Please. Stop. Thanks.

Facebook use to be such a fun playground.  When I joined in June '09, it was such a healthy place to interact with my fellow cyclists.  Keeping in touch with friends who are far away IRL and making contacts with new people.  People whom I might one day have the pleasure of their company on a bike ride someday.  I also found it a great place for blog fodder, inspiration... a publicly sourced muse.  My "friends" really knew what I needed to know (or at least mock).  Without Facebook, I don't get things like this image of my former PMBAR partner, Jody, fondling a tire like a sexy, bike-curious lumberjack:

Gold, Jerry.

But recently...

I know that scrolling through my feed is a huge time suck to begin with.  When I'm busy having fun with friends IRL, I barely bother to look at it.  Mostly, I'm checking what I've been tagged in to see if it's an Oakley ad or an image of someone's balls (also gold, Jerry).

At work tho, I need something to do between runs/deliveries.  Something I can walk away from as soon as there is work to do.  Hard to be focused (read a book) or productive (knit a sweater) in this scenario.  Not to mention, I still enjoy playing with my little friends, and I do still manage to get some blog fodder out of it.  Yesterday's topic just happened to be one of the first things I saw pop up on my feed yesterday morning.

So anyways...

With all the ugly things going on right now with our political system, my Facewall is being inundated with stupidity... that I, immersed in this stupidity, allow myself to intellectually drown in quite voluntarily.   Impulse control not being my strong suit, I click the links.  Skim.  Check the source.  Seek out bias.  Decide whether or not it's leaning left or right.  It's rarely balanced.  So why did I bother?  Nothing I read makes me feel better about the world.

Anal compulsion.  Rubber necking.  Lemming mentality.

It only takes a slight push to get me to go down the dark hallway.  Problem being, go down the hall deep enough and I have a hard time looking back and seeing the way out.  Insane.  I've even found myself watching the evening network news (no cable, so that's what I got).

What am I doing watching this instead of doing something (anything) else?

Being informed is not a terrible thing.  I encourage it, to the degree that you can either actively participate in making a change or at least say to yourself, "Wow, this is shitty/awesome," and then go about your day knowing you are less than a speck of dust in the universe.  From now on, I'm going to do my best to either seek out my news when I want it in my life or go back to catching up on the world by watching Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update.  Maybe enjoy the indulgence of watching a little John Oliver from time to time.


I realize even these sources may lean more in one direction than the other, but at least I'll be laughing while the world burns instead of hiding under a sheet like I would be if I only watched FOX News (which is equally entertaining, if you enjoy things like pulling the wings off a fly).

Yesterday, I found it quite easy to scroll past the fear mongering and associated bullshit.  I realize I could just block people who keep posting all this inane bullshit without checking their sources, but most of my Facefriends ride bikes, and honestly, I'd probably enjoy their company... as long as we don't talk politics... which people tend to not do as much in person as they do online.

So yeah.

Keep posting all those links.  Just please make sure the image and/or link easily identifies your post as political, so I can scroll past it to get to the bike-related posts easier.

And posts that reaffirm my lifestyle, such as drinking beer on a Sunday at 11:50AM because you're washing your bike.  And cute animal videos.  Keep them a'coming.  I love baby goats, FYI.  Who doesn't?

BTW: If anyone knows how to block posts with the words "Trump, Clinton, Republican, Democrat, election, and recipe," feel free to reach out to me.  It's either that or I'm going to start a social media site where we just talk about/make fun of bike related topics.  Some perfect virtual world where the most polarizing topics will be dropper posts, fat bikes, and cyclocross.

Mostly fat bikes tho.

Because they're terrible.