Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Tempted fate. Burned again. How stupid is that?

The only defense would be to invoke the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. That seems unfair when trying to explain the decision to make this the last shared post from the blog on https://stevelovewriter.com. Therefore, I plead insanity by desperation.

Desperate people do desperate things. In order to make others aware that I had written (and published) a new book—the first time I have tried my hand at independent publishing—I turned to a place I had been many years ago for a different reason. Rejoining the Facebook community seemed dangerous and problematic. It has been.

Now, I’m outta here.

When I became advisor to a (mostly) great staff of young journalists at the University of Akron student newspaper, The Buchtelite, it seemed a good idea to make myself available on a social media site I neither cottoned to nor used. But the students were there. Shouldn’t I go where they were instead of trying to make them come to me? The students were not the problem, Facebook was: It made me uncomfortable. Too many people looking for the guy who had been a longtime Akron Beacon Journal columnist before an early-retirement buyout. The axes were out and had been sharpened. I ran.

Later, when I had joined Hiram College as Director of College Relations, one of my staff members, a smart, talented young woman with potential whom I had tried (too hard) to advance, must have decided my shortcomings as a manager were too much for her to tolerate. She attacked me on social media. Anyone else would have been fired. But this was during my dark period and I didn’t even know that I had knives sticking in my back. My boss had to alert me to the situation. For many reasons, including some good ones, there were few-to-no consequences for the young woman.

With that baggage, I rejoined Facebook some six months ago. When I touched social media’s hottest hotplate, it found that, yep, it was still hot. Ouch! I might as well have put my head in my oven and turned on the gas—except it is electric.

Many good people frequent Facebook. I have “friends” divided between the old days of growing up in Oklahoma and then working for newspapers there and Northeast Ohio, the place I have spent the past 40 years. It has been good to reconnect with those old friends with whom I had lost contact and to “meet” new people with connections to my old hometown of Nowata, Oklahoma. We didn’t know each other but we shared a place. The catch became that some about whom I wanted to learn of their lives were uninterested. And, closer to home, some of those who are friends did not relish my Facebook responses to them, my blogposts, or both, and have made this clear to me.

Those reactions brought to mind something the older sister of one of my best friends—KB Berry—the impetus for Football, Fast Friends, and Small Towns: A Memoir Straight from a Broken Oklahoma Heart, told me while responding to questions during my book research. When I asked Margie Pierce whether she had an email account, since that would make communicating easier, she explained that she did not and why. “I do not have an email address,” Margie told me in a wonderful handwritten letter. “I realize I am in the minority. I did have but just decided I did not want to do that. I am just more at peace without.”

Her words, even as I reluctantly rejoined Facebook, became fixed in my mind and, more important, in my heart. But I tried to do what I thought necessary for the book. It has not worked and both the constant writing of blogposts, many of which I have shared on Facebook, and my resultant presence there has brought as much sadness as happiness. So I am stepping back or perhaps away. I will, at the very least, comment less about others’ comments or posts. It’s not that I’m uninterested or narrow-minded. I neither need the grief nor the heartache. I drank skin-thickener—some people call it bourbon—to numb my hide when it was my job to allow all-comers to take their shots. When, at the end of my career, my column appeared on the editorial page and I was chief editorial writer, department policy dictated that the respondents got the last word.

That requires self-control. Sometimes I still have it. So restraint will inform my hierarchy of response to the Facebook community in which I find myself. First, in addition to disengagement I am unfollowing some Facebook users who carpet-bomb their “friends” with comments, posts—their own and those of others with whom they agree or just wish to prompt a reaction—photos, religiosity, you name it. I also have turned off notifications of updates with which some Facebookers are so enamored. What I have not done is to “unfriend” anyone. That would be, well, unfriendly. If stepping back doesn’t stop the steam from coming out of my ears and other orifices, I will move on and up to Step 2.

Step 2, deactivation, is one step below the nuclear option of deleting an account, which I must have done the last time I took my leave. There seemed to be no record of me. Deactivation sounds like old age: You’re as good as gone but not quite dead. Good. Unlike a person, deactivated Facebook accounts can be resurrected or reactivated.

I will continue to keep my option open to write posts—football, books and authors, etcetera—for my website blog but not at the pace of the past six months. The first of 76 posts appeared in the middle of September 2020 as a trial and a steady stream of two to three posts per week followed, beginning at the end of that month. Blog experts preach continuity of posts for those who want to establish an audience. A consequence of not reposting on Facebook a piece on my website is that the accidental reader will be eliminated: You’ll have to visit https://stevelovewriter.com. Requiring a potential reader to be proactive can be off-putting. But that might not be so bad.

Those posts have attracted 60 comments and they do not include a couple unrelated to what I had written that I trashed and nearly 20 spams that were allegedly in response to two blogposts I wrote about killer Wayne Doyle, the man responsible in 1987 for the death of 7-year-old Charlie Wright, son of his girlfriend. Doyle wished to be released from prison before completing his 40-year sentence in 2027; I and others thought not. Response came in two categories—in a language I cannot understand—Полученную кашу нужно разделить на 5-6 приемов на весь день таким—and from those who seemed to be trying to sell me Amoxicillin. This is a drug similar to penicillin and is used to treat bacterial infections. Someone thinks I have a diseased brain. That could be.

Maybe I need to rest my brain before it goes to its final resting place. So with tips of the green old eyeshade to the originators of my favorite greeting, goodbye, and two-in-one:

Good Evening, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea. (Walter Winchell)

And good night, Mrs. Calabash—wherever you are! (Jimmy Durante)

Hello, I must be going . . . (Groucho Marx)

I offer a final farewell with a favorite movie I first saw in 1955—too long ago to remember—whose title and subject (a war) describes my Facebook experience:

To Hell and Back (Audie Murphy, star/hero)