Glass Shallot by Adam Baer | Adambaer.com

Did Facebook Delete A Writer's Attempt to Use Timeline as a Narrative Tool?

Today I posted "content" in an attempt to use Facebook Timeline in a humorous, narrative way; I was kidding a little, but I thought it could be fun to really use the software to create a comedic, serialized micro-narrative made of short status updates. The post was commented on by a couple of friends, and then removed by someone other than me. I then discussed this in another status update with those same friends. That was then promptly removed by someone other than me. I then reposted the content twice, and now I do not see any of this on my page. If Facebook would like people to care about its IPO -- and that's a foregone conclusion, they do, because billions of dollars are concerned, but let's talk about regular people -- they should not delete writers' attempts to use their tools to create and engage with an audience, in jest or more serious ways. The aforementioned content (copied below) is far from genius and merely average, but I posted it here, which is less "buggy" a virtual "place" and likely watched by fewer programmers who police and react to user content. Perhaps this was all just FB software problems...but if so, who can trust FB with content you do not backup elsewhere. I mean, what if this stuff was actually good?

Here is the attempt at humor I posted, related to the ABC Show Revenge. Do you find it inappropriate?

"When I was 10, a high-school senior in my Monte Cristo-like neighborhood was hired to hang out with and shoot hoops with me before my parents returned home from work. One day, the kind young man suggested I find someone to buy me a tape of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” So, I did, and the next time he appeared, he “borrowed” it, never to return or answer our many calls again. Now, as a rational adult, I plan to use Facebook Timeline, narratively, to track down this man for a final confrontation. Would any of you care to follow this meaningful adventure? I shall call it “My Facebook ‘Revenge’ / Season One: Born to Run.”

I shall move slowly, follow clues, keep my emotions at bay, and friend anyone close to this man and his especially heinous crime, crossing each one off my list one by one. It will be sweet to one day recover this low quality recording, if it still exists, uncompressed and possibly warped. But the ultimate prize will be hearing this man sing under duress the lyrics: “The highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive / Everybody's out on the run tonight but there's no place left to hide.”

 

AFTERNOON UPDATE: Facebook was briefly down this morning, and I wouldn't want to think they'd target one person, so it's quite possible that's what happened. Still, the "dangerous"  keywords used in my posts could have triggered a moderator or bot to remove them at different times (people observed their staggered removal individually), and the critique and untraditional use of Timeline the day after FB's IPO announcement is definitely something they might try to quash. 

The important issue remains: Can we trust FB to hold our original life-content as Timeline promises? I'd use a few backups, and make sure you already own the rights to anything you publish anywhere.

Leasing Los Angeles

The piece in text form, here.

"Speak, Malady" in Harper's; "Speak, Memory" Still Rightfully Everywhere

My recent Harper's essay, "Speak Malady," in which I rock, roast, and melt at medical tourism meccas Boston, M.A., and Rochester, M.N. [PDF link]

 

Medical Marijuana in LA: "Hit and Miss" in the Financial Times Magazine (FT Weekend)

 

This weekend, The Financial Times Magazine runs a hopefully informative and humorous personal essay [PDF] about my mysterious health travails and experience with LA's medical marijuana world at an crucial point in the battle to legalize cannabis in California. It's also online in web-friendly html page-format here, @ FT.com.

Naturally, I thought long and hard about what kinds of supplementary material I could offer on my blog. But we sadly only present words and stuff we can roll and/or bake into Web code  Glass Shallot. In that spirit, then let me offer a small chunk of text my editors and I had to cut at the last minute for page-space. It concerns the first dispensary I visited in Hollywood, one of the shops LA will close, where the system -- and the product -- actually worked very well. (Text below)

 

 

"More concerned with convenience than finding a boutique shop that sold Valrohna chocolate cupcakes, I first visited Druggie Christmas Tree Girl’s dispensary: a dank space above a seedy Hollywood motel, manned by a hulking Middle Eastern guy with a shaved head, wearing an elegantly dizzying Ed Hardy T-shirt. He screamed my name the way some thug had screamed at Jason Statham in an action movie I once reviewed. Naturally, I trusted him.

     “What iz dis?” the guy asked, taking my letter through a little hole in the wall that separated the real store from the waiting room.

     “It’s my doctor’s recommendation," I said.

     “I never see something like dis, yo.”

     “Well,” I said, “It’s real.”

     “I see dat, dude. But I still gotta call.”

     Yes, this sketchy drug-dealer type was calling a nationally lauded physician because of me. 

He left the window, I heard some mumbling. He reappeared minutes later.

     “You in,” he said. “He OK it.”

     “You spoke with my actual doctor, not some nurse or assistant?” I asked. 

    “Totally,” he said. “Now whaddayou want?”

     I walked into a tiny, smoky space through a cage-protected door, and he showed me some 10 canisters of fragrant weed. I asked for something to alleviate pain – nerve pain, if that meant anything?

     “Bubba Skunk,” he said. “That’s you shit.”

    “That’s my shit,” I concurred, handing over $50 for a pill bottle filled with buds.

     “How much should I use?” I asked.

    “Howev much you want, homeslice.” 

Then I left, and as I waved my new drugs around the seedy eastern side of Hollywood Boulevard, as a man in a doo-rag drove by me on a miniature bicycle powered by a tiny motor, my wife grabbed the bag and told me to hide it.

“But it’s legal,” I said.

“But this isn’t Brentwood!"

extremely original facebook-status updates from my network, posted during tonight's debate

In Chronological Order, from the most recent:

1. Mr. V "is mad that Joe the plumber just charged me 250,000 to unclug a drain."
    COMMENT: "I want his publicist. Dude's gonna be on Entourage next week."
2. MS. X "is watching the debate. thank you dvr. thank you."
2. MS. Y "thinks an angry old man sitting across the table from world leaders is NOT something I want."
3. MS. A "wouldn't call Palin a "role model" for this woman."
4. MR. C "is wondering if anyone knows a good plumber."
    COMMENT: "Plumbers do not pay taxes. They get paid in cash. And like waiters, they do not declare and pay taxes on a good portion of their independent income. Most plumbers make more than teachers, police, or fireman. So the candidates should have picked a teacher or lumberjack or barrista as an example"
5. MS. A "pro-choice doesn't mean pro-abortion, a-hole."
6. MS. F "thinks Obama is a class act."
7. MS. T "is thinking McCain doesn't know he's on split-screen."
8. MS. E "thinks McCain looks and sounds desperate"
9. MS. F " is amazed at Obama's restraint."
10. MS. F "wants to know what the Great Society was... I must not have been paying attention in American history."
11. MS. F "thinks McCain is really grasping..."
12. MS. G "is debate."
13. MR. V "is not going to hold back when watching the debates."
14. MS. J "knows her autistic kid is in good hands with Sarah because she 'understands special-needs children.'"

10 days since updating anything on Facebook, and I have to say, I feel such so clogged with  unexpressed emotion, I just don't know what to do...

too many connections

interlude

THE CHIPS ARE FALLING.

forget the desert: moses was all about the waterfront

"Try to see it my way" or "Welcome to LA, Rock-band mediator edition"

dfw

"There's part of me that wants to get attention and respect. It doesn't really make very much difference to me. Because I learned in my 20's that it just doesn't change anything. And that whatever you get paid attention for is never the stuff that you think is important about yourself anyway. So a lot of my problems right now is that I don't really have a brass ring. And I'm kind of open to suggestions as to what one chases. There are real abstract ideas about, you know, what art can be, the redemptive quality of art, and you know, kindness to animals. All the cliches that we can invoke. But ...the people who most interest me now are the people who are old and who have sort of been through a midlife criss. They tend to get weird, because the normal incentives for getting out of bed don't tend to apply anymore. I have not found any satisfactory new ones. But I'm also not getting ready to jump off a building or anything."

David Foster Wallace, 3/27/97