TIME TO PISS ON THE PARADE * * * Li'l story. My cousins are Quakers. Ever been to a Quaker wedding? I done shot one. They're supposed to go like this: 1) Invite everyone in the congregation. It'll be a potluck. 2) Bride and groom gather at the front of the congregation. Nobody talks. 3) If the spirit moves you to say something, you say something. If it doesn't, you listen and reflect. 4) At some point bride and groom decide that they've been spiritually fulfilled by the ceremony and they say "yep, we're married." 5) Cake. It's a cool idea, and in theory it should be awesome. This wedding was up in Estes Park so it should have been lovely. Where it all fell apart, however, was with the Groom's family. They were all Southern Baptists. And if the bride is going to invite her entire goddamn congregation, the groom's family is going to come out in muthafuckin' force. And a whole bunch of people gathered in a crowd being quiet struck them as "uncomfortable silence." And a whole bunch of people gathered in a crowd filling "uncomfortable silence" ended up looking a lot like an AA meeting. So what should have been a fairly pleasant 30-minute to 1-hour meditative interlude in the woods turned into a 3-hour "hi I'm Distant Cousin Shirley and I wish you both a pleasant marriage. Let me recount some story that I think is appropriate in this juncture but has nothing to do with anything or anyone here before I hand it off to Distant Cousin Larry." Worst of all for me, is I was "shooting the wedding." Which means every chucklehead who stood up got popped every single time they stood up. Because god forbid I miss the photo of Grandma Moses saying something heart-warming about Great Grandpa Phineas who died all those years ago that was the last time the family saw her before the accident and you call yourself a photographer? I shot 35 rolls of bullshit. The actual stuff that matters? The photos of the wedding party that you might actually show off to people? Had to squeeze that into 9 minutes before I lost my light. Things went so overtime dealing with trivial bullshit that there was no room for the meat. THAT'S FACEBOOK. * * * It's not a time capsule of all the important things in your life. It's not a running exploration of someone's majestic social graph. It's a scattershot explosion of every trivial detail in every trivial person's life because they're all so concerned with sharing each others' trivia that the trivial has become momentous. I finished a novel a couple months ago. I started thinking about how I would say "I finished a novel" on Facebook. Which got me to thinking "why the fuck would I want to share that amongst people's NSA petitions, songs from the '80s and shots of their fucking lunch?" So Facebook doesn't even know I finished a novel. Facebook knows that my daughter makes awesome faces and that the shoot I was on yesterday was scheduled for 30 pages. It doesn't see the good shots of my daughter, and it doesn't know that I spent a delicious amount of time hanging out with Louis Gossett Jr yesterday. 'cuz it's a trivial fucking place. And you're judged on how trivial you are. And if you decide to be NOT trivial, you better fuckin' well be NOT TRIVIAL AT ALL or else you're just a pretender. If anything, our "social graphs" will merely serve to demonstrate the bullshit we spewed at each other 40 years ago because we were too busy being awkward to be real, or too busy being real to be awkward. Either way, it reflects us the same reliable way a funhouse mirror does, serving up the exaggerations as if they were real, and serving up the real as if it were an exaggeration. There's a girl I'm Facebook friends with. We were on a 3-week shoot in 2008. Haven't seen or talked to her since, and she was in another department. From what I can gather, she's developed some form of chronic pain syndrome, is unemployed, and is having a rough fucking time of it. A few days ago she posted these two things, 8 minutes apart: 1) "Today is a very special day I am grateful for. 50 years ago in this day My Mom and Dad tied the knot. Congratulations Folks!! I love you!!!" 2) "I need sendoxen. To bad like every good med, we can't have it here. Might have to hit the silk road." Facebook has turned this person into a punchline for me. And if Facebook didn't exist, she'd just be a pleasant memory. I'd rather have the pleasant memory.