Point of View: Clean for 29 Days

I’ve been in recovery — clean — for almost a full month now, 29 days as a matter of fact, and while of course one always should be wary of a relapse, I think I’ve kicked the Facebook habit.

I haven’t formally resigned — I doubt frankly that they let you — but I swear I have not clicked on it since we returned from a vacation at the end of December.

“It’s just so much noise . . . so much chatter for the most part,” I said to Mary. “It’s not that I’m antisocial, I just don’t have the time on my time off to pay attention to what other people are thinking. As I said to Cebra, when he first recommended Facebook as a means of communication, ‘I don’t do dialogues, I do monologues.’ ”

Isn’t it ironic? I’m repelled, I guess, by the sight of others putting themselves forward when, in fact, that’s what I’ve been doing on a weekly basis for the better part of the past 50 years. Of course my ephemeral thoughts have more heft, I tell myself, anchored (often to my chagrin) as they are in print.

That’s what I tell myself, but deep down, I know the world is passing me by — and swiftly, too. Before you know it’s news it’s old — it’s already been on the Internet. That’s one reason, I suppose, not to defect from Facebook, though there’s only so much input one can put in. It’s as Bob Schaeffer once said, “There’s too much muchness.”

Of course it’s difficult, being a card-carrying member of the chattering class, to deplug entirely, but I figure the less time spent on Facebook the more time I’ll have for idling in other ways, such as happened the other day in the blizzard when I, in need of a horror fix, went in search of the papers at One Stop only to wind up spinning my wheels ceaselessly on an unplowed part of Delavan. Bill Leland, our neighbor, kindly set the car, which might otherwise have impeded the plows that night, free, leaving me chastened and resolved to spend the rest of the day quietly, with a book, listening to the fire.