Elements of Stale, with Luke Mazur: The Big Book of Friends
So remember how someone clever-ish wrote that with respect to social networking, Facebook is like your home and Twitter is a bar? That is, Facebook is for friends, family, Farmville and Mafia Wars. Twitter is for David Carr and Rainn Wilson tweeting movie titles, but with one letter off. You know: "Annie Hell" instead of Annie Hall, or "Chafing Amy" instead of Chasing Amy. Or "The Frying Game." (Spoiler alert: the egg has two yolks.) The possibilities are, like with any good bar game, endless. And also like This or That, Will It Float?, and Categories, the possibilities are also only funny or fun if you're hammered, or if you're Sarah Silverman. Somehow "Children of the Coon" works at all hours coming from her, and doesn't work coming from me.
But lately Facebook has been turning into a bar too—specifically, a bar the night before Thanksgiving.
I'm reconnecting with all these people who've fallen out of my life, or whose lives I've fallen out of. I'm becoming friends with my old grade school classmates. Last week alone I received friend requests from two old buds—Scott and Alexa. Let me introduce them.
Scott used to wear a Phantom of the Opera costume whenever possible, which for a parochial school with a school uniform policy, meant he wore it only on special occasions. But on Mondays, when the Buffalo Bills were still a Superbowl-bound team, we could wear team gear, and our one teacher, Ms. Sherman, would let Scott wear his mask then. When Ms. Sherman left us for another school, Scott signed her going away card: "To Ms. Sherman, the love of my life."
And in third grade, as we waited in line to head down to the cafeteria, Alexa used to clutch her Dick Tracy lunch box, and coo in her best Betty Boop voice, "I love my Dick." In fifth grade, when Scott asked us all what humping meant, Alexa began her explanation, "Well, Scott, when a mommy Hippo loves a daddy Hippo…."
I eagerly confirmed these two friend requests. Who wouldn't want to be friends with them? Scott and Alexa taught me about the importance of safe zones and the concept of irony, and Andrew Lloyd Webber and Hot Topic. They taught me so much that it'd take years before I'd even realize all that I'd learned. I mean, "Lisa's Substitute" didn't air, I think, until season three of The Simpsons, to show me how much one teacher could mean to a child. And even though Pulp Fiction opened in 1994, I wouldn't see it until, at the earliest, 1998, and probably, actually 1999. Which means that I wasn't a senior in high school until I learned that retro lunch boxes, especially clutching one jokingly, could be, like, a thing. Last week, I became sad that since eighth grade, I'd fallen out of touch with these two. So, what happened?
Tritely, Buffalo happened. Which is to say, we all moved. To be clear and (to be optimistic), Buffalo is not Detroit. But, as a former and now current resident, I can say that the difference is one of degree, and not of kind. We have only fortuity to explain why the three of us were all born there, in 1982. Since then, the city's population shrunk by roughly half, as thousands fled to the suburbs and thousands more fled to the South and West. I left my home for college, and then for law school. Scott and Alexa, at least according to their Facebook pages, too left the region. At least for awhile.
And, why not? The region's livelihood—manufacturing—had been rendered obsolete by our national economy's creative destruction. Holy Name, the school where we all met, closed too. In fact, most of the Catholic schools and churches in the city of Buffalo closed. The city is about 90% Catholic, and so when people leave it, the religious communities contract. And, even though Pope Benedict thinks so, there aren't many Anglicans, at least where I'm from, to fill in the ranks. The buildings are still there, but instead of jumbling together children from the neighborhood, they are giant empty monuments now—headstones, really—marking what came before: the city where all of our stories took place. The setting.
I was flying recently, and I read this essay (in hardcopy. It was so expensive) by this guy Richard Rodriguez. He was complaining about the San Francisco Chronicle maybe folding, and how this might negatively affect the city itself. That is, the paper had for years helped to form and forge the character of the city. San Francisco likewise reflected itself back onto this daily. The relationship was complimentary, but it was good. Rodriguez's friend, on the other hand, wondered whether assembling your own newspaper, with clips from here and there, "but no roots in a place," accomplished the same goal. "Perhaps we do not need a sense of place anymore," his friend concluded.
Whether he's right or not, he's got a point, at least insofar as how we gather news. Maybe he is right too, though, in a more general sense. Maybe our sense of place, physically speaking, has evolved. At Holy Name, there was a sign that read, "Attitude determines altitude." It used to also be the case that your altitude, or more broadly, where you are—your setting—determined what you were all about. Where you'd work, or go to school. Who you'd be friends with. Take Buffalo, for example. By being from and of Buffalo, many of my grammar schools friends needed to move, when they came of age, to a new city or town or country. And I know this is true of other places too; but the thing with the Rust Belt, a lot of people never return.
Luckily, Facebook has stepped in as our new neighborhood/Thanksgiving Eve bar. Even my dad is there, and although I live with him again, it is fun seeing who he pokes. But now I also get to see that my old friend Scott loves Rocky Horror (the movie) and also that he just shared his black sheep on Farmville. Alexa just visited New York with her mom. They got room service and then hit up the hot tub with a bottle of Jagermeister. See. It's almost the same as before.
"Even my dad is there, and. . . it is fun seeing who he pokes."
Please make me unread that.
I'm sorry, everyone, I know that's a pretty cheap shot. I'm just going through a lot. More substantively:
The way Facebook is further like a bar the day before Thanksgiving is that you start off SO EXCITED to reconnect with Sarah Davis and Jed, and Kenny (glad you got out of the Navy alive!), but you very quickly run out of things to say, and you pretend not to see each other on the way out to the parking lot to drive your Dad's Insight back home, because pretending to want to talk any further is just so painfully untrue that you just don't even want to have to pretend to mean it.
So, we're not gonna hang out then?
Ah, legacy friends. It would be rude to pretend you don't recognize them, but let's face it, you have absolutely nothing in common any more.
My home town just passed a liquor by the drink law this year, so I thought this was actually going to refer to the "Where are we all going to meet up to get shitfaced the night before Thanksgiving?" forums on FB that are in the works with all my reconnections.
Mandy Nottke: used to think she was a unicorn and walk around with her index finger as a horn and would eat grass at recess. She now at Harvard working as a biomedical engineer. Dead serious.
Running down that dream, no doubt.
Yep, Ming Ling used to lick herself like a cat giving itself a bath during cross country practice and she is now at Chapel Hill doing something similar to Mandy.
On other notes, maybe I just grew up in the country, but we always hunted out sour grass at recess(looks kinda like clover)and ate it…does this put me in the weird kid category?
if sour grass is another name for oxalis, it is pretty damned delicious.
Heck, we ate the 'honey' out of zillions of honeysuckle flowers when I was a kid, so I'm not gonna judge you for your sour grass preference.
Insert complementary remarks here.
Well played.
oh fuck. touche. at first when i read this i thought: weird s/he'd spell that word wrong.
So you're not practicing law?
why? do you need a lawyer?
Yes, I tripped walking down Main Street and I….no, I don't need a lawyer, I am a lawyer! Thus my nosiness.
Wait a minute, I waste precious billable hours hanging out on a website that I thought was populated with "cool kids" and it's just lawyers? Really?
Christ, Tuna, it's not like you're not billing anyway. Remember, minimum 15-minute billing increments? Do 5 minutes of work, have ten minutes to waste.
apparently the most populuar jezebel commenter is in finance. Her real name was used in an article – I wonder who her bosses feel about the time she's putting in there…
RELATED: someone should hire Luke! To do law.
I would hire Luke but I practice evil law. I picture him getting fed up and writing a manifesto. What I really need is someone who knows how to drown a litter of kittens using a burlap sack, a big rock and the Gowanus canal.
Ah, I remember the heady days of .25 billing… Before the bastards got into the whole tenths thing.
Related: Evil law is what I do best. Who would like to hire me?
will coach mock trial team for food
The big evil DC whiteshoe firm I worked for as a peon used to bill in 6 minute increments. That does not leave you with much time for facebooking!
Don't get in, Luke, while there's still time.
Where did you go to high school, Luke? Did Holy Name have a high school? I'm Hutch Tech class of '92, but my girlfriend my senior year went to Nardin so I knew lots of Catholic school kids. I just got back from Buffalo and it's like the land that time forgot, in the sense that everything looks pretty much like it did when I left town 17 years ago, though there is a modicum of life downtown around my old high school, of all places. All the old adult video stores on Chippewa where we said we were going to hold our prom are now yuppie bars.
canisius. my cousin goes to hutch tech right now. they have a jim's steakout right there on chip too.
Oh, yeah, I knew lots of Canisus kids, though if you were born in '82 I guess they would have been before your time. I did go see a school play there once, got lost looking for the auditorium, somehow ended up in the priest's residence and stumbled into a funeral service that featured one dead priest and one live priest and nobody else.
I just walked by Hutch Tech when I was home last week and they've completely renovated it — it looks great. Your cousin is lucky!
Buffalo! My adopted hometown – in what is apparently the exact opposite of the usual trajectory, I recently moved here from the New South, on purpose. (Who's hiring?)
I think sense of place has definitely evolved to become not necessarily relative to a physical location, and recently have noticed that many people assume experiences can be approximated as well – my friend said why go see Niagara Falls when you can stare at a faucet? and I thought why travel to see friends when you can GChat with them?
"irony, and Andrew Lloyd Webber and Hot Topic."
One of these things encompasses the others.
Three Men End A Baby
LULZ. I just tried for a whole three minutes to beat that, but, nope.
"Three Men, In a Baby"*
*Made in Thailand
Three Mennonite Babies.
Your articles keeping getting better and better.
I'm telling all my friends about your article.
Since my last high school reunion, the same experience is happening with me. Not on Facebook though. We created a blog. Luke, if the law isn't working out, why don't you look into a new enterprise: a nursing home social networking sight. In a few years your dad may really appreciate it.
"a nursing home social networking sight" — you mean like an all-day game of bridge in-front of a picture window?
Yes, on a big screen. They can start leagues. Nursing homes vs. Assisted Living facilities.
I'm his dad and I apologize for poking one of his former classmates
Exactly, Luke. Thank you.
Love and agree with this article. (It's so tender! Kind of hard to believe it was published here.)
Awesome work.
I like the allusion to the death of the newspaper in your online article.
Um, facebook is most importantly for Dictator Wars. Get your priorities straight, people.
Nice post, Luke.
From: Your cousin who is old enough to be your uncle because your Dad is young enough to be his older brother.
luke i love that jon sack made it onto the pic from facebook. the rest of this is fine.
-jenna (it is supposed to be jenna s, but i forgot the space)