poor old michael finnegan. begin again.

Day 23. In the dirt, looking up again with my winds hovering somewhere above me and everything has been point form notes. My attention span is limited.  It has been a long time for me, since I needed to write a sentence longer than a few words. You know, a few words to fit into a facebook chat/message window? Six years, I guess, have passed since I signed up for facebook (and ultimately deactivated my account). The internet is becoming the place where you put your favorite version of yourself up for the world to see. Or view. The world we've come to live in is highly scrutinized and judged. Your measure in 'likes' and 'shares'. I haven't written anything solid in as many years. This is partially due to the miraculously devastating and simultaneously exultant happening of my daughter -- but also to facebook.  It's only just lately that my early mornings have become quiet and solitary -- similar to before, but not the same. Never the same. And yet, I have been using them -- still -- to look at what is going on with other people I seemed to know, once. Or at least, we used to speak to each other. Now we linktalk, cutandpasteconverse and brb with pretty much everyone we know. I feel like my eyes are getting old, looking at screens all the time (like I'm doing now), and for this reason have been mostly writing in pen.

I pledged to write every day, as my usual resolution. I've made it every year for as many New Year's as year ends, weekends, Tuesdays and birthdays as I can remember. Some years, though, it never happens. Not even once. Those years are bleary and shaken things, hanging onto some scrabbly rock in the windy back-corners of my mind. Each one just as dripping with maudlin concrete assurances that it's gone, gone again, gone for good. It's around then I cut my hair, or meet someone new, or start taking 3 am walks in abandoned places -- just for a change of pace. Variety is the spice of life, after all, and what is a writer at all, if not someone to help you to live vicariously from your sofa reliably, and with feeling?  But is it fiction, I am feeling?

I have something boiling up inside of me right now and I feel the motivation to write for the first time, in a long time. For now, I will simply state that it's suspect to me that I can't fully delete my facebook account. Everything is kept on file, including my password, should I choose to come back soon. They can put me through the entire sign in process and get me a new password if that happens, I'm okay with that. But, no, they hang onto that stuff. I don't think that's right, and I think it's shady when facebook seems to declare up and down that it has its users privacy rights strictly at heart. I want a full delete.