Someday, I suppose...

I took a break from Facebook earlier tonight.

If I can stand it, I hope it's a more-or-less permanent break. There are things on there that I kind of "have to" use it for, to maintain communications with groups of people and such, but overall, I just don't need it any more. I don't need to share my opinions with people I know longer know. I don't need to pretend to be the "friend" of someone with whom I was only slightly acquainted at a much earlier time in life, when we were much different people, and we still weren't very close.

It's not that I don't value these people, or think they are worthy. It's kind of cool to see what some of my old high school acquaintances became, what they did with their lives. It would be great to see these things at a high school reunion, where we could pretend to remember stories about each other, and then go our separate ways. Later we could think about the evening and think "Hey, I didn't like him all that much in high school, but he turned out to be a pretty good guy". Then we could maybe meet a friend of a friend sometime way down the road, and be reminded that we each turned out pretty well. And all we'd have to remember is that vague feeling of each other's mutual decency.

But in this age of Facebook and social networking, we are still connected, long past our relationships' natural shelf lives. We still have to see each other far more than we ever would in real life. And even when we've long since "unfollowed" some of these people, their attitudes and opinions still show up and rear their ugly heads long after we stopped caring about what these people thought. And pretty soon our musings and comments that were intended for friends and like-minded people from our nowadays-lives are highjacked by ghosts from the past. Oh, him? I forgot he existed!  And pretty soon, we're tiptoeing around the feelings of people who just recently intruded on our own lives, trying to get along, justifying our own opinions and trying to make nice.

Tonight I finally had enough. For one thing, no one really needs to care what I think about anything. But if they do, having a blog is perfect. They can take it or leave it. If they don't like what I have to say, they can just ignore it. If they choose not to ignore it, and decide to leave snarky feedback, I can just delete the feedback.

So if you're with me, welcome. For some reason, a few people still want to hear what I have to say about some things. I'll talk about music here. I'll talk about beer. I'll talk about things I love, things I hate, and whatever else I feel like I need to say. Sometimes I'll even try to leave things better than I found them. Please feel free to disagree with me, but don't try to change my mind. My mind is changed gradually, over time.

Oh, and about the title of this blog: I've been a fan of Ben Folds for quite some time. I've always been a little bit snotty about my tastes. A little bit opinionated and superior. As I've aged I've kind of realized I'm not as cool as I thought I was, and that there is, indeed, always someone cooler than me. And I've come to a point where that's just fine with me. My one dream is to make this blog just big enough that Ben Folds hears about it someday. He contacts me, and being the cool guy I imagine he is, he checks in to see if it is: a) worthy of his song, and b) making any money. I assure him that if I ever make any money from it (yeah, right), I will either pay him royalties, or cease and desist. He's cool with that, and my blog goes on to never make any money, but he becomes a regular reader and commenter.

Is it creepy for me to have a Ben Folds fantasy?