The vampires of Facebook
Could it actually be dangerous to connect with everyone you ever knew?
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
In psychic workshops, they teach you all about cords.
Cords that bind. Cords that connect. Cords that can invigorate as well as consume, excite your spirit and yet also leech life from your very soul, cords made of simple psychic energy that run like invisible cables straight from your heart and your mind and your various energetic G-spots straight out to the world, and back again.
But most of all, they run straight into other people. Or from them, straight into you. It happens all the time, every day, in every interaction you have, psychic energy instantly passing between individuals as you move through the world and through your thoughts and memories and dreams, energy cords established even over long distances, phone calls, handshakes, gropings, co-ed showers, not to mention fantasies, hatreds, unwanted desires and just about everything in between. It's just what we do.
Usually the cords last only a short time before fading away, a constant swarm of insta-circuits made and broken, effortless and normal -- just the everyday thrum of life.
But not always. Energy cords are also potent, dangerous motherfrickers. They can last years, lifetimes, reappear like a virus, inflict nefarious harm and cause all sorts of unpleasant melodrama, illness and upheaval in your equilibrium. Obsessions, intense loves, heartbreaks, resentments, someone's awful day or their own needy, I'm-a-victim energy can attach itself like a vampire onto the neck of your good mood and suddenly you'll feel like you just got run over by a bus made of thumbtacks and snail spit, and you have no idea why. You know that feeling? Of course you do.
Let us not go too far. I am not here to convince you such cords exist. I am not quite drunk enough for that. Really, it doesn't matter if you believe in them or not because, like air, like black socks with sandals, like the proper deification of Obama, it just is. They just are. Let's just go with it.
But it does lead, quite naturally, to that most wonderful and disturbing of cord-slinging, energy-wringing e-creations, known as Facebook.
From an energy perspective, Facebook is a goddamn cord-makin' wonderland, a sort of psychic Grand Central, the place where psychic energy goes to jack itself back into the mainframe. It's tens of millions of people peeking and poking and peering into the lives of those they know, those they want to know, those they like or love or hate or begrudge or secretly want to peel the pants from and lick like a popsicle in summer.
It's a notion that struck me as I realized that nearly everyone who's ever played a reasonably significant role in my life, both past and present, has since found and reconnected with me, initially via email through the digital reach of this very column over the years, but now far more actively and vividly through my Facebook profile (or, to a lesser extent, my Twitter feed). It's sort of stunning, really.
Old girlfriends, lost loves, long-forgotten friends, high school sweethearts, band mates, roommates, old nemeses, lots of former cheerleaders turned born-again Christian megamoms, and everything in between. All those old connections, those lives and chapters and periods of my life I thought I'd left behind so cleanly, so decisively, way back when? Here they all are again, like a living scrapbook, constantly renewing and updating itself. What a thing.
It is, on one hand, a marvelous and magical invention. It is often fascinating and deeply touching to dip into those worlds, those lives again, a true gift to see what became of all those people, their joys and paths and prison sentences and odd tastes in haircuts and copious offspring (note to self: if I ever have children, do not use my child's photo as my own personal profile pic. It's just creepy).
More at......
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2009/04/29/notes042909.DTL&type=printable
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