So I'm just going to cop to it up front: I lurk. I used to post here, kind of a lot, and lately not so much.

I'm still interested enough to poke my head in and see what's funny, what's sad, and what's being re-argued for the nine billionth time. I drop a little surrealism in my favorite thread, if I can find it. But for most of the many of you I've become friends with, I'm by and large content to keep up on Facebook. And given that the community here has rolled on just fine in my entirely unremarkable absence, that seems to have worked out well.

But I've been thinking about something that's been a topic of conversation on and off ever since FB became the new MySpace and RPeeps started fleeing here for there. Steeler touched on it in a recent journal, and I thought about it as I did my lurking routine, and I had a thought. (It's okay - I took a nap after. These things happen to men of a certain age. One adjusts.) 

What does FB really offer that the Forum doesn't?

Is it really just as simple as being able to limit your interactions to those you'd rather interact with? Certainly that's part of it.

There are certain people I'd rather not have around, and if I can simple up my e-life with a little e-voidance, so be it. Yes, that makes the FB experience less of a community and more of a social circle: you only end up hearing from the people you like. If you want to meet someone new on FB, they'd better be a friend of a friend or no go, Mercutio.

On the other hand, from my introverted perspective, that's kind of a non-starter as arguments go: I'm not likely to seek out strangers to befriend, and any that seek me out aren't likely to find me welcoming. But that's neither you nor the person next to you so much as my "man in the mirror". For most I suspect there's some fun to be had from adding new voices to the choir, despite my desire to "neither recruited nor a recruiter be". And why not? We are social animals.

But I think that's not the biggest draw. The biggest draw is that Facebook has no memory.

I don't mean that literally, of course. What we post stays posted, like a string of sturdy wood poles on wire back to the horizon. But if you want to go looking for something Aunt Mavis posted last week about how the Kennedys assassinated themselves, you have to actually put in the effort to look for it. Odds are that even if it makes the ineffable algorithmic cut for FB's "top stories", it's not going to hover in your feed for more than a couple of hours. She grinds her axe, and those who are interested say their piece, and everyone moves on to the next thing. 

It's like a cocktail party. You walk in, greet the hosts, hang up your coats, and walk smack into a heated discussion about abortion. Not your cup of tea, so you make chit-chat about last night's episode of "That Show Everyone Watches". Or a book you just read, or what happened at work today, or even why people were fools to believe the banks needed to be deregulated. The party goes on. Everyone gets a little of what they want.

But here we can see debates about guns, or whether Obama/Bush/Clinton...Hammurabi is good or evil, or how we can straighten out the economy, or who wrote history when we were watching stuff happen, and it's harder to walk away. Even if you don't participate in the conversation, it's still there in your feed: Aunt Mavis is still grinding away days later, there's that bore at the party who won't move off her favorite topic no matter who or how many steer the talk elsewise, and there you have it. It's proved to be quite the caterpillar in the buttermilk (19:10).

Granted that no one has to look in those threads if they'd rather not. But they are still there. Even when they fade for a bit, someone brings them back. Thousands on thousands of threads, as damn near unkillable as an army of Terminators. They'll always be back, because someone will resurrect them either for shits and giggles or to actually re-animate a battle fought over the same stale ground with the same weapons that didn't win the last time but have now been re-branded for optimal efficacy.

It's a cocktail party gone mad. The echoes of Todd's tirade about the Fed and Dani's diatribe damning the 9/11 Commission hang in the air until everyone has to plug their ears and shout to be heard. Even if we try to walk away someone keeps talking: they have the answers, they lived the good old days with Percival, Perseus, Ike the Well-Liked, and Bilbo Baggins, they just found this new truth that ties it all together so any fool can see, they get what you're doing and can show you on the tablets which logical commandment you just broke and how many virgin sheep's throats need slit to make amends. And there's no host here to cut them off. So just one more round, barkeep, and then we're all homeward bound and halfway to bed. Scout's honor!

I sound harsh. And maybe I'm being a bit harsh, because having played in this sandbox a few years myself I feel a bit unhappy that it's less than I'd like it to be. I miss this place (hence the lurking). And I wish I could look past all the pointless, pointless bickering that seems to exist more for its own sake than to bring forth some rough clarity, "its hour come round at last". But I have an inceasingly low tolerance for all that, and too much of it brings out the worst in me. Life is too short to be so angry, I'm told.

So how do we make the ground safer for play? We all know the guy who hammered the boards into a box and poured the sand has a merry-go-round to run, and Ol' Noodly bless him for it. So there's no looking to him to answer for the rules of play. (I'd call that a metaphor for life under gods, but that's a song for a better singer.)

Maybe we need fewer threads: General Conversation, Politics, Books, etc. Say ten or so, maybe thirteen if you feel the need of a superstitious thrill. That way whatever pet axe needs grinding doesn't get honed to an atom-splitting edge while the steely rasp wears its way through everyone's ears.

Maybe we need a consensus that what falls off the RAFT stays off the RAFT: never the same river, right? No more strange aeons for what may eternal lie. (Although there is something often non-Euclidean about the angles I've seen here. )

Even the most contentious journals - I remember arriving here when some had replies in the triple-digit range - had a hard time breaking the Franklin rule. They were "boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past". 

Maybe we need both. Or neither. I'm better with questions than answers (not that anyone looked to me for the latter, thankfully). I just think that this persistence, this inability to achieve escape velocity from the ever-deeper gravity wells of certain topics, is the key.

On Facebook, it's harder to remember who was an ass.