Not a Joiner

MySpace is haunting me.

Like a lot of clueless morons, I signed up for a MySpace page a while ago because some random person told me it was a necessary marketing tool. Every now and then I wake up on a strange park bench wearing a white linen suit that isn’t mine, and I think, damn, it’s time I started acting like a real live professional writer. On the long walk home I ponder what exactly real live professional writer means. I imagine wearing a dinner jacket all the time, smoking a pipe, and being able to quote poetry and Greek tragedies on demand. And then I notice I am walking by a windowless place named Teddy’s Bar and I forget all about it.

Sometimes, though, I make these spastic efforts at being all adult and professional, and lame attempts at branding or marketing result. Like, for example, setting up a MySpace page.

The great part about the MySpace page is that I don’t remember much about it. I think I set it up and then forgot about it, imagining it would yield all sorts of markety goodness all automatically and shit, without my intervention. Which is how I like to run things whenever possible. Hell, I would write my books without my direct conscious involvement if I could.

Instead, all I’ve gotten out of MySpace are endless friend invitations. And this is just underscoring and exacerbating my general misanthropy. I’m socially awkward, and this apparently extends to the Internets as well. As a matter of fact, it’s worse. In real life when total strangers try to flag me down for a conversation, or invite me to functions, I can generally do something to signal to them that I would rather make a total ass out of myself in public and be hated for all eternity than speak with them – you know, feign a seizure, feign not speaking English, all the usual tricks. On the Intarwebs, this is not possible. I get these friend requests and they just sit in my Junk email like radioactive nuggets until I turn off the PC and they get flushed away. Meanwhile, someone somewhere places me in their asshole folder for never responding.

I know it’s possible to delete your MySpace account and stop giving out the impression that I want to be people’s friends, but this would involve some actual effort, unlike the act of setting up the account in the first place, which basically involved me thinking casually that I ought to do it and then somehow, in a process probably involving black magic and elves, my account had been created.  Aside from crippling misanthropic tendencies, I am also: incredibly lazy. I’m the whole package!

How can a man be this socially awkward and yet achieve some modest success as a writer? Science has no answers.