother’s sister lived in Los Angeles. I’m not sure what to call her other than that—my mom calls her Aunt Sara, but she’s not my aunt. My grandmother’s sister is only my grandmother’s sister to me—high cheekbones, Los Angeles. My mother’s cousin and her husband and infant son used to live in a small house in Venice Beach in Los Angeles. She isn’t my cousin—her infant son is my second cousin, but she is only Amy Cohen from Venice, now Amy Renner. She and her husband and her infant son lived in a small house in Venice Beach in Los Angeles, which is a strange place.

I have family in Los Angeles, but they are too different and too distant to mention or to contact. My mother was close with Amy and Sara. She talks of escaping the midwest to wistful Santa Monica summers at sixteen. It sounds like a movie. My mother grew up in Denver, which is Los Angeles if Los Angeles dressed a little more conservatively, laughed a little less, smiled a little deeper. 

I have family in Denver—lots of family. My parents and their families are both from Denver. Denver is powerful, grounded, unique, but it isn’t strange. When I visit, the moon is whole—bright, no cracks. It makes sense.

Although Los Angeles makes sense. The weather is perfect. The people there are so beautiful it makes me mad, horny, and self-conscious. The weed is cheap, strong, and slightly legal. From those facts, Los Angeles makes sense. From dream logic, Los Angeles makes sense.

I have a friend in Los Angeles—I visited his house. It’s large. It has a pool. His mother is a federal prosecutor. His father works in investments and government pensions. He wants to be an electronic musician—specifically the intersection of dance and hip-hop, where his passions fall. He’s squishy listless but amiable, content to have friends and smoke weed—but behind the laptop, composing music, he becomes a real person. He has ambition. Is that why he had to leave Los Angeles? It feels strange to want in Los Angeles—to strive toward, to want to be. Is there a less awkward way of putting it? Los Angeles doesn’t want anything—that’s the strangeness. It’s content to sit by the pool and be beautiful and wealthy, with rich parents and an eighth and the weather, with only foreground, with a shattered moon and no view of the horizon. Los Angeles is a strange place.

I live in a strange place, too—the environment is so inhospitable you need pills to live here. You need pills to leave here. You need money and pills and lists and Gchat and ambition and stupidity and stupid confidence and pills to live here. Rent is due on the first of the lunar month, when there is no moon in the sky, when it’s fallen into Los Angeles and calved the Pacific.

I have family here too. My father doesn’t talk to them, and neither do I. I met them when I was thirteen—they were twitchy, unmanageable, talking too fast. One of them was a high-functioning autistic, the other was a lawyer, the other was a conservative foreign policy expert. I couldn’t tell them apart. I live here under the perpetual threat that if I ever fuck up, my father will introduce me to them.

It strikes me how many people I know, how few doors I can knock on, how many I can list, how few I can call, how many I can friend on Facebook, how few I’ll actually see again, how many coastlines they see, how few I’ll actually be sad about when they die, how many the shattered moon will kill when it falls into the ocean, how few family vacations I have left. My father solved this by running away—there’s a reason a New Jersey kid moves to Colorado, to Grenada, to North Carolina, avoiding New York, New Jersey, Toronto, Boston, Philadelphia. My mother solved this with PDAs, hourlong phone calls, and mandatory family vacations to Los Angeles, to Denver. It’s easy for them—they have relatives. I have my relatives and their relatives, and I just can’t relate. 

But one day I’m going to reconnect with a second-cousin. We’ll meet in some strange place—maybe Los Angeles, maybe late twenties, maybe medicated, maybe on an island, maybe as high-functioning autistics—we’ll introduce ourselves, realize our relation, laugh and warm up. It will be awkward and then pleasant and we’ll remark how odd it is how we of all people have become friendly, how we never talk to anyone anymore, go to Denver, call anybody—Facebook is enough, we’ll know if they died or get married! Another quick laugh, another oddity. He will live in Los Angeles, which is a strange place, and I’ll be wherever I’ll be, and we’ll discuss how the water has run out, how the sunken desert is reclaiming the suburbs,  how that doesn’t matter since the moon is falling into the valley as we speak, and I’ll comment how I remember he was an infant, and he’ll ask my name, and I’ll laugh and tell him, and then I’ll laugh and ask his.