A Final Thought: Facebook Memories
By Mitch Allen
I gave up Facebook in May of 2020. We were still reeling from the Covid lockdown and my Facebook feed was filled with misinformation and vitriol. In addition, the Democrats were about to hold their convention to choose a presidential candidate to run against Donald Trump, and my friends on the left and right were fighting like children in a school yard.
It was too much for me.
Today, well over two years later, I’m less informed, but I’m happier, less aware of what old high school friends are having for dinner, and less anxiety-ridden.
Although I no longer post on Facebook, I do sometimes visit my memories page to recall an event or a forgotten piece of writing. I did that recently and came across a few posts perhaps worth sharing with you:
August 6, 2014
Feeling all squishy this morning: Ever since I ate that fresh Georgia peach the other day, I’ve been thinking about fruit as a metaphor for a human life: we begin as a bud, but soon open into the world as a delicate blossom with little to offer but our beauty, tenderness, vulnerability, and infinite potential.
As childhood fades and falls away, we discover that we are fruit, with purpose and ambition. But we are small, green and bitter, and we remain this way for most of our lives. We may grow larger with experience and the accumulation of resources, but inside we are hard and sour.
Eventually, if the fates give us the time, our aura takes on a golden hue, and we become soft and sweet, tender, and plump with generosity. It is at this time when we realize the true purpose of our lives: to allow ourselves to be devoured, to give ourselves away completely to our art, to our cause, to our true loves, even to our enemies. Otherwise, we risk falling from the Tree of Life undevoured, taking our succulence with us to the dark forest floor where we rot slowly among the masses who chose the same path.
But all is not lost, for even in this rotting death, our seed, our pit, the mysterious inner spark of being that we have come to call the soul, returns to the rich soil of creation where—as the ancients have promised all along—we are given the chance to live again.
September 20, 2015
A Note on Politics:
After next year’s primaries, there will be only one presidential election strategy that will matter: energize your base in the swing states of Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio without appearing so extreme that you scare away too much of the middle.
If Jeb Bush wins the Republican nomination, he will offer up Florida on a silver platter, and he if selects John Kasich as his running mate, then Ohio is guaranteed. That’s how it will eventually play out.
In fact, right now the Republican strategy is to intentionally allow Donald Trump and others to drag the party rhetoric to the extreme right so that in the end Bush and Kasich will appear as centrists by comparison, giving them widespread support of the middle—and a landslide victory.
Whoa! Was I wrong about this!
November 15, 2017
A decade ago, the men in our family used to go fishing for speckled trout and redfish at the end of every November—in some place like Spring Creek, Florida, or Cocodrie, Louisiana. I liked Spring Creek because there was a short pier stretching out into the canal, at the end of which was a dim street light, a pay phone, and a three-legged chrome and Naugahyde chair. This was in the days before cell phones, so the men would line up on the pier waiting to sit in the chair and use the phone to call their wives. We gave each other space because no one wanted to hear another man tell his wife that she meant everything in the world to him.
August 2, 2016
At lunch today my check was for $13.34. I gave the server a twenty and she returned with my change saying, “I’m giving you an extra penny so your change is $6.67 instead of, uh, that other number.”
She meant $6.66.
I thanked her for looking out for my eternal soul and added the penny to her tip.
May 21, 2013
Every word I speak is rooted in one or more of three goals: to prove my righteousness, to express my individuality, to escape responsibility for my predicament. In other words: let me tell you why I’m right; let me tell you why I’m different; let me tell you why it’s not my fault. Rarely does even a whisper reach beyond this three-walled prison, which I continue to build myself, every day, stone by stone, including this.