Salted Bomb

I worry about nothing a lot. I know my daughter likes to worry and to nothing too but I don’t want her to know we share that. I don’t want to tell my daughter what to do but I enjoy it too much to stop. When Medusa turned her enemies to stone she nothinged them. I like to think about Medusa but I don’t like being like her but I find myself practicing death mother memes. I must enjoy it or I would stop that too. I guess this is what addiction looks like, not being able to stop. Medusa would be better than me to take on my nemesis, this parasitic nematode better known as social media. But, I will do my best.

I spent much of that first winter-of-our-covid trying to walk outside in the cold to better clear my mind to understand Medusa through memories of me and my Mom because, who better to become a meme slayer than a Mom? The covid pause gave me time to luxuriate in the nothing that I’ve loved to hate most of my busy life but instead, what actually happened was that I was sucked into surfing the web and my beautiful daughter gave up real books for tiktok. Nothing came to us in sets. Big waves of it came crashing over us while we left our home to hunker down with my parents.

Without the daily routine of servicing the farm, the chores and the taming of lands, we curled into the pandemic nautilus of family and boredom. The internet was school, the internet was work and the internet was meetings, everything zoomed through the screen. Those waves of disappearing into screentime nothing came harder and faster. I witnessed the devolution in slow motion, from a safe distance, as the undertow pulled every one of us out into the digital sea until all that was left was my body holding the selfie stick wobbling in the seafoam on the receding shore. Covid was good for nothing. I looked to my spiritual training to help mediate the anesthetic negative charge. But, in actual practice, meditation, that vindictive mistress, abandoned me again just when the universe conspired to give me the time to really sink. Turns out I could “get there” by firing up instagram. Nothing for free! I scrolled away to my heart's content without breaking a sweat or hearing any bells. Just me, the beach and my iphone. #sad!

I have tried to stop worrying and learn to love social media but I cannot. Stop. Nor should I let a 15 year old drive that hardcoded lamborghini. It’s too fast and furious. Please, just stop. On all of the big wide world of internet, why is there no off button? They seem to have hidden the directions and the return slip too. When I look for the obvious feminist flag for Moms against social media to rally around, I’m frustrated by dead ends. I can spend a lot of time filling up on empty promises while trolling around the Motherhood sites. Mom blogs such as this one are the undead horse trope that built social media as we know and love it now. Self improvement memes and clip art portray Motherhood as a sad self deprecating joke or infinite listicle of advice. Dare to compare? It makes me sad to compare but I enjoy it too much to stop. #Momsagainstmediaaddiction is not real, yet. Would starting one make me a Tipper? I am always in that comparison loop and it turns my compassion levers to stone.

Medusa’s got nothing on Insta. I mean that in the most sincerest form of flattery. I looked up Medusa on Instagram, there's no account, just some piercing and tattoo art. I wish Medusa could actually metastisize through Instagram and zap us out of the tractor beam of self-ness but the death mother is old fashioned and sequestered in a different void. Her messages don’t come through Hades or social media, they come from the inside the empty place that social media creates. When I really listen, I do sometimes meet up with someone way worse than the death mother, someone made of something much darker that emanates from the magma core of that millennial vacuum known as facebook. I meet that energy and raise it by two stones very late at night or very close to a deadline when I should be doing the hard work of making a spreadsheet. What happens is I peek in just enough to be recognized and whammy! a black hood is thrown over my head and I'm transported, rendition style to an undisclosed location. They call it "clickbait"and it's not even covert - they keep it right there in plain sight all personalized like a full menu only it's all apps. Cheeky they are, those geeks. There’s a lot of hate too. It's also not so hidden in that algorhythm, that ‘facebook’ thing. Plenty of self hating pathos, pretending and proselytizing (like me!) on self servicing loops all for the taking, all day, everyday. Of course there's some style and commerce and maybe the occasional laugh at someone else's expense, typically a small animal, but mostly my feed is all pretense over thinking. Note to self: find a curator for spoon fed differentiation, get off the wheel.

I do realize that there is an industry emerging to analyze the shit out of the facebook wake. But, that's not going to save my daughter. It's cute to point fingers to the land of the lost, that other generation. Not my cooler than school GenX, not my baby's must save the planet GenZ, but that millennial place in the new middle. That the jobless, handsomest drowned man has washed upon our shores and into our daily routine is our fault too. He’s an idea of our own making repleat with a meaningless college degree waving his tool around to replicate the nothingness we all crave because he couldn't vision something bigger. After all it's our fault that no self respecting, well fed and entitled millennial could get a job or crawl out from under their student loans. I’m not picking on them for the rack, they didn't happen alone. I'm not interested in the Kardashians or the dick pics posters or even the punk-y pranksters, they can have each other till kingdom come, just, please, leave my daughter off your suggested playlists. My story is a plea to all my peers in the meno-factory, my daughter and myself to find our way out of the nothing and away from the prettiest kind of less than zero. We really ought to resist the social media septic tank because if the posting doesn’t cloud our vision the watching will surely make us go blind. Social media is the ephemera of nothing. Captioning the yoga mat is a retorical act of the artless. It is a contribution to the deep fakes adulting that our children do not need to learn. Life’s a beach, get frothy IRL.

I mean, there’s just such a big downside to the show and show and show some more, just enough, maybe too much of the perfect face, family, vacation, pet, pasta or whatever it is that happened to be ‘captured’ by a handy camera. It is all cobalt-thorium G. Mutually assured destruction courtesy of the shareholder elite who don’t give a fig what happens to your mental health.

I worry a lot. Did I mention that I love to worry? Worrying creates time from nothing. Foop! I worry about the nothing of everything, the nothing of this digital moment. I guess we’ve been careening toward the metaverse for a while, but I wasn’t paying attention in the aughts because I was too busy making ice cream and trying to get noticed in old media. I created something from nothing and of course I wanted to see it in print. Who among us? I poured my heart and soul into the product and called it a company so my government could take a piece of it every month. There’s nothing more worry free than ice cream. And yet…I turned it into industry. I worried about the milk, the vats, the rats, math, the imported chocolate picked by little orphan hands in desperately poor tropical villages, my employees, the price of oil, cold chain temps in trucks crossing over Independence Pass in Colorado balancing negative 15 degree temperature differentials to overrun while I managed a little known thing called profit. I do get it facebook, you are a business. Ah-hem, an industry. But, again, silicon valley, c'mon I mean really, even Hollywood knew it needed guardrails. The film industry has ratings why not YouTube? Back in the day, as we say, in my 35mm career, I worried my fair share about truth and consequences and also how to make other people rich. So, I knew this territory, 'worrying in a business setting'. Women worrying in business is sometimes called being “detail oriented”. Sometimes it is called being emotional which is the gateway drug to using the term hysterical, a label favored by the phlegmatic philistines who still make 22% more pennies on the dollar than their mercurial female counterparts. When it came to my own business, though, I was worried all-the-time. I wanted people to like me, sure, but I needed them to like my ice cream more. Ah the innocuous foibles of pre-social media selling. Put it in a magazine!

Business is not the enemy of the good in my belief system. I believe in capitalism, sort of. I believe in advertising. Back then, when I became an entrepreneur, I had consciously mixed my life savings, a marriage and child simultaneously onto one balance sheet of time and effort. Duh. Where was my female mentor to stop me from doing something so silly as that. Where was the “What in the wide world of fuck are you doing?” advice from a trusted peer? There was nothing where caution should have been. Not even worry. It was all a cavalcade of excitement and intoxication that one gets on the buggy ride of some too-early print magazine glory. It’s a slow burn and you have no idea if anyone actually read Cottage Living anyway because there is no “like button” on it. Spoiler, not very many!. I had made it to the cover of half a dozen magazines like that which no longer exist now thanks to the internet. Competition! I vibrated worry then as I do now, worry masquerading as caring, and I went about the tomfoolery of operating a food business while growing a real live human girl in our homesteading experiment. It wasn’t nothing. But, there was no real social media back then so it's hard to say how many likes I got. Which means, it’s hard to know if I was successful unless you count the money. Spoiler alert, not very much! My own FOMO was localized to the actual geography of this two chicken village and friends IRL, there was no insta and I didn’t know Tom. Was it all a dream?

My daughter reminds me that throughout my 15 minutes, when I sat for a photo shoot, I had lighting and professionals on my side. I know that those layouts didn’t capture the worry going on behind the scenes but I approved those aproned June Cleaver shots nonetheless. I think people understood that. The reader recognized the artifice in the consensual portrait. I always smiled for a photo. I still do, especially when I’m the photographer. We're all photographers now. My husband is a professional one and he supports us now with photography +. He tells stories by making people’s portraits, mostly of farmers but none of them are smiling. But, this was different. It’s what I would expect also when I purchased magazines. I wanted the release from the worries of IRL. I owned the awareness and forethought I extended to select and pay for media where someone else was smiling through something that I was willing to separate myself from my cash in my pocket to find out whether or not I found it interesting. Paying for O.P.P. (other people’s pictures) made me complicit, a willing player in the game. It's different now. Being cognizant of our role in the exchange seems old fashioned now, the act of entering into a social contract and subsequent suspension of disbelief that allowed me to lose myself in 35 pages of something curated and managed by a team of people is not how I experience my daughter experiencing media. I see her zooming through content made on the fly. A stream of consciousness from the barely conscious. Ouch. Not fair, but mostly now, I’m online and I don’t feel the promise of curation anywhere. I don't see production very much, especially since most of my media seems “free” I guess I should not expect value. Mostly, though, the media just goes by way too fast. Now the journey doesn’t feel aspirational or proofread even. Back in the olden days, the grift was upfront and it was all about aspiration with some side effects of low self esteem.

Not so for my girl. She’s 15. I just can’t help but feel like the body image issues were milder when compared to today's incitements to suicide and civil war. I’m worried that this will seem like I’m giving the beauty industry a pass, I’m not, but next to facebook, I’ll take Vogue’s thumbprint on society anyday. My daughter’s 80’s ladies are today’s 20’s theyshers. The lookback from the 2050’s to her 20’s in the 20’s is going to be this salted bomb, the insta-culture of social media that has swallowed all of us whole. I worry about her memories of her teenage years inside of that marooned party boat, caked in the drydock of social media. Wasted. Part of the beauty of memory pain from my 20s is that there are precious few photos or documentation of it. There was no way to take a selfie with an instamatic. Middle age allows for writers' embellishments and there’s nothing anyone can do to re-write my re-write, right? The grainy 35mm from the disposable camera was just enough for me to remember all those silly moments doing nothin’ with friends.

Maybe I should let go and learn to love social media. After all, if you want the ultimate, you’ve got to pay the ultimate price~just ask a surfer or a baby shark.