Is It Just Me?

So here's the story -  Red Hen Press will publish a new collection of poems next year.  They (the press) urge an on-line presence (sounds spooky in a way, doesn't it?  "I sense a presence in the room!"), mostly Facebook and Twitter.  Fine.  I'll cooperate for a change.  So I get a couple of accounts.  Or rather a friend sets me up.  I approach w/ great trepidation.  I'm the mongoose, the accounts are the cobra.  But a mongoose is tough, so I toughen up, too.

Twitter I learn to like because the entries (don't expect me to say 'tweets') remind me of haiku and I get to compose something short and, I hope, attractive.  None of that, "I'm eating cake!" nonsense.  Something w/ some resonance.  Or mystery.  Or at least a laugh.

But Facebook?   It's way too much like making out with an octopus -- all those arms and suckers everywhere.  So many unreasonable demands!

I've always been a selfish s.o.b. and/but I get a lot of writing done because -- partly, anyway --  what's left of my mind is free to wander.  I'm not busy friending (there's another barbaric neologism) somebody I went to grade school with who remembers the birthday party where milk ran out of my nose onto Shirley Willoughby's new dress and oh, by the way,  Shirley is now in a coma but might like a card.

See?  Just writing about it makes me cranky.

There are two people I e-mail every day.  I'd be, frankly, bereft without them.    I'm deep with them rather than wide with others.  It's the best I can do.

 Montaigne:  "I have seen no more evident monstrosity and miracle in the world than myself."

I second that and call for a vote.

RK