Facebook column

It’s official: Facebook is scary good.

When I first heard about Facebook it was from a guy in England (kinda the way it should be) telling me I should set up a Facebook account because it was going to make the world a much smaller place, even better than MySpace was at the time.

So I dutifully set up my account, threw up an old handsome pic of myself and waited. And waited.

Impatient, I began searching for people from my past. At first, it was just old school classmates, since I still have my old yearbooks around and used them as reference material to figure out just who I might want to have be my friend (again).

A slight problem presented itself immediately: I had very few friends that I cared to find again, and the ones that I did had fairly common names.

One thing about Facebook now is that if you are looking for someone with a fairly common name, you might well end up having to search through several hundred accounts looking for just the right Robert Johnson.

Then there was another problem: Deciding just how much you want people to see. As someone who recently turned 50, and who has had a fairly adventurous life, I decided to undertake a huge project: Scanning every pre-digital photo I have and putting them, if not all, then most of them, on Facebook, along with at least some apt description so people will know what they are looking at. Once the pix (Facebook jargon) were up, all of a sudden people began wanting to be my friend. Old shots of an intact Main Street in Kerhonkson, NY, now almost completely torn down, have elicited the most response, as have a lot of old family pix of my dearly departed dad and sister, both gone too soon.

Another great (if you can call it that) result of this new toy is that I have, much to the chagrin of my wife, re-friended almost every girl and woman that I dated, back to when I was a 17-years-old, pimply high school kid. I must admit that this is the most enjoyable, if somewhat creepy, aspect of Facebook: “There she is, and there is the guy she ended up marrying and having kids with. Oh, those kids are homely. I wonder what our kids would have looked like…” and other, similarly immature thoughts run through the mind. ”Wow, did she pork up. Glad I got away from that when I still could!” You get the picture.

Seriously, though, Facebook is a blast. I have really enjoyed chatting with old friends and even some foes. I even was recently friended by someone I helped send to jail many years ago. They wrote to thank me for doing it, since it helped them get on the right path, a path they have not strayed from for 14 years. That alleviated some guilt I had been carrying around for a long time.

Mostly though, Facebook is just plain fun. I welcome any of my readers to track me down if they so desire.

Wanna be my friend?