This is the sec­ond day since I delet­ed my Face­book account. I joined back in 2009, so that’s sev­en years of posts, com­ments, threads, friend­ships, “friend­ships”, and more gone for­ev­er. I don’t have to look back very far here to see that I’ve tried deac­ti­vat­ing my account in order to gain some sep­a­ra­tion from all the things whirling around in the world. I’ve tried it a few times. It didn’t work. I’m an idiot child. I’ll fol­low any dis­trac­tion through the trees and into the rape van it’s got parked behind the com­mu­ni­ty cen­ter. Not that Face­book is a rape van, but it is, kind of.

So I delet­ed it. It wasn’t hard. I like scorch­ing the earth behind me, leav­ing nowhere to go but ahead. A bunch of years back, some­one robbed my house and took my cold weath­er coats, my stereo, and my lap­top. I didn’t have any­thing backed up. Every­thing I’d writ­ten since grad school through the first three years of my career was gone. Sto­ries, let­ters, poet­ry. I wasn’t upset though. I felt lighter, freer And I felt an urgency to go out and make new things.

I’ve gained at least two hours per day over the last cou­ple days. It’s ridicu­lous but it’s true. I’m not all chum­my with my phone any­more either. I don’t check it when I wake up. I don’t don’t check it dur­ing the day. I hard­ly look at it at all. I know I’m miss­ing out on stuff. My friends from every­where are writ­ing smart, hilar­i­ous things and shar­ing art I’d want to see. I’m already out of the loop on all the lat­est out­rages and gaffes and rev­e­la­tions and lis­ti­cles and deaths and sta­tis­tics and out­rages, again. It real­ly is a loop, accel­er­at­ing, feed­ing back, blow­ing apart and then reform­ing, giv­ing me no time to sit in the after­noon breeze and won­der what’s hap­pen­ing with me.