Mediocrity is a hard thing to grasp for some of us. As a child I used to sit and dream about greatness. I had such plans. I wanted to be a movie director. From the time I could remember that's what I wanted to do. Make movies. Everything was a film to me. Everything was fantasy. When I was six-years-old my GI Joes and Planet of the Apes action figures (never dolls) were trapped in the board game Candyland where villainous giant Lollipops blew up the Peanut-Brittle Bridge and chased them into the Molasses Swamp. At eight I wrote a short story in Mrs. Thompson's third grade class about an existential dinosaur who sought out the truth of why his kind died off only to find an alien plot against the earth. When I was twelve I had a notebook where I wrote down all the plots of the movies I had created. I made up casts, crew. I made up filming locations. I had an old basketball timer-clock that I nicked from my cousins. I would start it and would repeat my movies aloud in their entirety only stopping the clock to note the running time. My longest faux-film you ask? Was a movie entitled "Masquerade." It was about a woman whose husband left her for some one younger and the emotionally journey she took as she became a movie-star while fighting fame, depression and addiction to drugs and sex. Think of a cross between Valley of the Dolls and Looking for Mr Goodbar. The woman, Betty Ross, committed suicide/ or OD'd in the final scene. I could never decide which so left it ambiguous. That film clocked in at 167 minutes (2:47 to you laymen.) The make-believe actress who played that role won an Emerald Award. It was my version of the Oscars. You see each year I would give out awards for the films that I made the previous year. Since the Oscar statue wad gold I figured my should be a precious stone. So the Emerald Awards were born. For years I kept a list of what film won what for Best Picture and Best Director. I had opening dates and even box office receipt numbers. My two highest grossing movies? "The Owl"--the story of a woman cursed by an avian cult causing her to slowly turn into a monstrous bird and "Arcade"--the story of a young girl's encounter with aliens that gave her the power to heal the sick by killing the wicked. They both grossed over $1 billion. What can I say I was ambitious in 1978.Either stupidity or fear got the best of me because I never went to film school. After college I moved to New York City. Now don't get me wrong. I am not being mawkish. I loved--love my life. I have great friends, great family and have had many adventures that will actually make you scratch your head in disbelief. I've visited and lived in other countries. I was on one of the last flights out of Hong Kong the day before it was turned over to the communist. I've seen James Bond Island. Had clairvoyant dreams while living in India. Done drugs with celebrities and done other things with porn stars. Sometimes at the same party. I've met millionaires and homeless and treated them all the same. Worked in the most disparate places imaginable; from operations manager at the Bronx Zoo, to software trainer at a program dedicated to helping women escape domestic violence to being the manager of a graphic presentation group at the world's most prestigious investment bank. Along the way I've been a dishwasher, custodian, clown and we just won't talk about what I got paid to do in the sumer of 1989. Right now if I threw a party I would have white-bread conservatives eating chicken roulade cheek-by-jowl with transmen anad transwomen. People have used the words "You did that?" around me. But according to Facebook the zenith of my life is a French Door stainless steel refrigerator.
Life is finite. So we have to squeeze as much into it as possible. It's like a banquet you see, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. But over the last six years life has afforded me fewer and fewer opportunities it would seem almost on purpose. I've gone from the abundance of Auntie Mame to the decrease of Mrs. Havisham. Not only have these opportunities seemingly dried up but things have come undone. As if their was a hand at work in this mess. Dismantling the different parts of my life. First I had severe financial problems, then my mother developed dementia, then I health problems, then I had bed bugs, then I had to move to North Carolina, then I had to work from home to take care of my mother, then that job was gone, then unemployment was gone. Leaving me broke and humbled. It was a systematic reduction; a cascading system failure; a complete collapse of the layers of my life. One pancaking down onto the next. I felt beset upon like Ramesses. I would lay at night looking out my bedroom window waiting for the creeping mist and the wail of lost children as the hand of God moved through the Nile delta taking the first born of the Egyptians. I beseeched God to at least give me a clue as to why I was being punished so.Its bad enough that I often feel that life has left me with so little but now Facebook is reinforcing that emotion with a stupid video that illustrates just how far I've fallen. Well all I have to say is fuck you Facebook. I will not allow you to reduce the beauty and joy or even the inelegance of my life to a neat little package of silly little images. I am more than that. How dare you try to make me so small. The volume of my life is vast. I am not some cyber-plaything you can analyze and algorithm then spew out in the form of a hokey video downloadable in multi-device formats. You're a ruse. A falsehood. A canard. I am a real person. With fragile hopes and impossible dreams; of unimaginable sorrow of watching a parent slowly decay, of struggling to find the dignity in that work, of struggling to pay bills and live in a country that prizes excess while I subsist on so little. A person of simple pleasures of walking my dog or listening to my mother play songs on her Steinway piano or Hammond organ plucked from her demolished memory. Of those three hour conversations with friends left behind in New York where the shade is thick and now all we have are reminiscence because I am here and they are there. But none of that was in your stupid little video was it Facebook? It's a difficult place to be in isn't it? And you now that don't you. Needing that human contact even if its on a virtual level; but I won't allow you to tell me that my life is nothing more than a selfie that was liked 157 times. I may not quit you Facebook but I will disengage more frequently from you. Because the more I log-on the more I log-out of my life. So no Facebook I am not going to Look Back. Look back over the life you've fashioned for me. You don't get to choose the soundtrack of my soul or the emotions I should be feeling. You hold us back with your pretty pictures and choruses of like-minded people. You make inaction and inactivity palatable as long as one reads that Al Jazeera story of inequity or likes that video of the laughing baby. A facsimile of human interaction. You meter out your judgment in the form of a condescending short sentimental video. But you know what Facebook? You can keep your shoddy simulacrum of whatever it is you think you've created about me. I may not be an emperor but I'm not a tatterdemalion either. I'm going to look forward. Not back but forward and move forward with my life. And guess what? There's going to be a lot less of you in it.
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