Swing

Mood, motion, and social media (which I'm leaving).

My friend is married to somebody who dated Mark Zuckerberg. I don’t know that this matters. It’s one of those things that sticks in my head and comes out of my deep brain at apparently random times.

It seems to come out in relation to time and social media. It may be a particularly Gen X thing, something having to do with the ability to remember time before social media existed. We roll our eyes and laugh, shaking our heads saying “remember how we used to find each other on New York City afternoons without so much as a cellphone?’ One conversation in particular comes back with all the clarity of it happened yesterday: “there’s this new thing,” my friend said, leaning in with his hand lifted for emphasis and conspiracy, “it’s called electronic mail!”

This friend and I had written letters back and forth for years. They were gorgeous letters. He’d draw on the back of his. Or he’d illustrate the envelopes with graffiti like caricatures and street scenes. Mine were gusty and high and often on the thin blue airmail stationary one would use to write letters from Paris. I don’t for the life of me remember a single email we ever sent, though I know we have sent them.

I can almost smell the letters.

But this burp of my brain is also mappable and personal: I can remember where I was when Facebook (the “book of faces”, we called it, and it came after the thing called Friendster) started, and I remember what my days and life were like at the time, and I remember who filled those days. That I know somebody who’s married to somebody who started this whole thing off feels, oh I dunno, like I can trace a direct line. And this feels important precisely because social media tends to feel impersonal and disoriented. What my brain is doing feels like an ominousness abetted.