Who Needs A Life When You Have Facebook

It all began somewhat innocently. Someone told me about it and I thought that I would give it a quick look see and be done with it. Who knew that it would become an addiction that I would have to feed several times a day – even when I said that I’d back off from it, but never did. It’s now come down to this: Every evening around 9pm – I join a special chat room on AOL Instant Messenger – where some of us even come clean about our addiction.

I get in this special chat room and I type in the following words: “Hello, my name is Rich.”

And for about a minute or so – I see a stream of “Hello Rich” on my computer screen that people around the world have typed on their computer keyboard for me to read and feel like I was one of them..

I continue the chat by saying,“My name is Rich and I’m addicted to Facebook.”

And then the stories begin.

I never thought that I would become addicted to a social network on the web – I mean, come on, it’s an internet web site -- what can be so fucking addictive about that? That’s what you say until you join this little group where people speak in short little bursts of status updates and it takes you in and you become a part of it.

It all starts out pretty innocently when you hook up and become buddies with a couple of friends and then it grows and grows. Late in the evening – you’ll sign on Facebook and do a friend search in the hopes of expanding your Facebook friend base. That growing need to get people to become Facebook friend takes over and you can’t control it. You’ll want to be friends with people you agree with…people you don’t agree with….people you wouldn’t stand next to at a urinal in a men’s public restroom…you want Facebook friends! The more the merrier, God-Damn It!

And when you’re not searching for friends – you start joining groups or making up groups to join. There are the “groups of people who use to work somewhere groups” – I joined one of those lickety split and I still check back occasionally to see if some of the people that I worked with there even remembered me. I’m waiting to read something like, “Yeah, I remember Rich and he had to be the biggest douche ever to work in the traffic department.” (Yeah, I’m talking about you people at FOX 66 in Flint).

When you’re not searching for friends or groups to belong to – there’s always the games on Facebook. There are some people who are literally addicted to “Yo’Ville” and that mafia deal and I’ll be honest with you…..I have better things to do with my time – such as searching for words on the Pathwords app on Facebook. I have now played more games then my highest Pathwords score and for some reason I just can’t beat my own score and it frustrates the hell out of me – that’s why I’m up sometimes until 2:00 in the morning in front of this computer. (And don't get me started on how Pathwords pisses me off when they won't except to word "Zen" but accepts "Jew" -- two words that Scrabble doesn't even recognize.)

Oh, I’m addicted to Facebook and it hurts. It hurts so much that I have even had to write about it. I know that I should do something about this addiction – maybe even attend another one of those meetings that I mentioned earlier – but I’ve got to check out my Facebook page to see if someone said something. Who knows maybe I’ll hook up with a couple of new Facebook friends.