Back In The Slightly Realer World

As some of you might have inferred, my son contacted me a little while ago.
We had been estranged for 11 years - he was taken away from me, rightfully I have to say, when I lost the rest of my family, and all my worldly goods, and my sanity, and a roof over my head, and very nearly my life. That this period was an agonising death and rebirth experience, often referred to as a Shamanic Dismemberment, is neither here nor there for this post .

I joined up on Facebook as Shevek seems to keep a regular network of connections over there - not too many, to his credit, but at the time he wasn't on the wider web- and FB only through his cellphone- so it was a great way to keep in contact with him.

So Shevek was the primary reason I had a Facebook account. If it could have stayed there, it might have been well and good. But I soon found myself being friended by people I didn't know from a bar of soap, being cajoled into using apps I shouldn't touch with a bargepole and joining groups which, frankly, should know better than to not only stick their heads above the parapet but to wave their flags around wildly as well.

A week or so ago I finally had enough and deactivated my account, after mailing my important friends about my decision. I just couldn't take the attention-deficit inane chatter any longer.

So I've more time to mull things over, to myself, here on this blog, which has always struck me as a richer, more organic way to belong to the Gaian Polity. I also feel vastly relieved. There are, as far as I'm concerned, angelic modes of communication on the web: blogs, focused and well-run discussion groups, the occasional outstanding lecture on video. But the demonic realm is well represented in all its distracting, confounding noise as well: FB, Twitter and other superficial networking systems. Which, as far as I'm concerned, I'm well out of.


Pic: Some games graphics work by Shevek