I have a ritual that I do every morning. I log into Facebook, I pull up my “Memories” page, and then I delete everything I posted on that day a year ago. Well, almost everything - I do keep some photos. Mostly of my cat. But I delete every stupid joke or meme or long-ass post about what I was watching on television the night before. I completly erase that timestamp of what I was thinking and talking about a year ago.
I’m not sure exactly why I do it - it’s just something I decided to do a few years ago and I’ve religiously stuck to the schedule every single morning since. Reading - and then deleting - the stuff I posted the year before has shown me that my internet usage has gone down dramatically over the last few years. I went from posting twenty to thirty different updates a day to posting a few times a day to - lately - posting a few times a week. Maybe I’m weaning myself off social media entirely? That could be nice.
I do know, though, why I’m not posting on social media as much lately - I’ve learned to save it for my writing. Why waste a great - or even a kinda good - joke or a funny story about something that happened to me in real life on Facebook or Twitter when I can fold it into a short story or comic book that I’m writing? I don’t lead that exciting of a life so when I somehow do luck into an entertaining anecdote you can be sure that I’m going to find a way to shoehorn it into whatever creative project I’m currently working on.
I’ve been working on WHERE WOLF 2 recently and am about 100 pages into the comic book’s script. In those 100 pages is a time capsule of all the weird obsessions, tangents, and conversations I’ve had in the last year. The sometimes strange people I’ve met on my daily hikes and the girls on Bumble I’ve gone on dates with and the people online that annoy me - they all make cameo appearances of varying degrees in WHERE WOLF 2. So do my friends - old and new. And I’m there - in almost every character. Pieces of myself, at least.
Maybe eventually I will wean myself completely off social media and I won’t have any reason to log in every morning and delete my online footprint - but I’ll have something better. I’ll have a comic book that represents the things I was thinking about and the emotions I was feeling and the weird crap that floated in and out of my head during 2021 - in comic book form. That’ll be cool.
MOVIE RECOMMENDATION: RED ROCKET (2021)
Sean Baker's coming-of-asshole comedy stars Simon Rex as an ex-porn star who moves back to the armpit of Texas - a refinery-filled region that acnes the state's coast - to make a go at restarting his life only to fall back on old habits. Any film that uses NSYNC's "Bye Bye Bye" as not one, not two but three cathartic epiphanic moments is a treasure to behold. Rex is outstanding as a sleazy, perpetually fully frontal would-be lothario - simultaneously charming as hell and repulsive.
In the film, a movie set in Texas City, a seventeen-year-old girl named Strawberry inexplicably has a WILD BEASTS movie poster on her wall. I choose to believe that, in the film’s backstory, she saw BEASTS at the Dismember the Alamo marathon I programmed in Katy. Please, nobody take this away from me.