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The Facebook 12-step plan

Not surprisingly, there was both joy and sorrow in our recent municipal election. Pain and pleasure were to be found aplenty no matter who you supported.
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Not surprisingly, there was both joy and sorrow in our recent municipal election. Pain and pleasure were to be found aplenty no matter who you supported. There was the pleasure of seeing a spirited, engaged public that overflowed the woefully undersized MY Place for the all candidates' debate, offset, perhaps, by the painfully unprepared 90 seconds in the spotlight of a number of the hopefuls.

That infectious joy climaxed with a solid voter turnout. Nearly 55 per cent of eligible voters cast ballots in last month's election. In a province where the average runs around 30 per cent, this says Whistleratics were engaged... or was that enraged. Whatever.

Of course, that massive display of democratic will led, in turn, to the sorrowful rout of every single incumbent, save one lone school trustee. There were some who probably didn't deserve their fate but as William Burroughs said, "There are no innocent bystanders...what were they doing there in the first place?" I'm not sure exactly what that has to do with the outcome but I've always been fond of it and this is likely as close as I'm going to come to finding an appropriate context for using it.

But the single most painful election experience for me was my plunge into the addictive, soul-sucking cesspool of Facebook. I've been on the periphery of FB — which is to say it's been bookmarked on my computer — for a couple of years now, every since the people I work for at the MotherCorp suggested they might use it to communicate with me and the rest of the workerbees. I don't know if they ever did because other than signing up for it, I never figured out how to use it.

Still, like the spread of athlete's foot, it spread its way into my life. A trickle of people would send a request to "Friend" me. I'm not particularly comfortable verbing nouns and for quite a long time I resisted. It wasn't that hard because I wasn't really sure I knew many of the people wanting to be Friends. But someone pointed out ignoring a Friend request was, well, unfriendly and despite the fact I didn't give a rat's ass about insulting someone I didn't know, I started Friending anyone who asked, as long as they were a person and not a business. I'm uncomfortable being Friends with something that only wants to have a monetary friendship with me.

But my Friends began to insist I "Like" some things. Some of them I actually liked so that was okay. Some of them I didn't really like and a lot of them I didn't even understand so how could I know if I liked them enough to Like them. And then, some of them began to get obsessive about being Liked, as though they'd just moved into the neighbourhood and showed up at school wearing traditional Lapland clothing and toting reindeer sandwiches in their lunchboxes and wanted all their Friends to Like them.

I didn't like that at all. I didn't like it because wanting to be Liked is so, like, lame. And I particularly didn't like it because they were nouning a verb, which is way more subversive than verbing nouns. I already have a tenuous enough grasp of English and this whole FB world of bizarro-English wasn't helping.

Then someone took a crazy, not to say meaningless, idea from one of my columns, made a FB page and, unbeknownst to me since we were way too far into the depths of FB for me to understand, made me an administrator. The next thing I knew I was getting hundreds of emails from people pissed off about pay parking. Now the whole FB experience was spilling its stinking guts into my email and since I use email as a valuable tool to making a living, that was simply unacceptable.

I found momentary liberation the first time I unFriended — god help me — someone. Truth be told, there are any number of people I'd like to unFriend, people who somehow imagine I'm really interested in watching their kid learn to ride a tricycle or buy whatever they're selling in their latest multi-level-marketing scheme. But I found a Friend's insistent shilling for a colonic cleanse to be more than I could take, even on a very casual basis. Click... Friends no more.

The election, and more particularly the 2011 Whistler Election FB page, was my personal tipping point though. For a couple of weeks leading up to election day, I was hooked, addicted, obsessed. I let my online subscription to the New York Times lapse because I was getting all my news off FB. I'd sneak furtive glances at the latest posts when I should have been doing something more productive, harvesting navel lint, for example. It was hopeless and embarrassing.

I tried going cold turkey the day after the election. I failed. But I found others like me, rational, thinking people who cursed the day they ever took their first look at FB. People powerless to wrest themselves from its annoying grip.

We met. We borrowed a page from more established self-help groups. We formed FaceBook Anonymous and adapted the following 12 steps. If you find yourself in the throes of this timewaster, maybe this'll help. Maybe it won't. But no progress will be made until you stand up, surrounded by people like yourself, and proclaim in no uncertain terms, as I have, "My name is Max and I'm a FaceBook junkie."

Admit you are powerless over FaceBook. That your life as you knew it, has been changed forever, not for better.

Believe there is a power greater than FaceBook — be it YouTubes of kittens or Word of the Day — that may restore you to sanity.

Decide to thwart your weak will and turn important decisions over to your browser's Parental Controls site-blocker function. Then choose a password so convoluted you'll never remember it and have to do a fresh install if you're ever weak enough to succumb.

Make a searching and fearless inventory of all your posts and delete them.

Admit nothing to no one. Pretend nothing ever happened and you've never even heard of FaceBook.

Install a military-approved disk-cleaning program and remove all traces of FaceBook from your hard drive.

Humbly ask your ISP provider to block any attempts you make to access FaceBook from His end.

Make a list of all your Friends and tell them, "Nothing personal," as you unFriend them, one by one.

Contact real friends, face-to-face wherever possible, and talk to them in person, using complete sentences whenever possible and occasionally making eye contact.

Continue to be vigilant and whenever tempted by Internet Cafes, promptly admit it and run the other way.

Take up a new sport, preferably one that will likely result in severe wrist injury.

Admit you are powerless and sign on under an assumed name. Tell no one.