don't show me no more please

It's getting harder and harder to hide from bad news, he thought, as the red light on his BlackBerry flickered from across the room. This can't be good. Almost none of the messages lately were good. What he dreaded the most were the Facebook 'updates.' Why did he need to have all this information? Why all the sharing? Oh, look: there's the woman he had a crush on a couple of summers ago. He'd taken her to the Bob Dylan concert in Prospect Park. Now she's 'in a relationship.' Worse than that, there's a photo of her, and she's obviously like four months pregnant. In a relationship, indeed. How nice for her. And his ex-girlfriend, the one who dumped him: she and her boyfriend, who she met at a comic book store, are having a combination engagement/Halloween party. Maybe he should rent a costume and crash the thing dressed as Benjamin Braddock from 'The Graduate,' or go as the Jason Segel character from 'Forgetting Sarah Marshall' (a Hawaiian shirt? Or the leotard from the Dracula musical?).

It didn't even matter that he wasn't 'friends' (hah!) with these people. In Facebookia, the Land of Uselessness, he was always one degree away from finding out shit that he didn't want to find out, because so-and-so wrote something on his friend's wall, or commented on some dopey post or picture. What?? Karen went to the Darlin' Companions show at Rockwood with Charlie?? Robin was in New York last week and she didn't even call??

That sort of thing. Or someone has tagged someone he knows in a picture. It's just a big heaping matrix of passageways to misery. OK, maybe not misery all the time. But since you can find out the scoop on anyone if you dig enough, he sometimes followed the path of curiosity into dark corners.

And the trivia! My God. Someone he barely knows has just indirectly told him that he has landed at LAX and is on his way to get an In-and-Out Burger before checking into his hotel. O…kay. Pictures from parties that he was not at. Lots of cute babies (who doesn't like cute babies, one might ask, and he was not immune to the cuteness of babies, except when those babies were given birth to by women he himself would have preferred to have impregnated, there's a small amount of ambivalence involved).

So he posted a line about his Facebook status: closing for repairs. He decided to take a break from the whole damned thing. He thought about The Kinks, and a couple of songs from the 'Village Green Preservation Society' album. Strange, he thought, that this album has become so revered, so classic. When it came out, he'd bought it, and a few of his friends had bought it, and they were wild about it, but it bombed. Completely tanked. Too Kwaint. Too Kwyet. Too Kwirky. Not nearly rockin' enough for the late '60s.

He took the LP out. He didn't have to take the LP out, because he had the exact same songs on three different CDs, on two iPods, and on his computer. But he took the LP out anyway. Listened to 'Picture Book':

"Picture book, of people with each other, to prove they loved each other a long time ago."

And listened to 'People Take Pictures of Each Other':

"People take pictures of the summer,
Just in case someone thought they had missed it,
And to proved that it really existed.
Fathers take pictures of the mothers,
And the sisters take pictures of brothers,
Just to show that they love one another.
You can't picture love that you took from me,
When we were young and the world was free.
Pictures of things as they used to be,
Don't show me no more, please.
People take pictures of each other,
Just to prove that they really existed,
Just to prove that they really existed.
People take pictures of each other,
And the moment to last them for ever,
Of the time when they mattered to someone."

Screw Facebook, he said. And God save The Kinks.