Face Off

My name is John Horst and I have 0 digital friends. And I’m thinking Arby's.

I agree wholeheartedly with my real life friend Chris’ hatred of Facebook and all it stands for. Oh, believe me, I understand the multiple hypocrisies of our open disdain for social networking online and I’m fine with all of them. For example:

1. How can I claim to hate Facebook when I don’t know anything about it and have never been on the website and have never even seen it? Easy – it’s the same way I hate Nicholas Cage movies. I haven’t seen a Nicholas Cage movie in 15 years but I know they all suck. All except the Rock. The Rock was fucking sweet. But it wasn’t because of Nicholas Cage; it was awesome because of Sean Connery. You could have cast any douchebag in Cage’s role as Stanely Goodspeed and it still would have kicked ass because of Connery. You could have even cast John McCain and I still would have liked it. Although you would have had to rewrite the climactic scene after which Goodspeed had disarmed all the biological missiles on Alcatraz and the F16 fighter jets were swooping in to blow up the Rock only to pull up at the last second at the sight of Goodspeed holding the green flares above his head, you know, because McCain can’t lift his arms above his head, what with the fact that he had them repeatedly broken in a Vietnamese prison during his 5 years of captivity.

2. The very fact that we feel it necessary to speak with such animosity about the cultural phenomenon that is Facebook in itself lends credibility to Facebook and the masses that subscribe to it. Whatever; the masses also subscribed to the Salem witch trials and somehow believed that it made sense to dunk a suspected witch in a barrel of water only to have her innocence proved if she in fact drowned. I mean, whatever dumbass thought of that, what the fuck was he going to do if she didn’t drown? They’d have a soaking wet witch on their hands and she’d be pissed as fuck. The point is, the masses often do things because the masses are doing things regardless of the merits. I don’t give a shit if “Paul is going for a jog.” In fact, if Paul wants me to know what he’s doing he damn well better have the couth to call me up and tell me what he’s doing and if he calls me up just to tell me he’s going for a goddamn jog I’m going to find him, kidnap him, and dump him in barrel of water for wasting my time. Then we’ll see if Facebook is really worth a shit if anyone responds to his status, “Paul is drowning,” to save him.

3. Here we are railing on about the stupidity of a website where people can read every little thought and action you chose to post, on a website where people are reading about every one of our thoughts and actions that we’ve posted. The difference is, if I can be so humble, the blog is humorous/insightful/ironic; Facebook posts are mundane/pointless/uninteresting. “Darren is eating steak” = waste of kilobytes. “The thought of killing him right then and there with the cake knife crossed my mind” = hilarious.

I could come up with thousands of reasons why I hate Facebook but it really just boils down to one thing:

When Marcum and I were freshman in college we were both pledging the same fraternity. When we weren’t sitting in a circle on the floor of the fraternity house bathroom with the rest of the pledges wearing only blindfolds and jock straps, being beaten repeatedly with wooden paddles and pelted with garbage while trying to recite The Order of the Sphinx in the presence of all the brothers, we were forced to go “interview” all the brothers individually in order to learn stupid, meaningless facts about them and their lives in order to “get to know them.” One night all the pledges gathered together to go interview Rich Brown, the scariest motherfucker I have ever met in my life. Rich Brown was once nationally ranked as a NCAA Division I heavy weight wrestler for the University of Louisville. Before he graduated, Rich was banned from wrestling and kicked out of the university for what I can only assume was killing some poor sonofabitch on the wrestling mat because he some how ended up at Ohio Northern University to finish his degree, in what I could only assume was a bachelors of kicking ass because Rich was built like goddamn Mount Rushmore and had the disposition of a death row inmate.

In order for us to “interview” him, Rich required us to bring two handles of Southern Comfort whiskey and drink both of them with him before he would answer any questions. So we all piled into Rich’s off campus apartment, sat Indian style on the floor, passed the bottles of whiskey around, and tried not to shit ourselves.

It was the most fucked up experience of my life. Rich would point to someone and say, “Tell me a funny story,” in a manner that suggested if he didn’t find it funny he would choke the life out of you with his pecs.

After three hours of that shit we finished the whiskey, which did nothing to calm my nerves because of all the questions we were supposed to ask him, there was only one question I needed an answer to, “Is Rich Brown a violent drunk?” and the answer was yes, yes he was. At one point Rich’s little Boston Terrier, Floyd, who hadn’t been taken outside all night couldn’t hold it any longer and took a piss on Rich’s futon. A rational human would recognize that situation as their own fault for not walking the dog. But Rich, who was neither rational nor human, picked the poor dog up with one hand, screamed in its face, then bit it. I’m not making that shit up. He bit the fucking dog. I’m not sure who was more surprised and terrified, me or the dog. It was at that point we all got the hell out of there, having not even conducted the interview.

Suffice it to say, we eventually did finish the interview and we all survived but that’s not the point. The real point to this story is twofold:

1. I’ve lived every day of my life since that day I met Rich Brown with one singular goal: Never come into contact with Rich Brown ever again. It may be laughable to think that someone like Rich Brown would be on a social networking website like Facebook, but if there’s even a fraction of a fraction of a chance that he is, I don’t want to have anything to do with it for the fraction of a fraction of a chance that Rich Brown would ever be able to find me.

2. During the interview we asked Rich Brown if he had a favorite quote. He said, “Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead; Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow; Just walk beside me and be my friend.” That’s the most fucked up thing I’ve ever heard, especially coming from the likes of a giant dog eater but I think about that quote every day of my life and I think modifying it slightly is directly applicable to the subject at hand: “Don’t post stupid shit on your Facebook page, I won’t read it; Don’t put something on my Facebook wall, I don’t give a shit; If you’re really my friend you’ll be there for me when I inevitably run into Rich Brown again and he attempts to remove my gallbladder through my esophagus with his bare hands.”