Self Deluded Cranium Dump

Ah yes. This blog entry is a bit late, but a lot has happened over the past fortnight - but, as promised, I'm continuing the thread of Facebook as no better than a Satan in the machine and picking up on RULE 5 from Part I of this article. For those of you who have the attention span of the Cheeky Girls on crack, Rule 5 was the one about getting back in touch with school friends again. Let's revisit one of them, namely my "school prom queen" who is currently in London, having to contend with her police officer's salary, surrounded by unaffordable property and embracing Buddhism as a way of dealing with the bodies (dead or alive) surrounding her. For the purposes of this article, we'll call her Buddhist Cop. In addition, there's my other dear school friend who lives in London and when I heard his voice over the phone a few months ago, he was panicking over a gently smouldering server computer. It wasn't so much the fact that he was telling me about a fucked computer that was slightly bizarre - it was the gap of 15 years between last hearing his voice, during a time when the internet barely existed to suddenly hearing his contemporary voice again, talking about... MODERN applicances!! Things that are.... TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY! For the purposes of this article again, I'll refer to him as Asp Man (for those bored enough to know why I'm calling him that, he codes some stuff in ASP for the business that he runs himself - betchya that fascinated all you geeks out there).

With Buddhist Cop and Asp Man, I'm supposed to be organising a school reunion because of Facebook. Just by me writing that sentence, I've already caused some outright derisive laughter from some people. But you'd be right - out of three of us supposedly doing it, I was probably the most cynical; the other two probably had a better time at school than I did anyway. But curiously, I appear to have become the lone torch-holder for this re-union - primarily because I've changed perspectives on it and am essentially doing a Hunter S Thompson.

Gonzo bloggism, instead of gonzo journalism, I suppose you could call it. And, fuck me, am I now enjoying it. Rather like Edward Norton's character in "Fight Club" feeling disconnected from life events around him and then suddenly feeling the pulse of life by getting beaten up on a nightly basis, I'm discovering bits of myself that I'd forgotten about; I guess this is a journey of self-discovery I've accidentally tripped upon. Except, thankfully, I don't have my alternative psyche played by Brad Pitt pummelling crap out of me.

Anyway, my Hunter S Thompson journey and the gonzo motto of living the experience, rather than being a dispassionate observer, is never more apt than turning off the evil of Facebook and just going out and meeting the REAL people behind those profiles. And the most viscerally satisfying out of meeting any of those Facebook friends are precisely those friends from school, mired in the emotional flashbulb of screaming hormones and formative experiences. Big, gut-wrenching, filmic moments that re-visit you occasionally in the deepest bowels of sleep, during times of contemporary anxiety - normally caused by those exact same peer pressure moments that were the lingua franca of teenage interaction at High School. God, my old English teacher was right - I've just looked at that last paragraph and I'm STILL fecking mixing more metaphors than a pissed Alan Whicker. But bear with me, as after yet another meeting with two people from my school past on Saturday night, I'm starting to understand why Facebook can be rather mis-used. So far, Facebook communication has fallen down because of the way most internet communication breaks down - zero body language, amplified by the fact that people are ALWAYS going to think that the old school friend from behind the profile is frozen in time like a Grange Hill DVD, rather than the rich collection of life experiences that they are now. It's been the basis of terrible, terrible misunderstandings behind some of the messages flying between some of the people and I've ended up becoming a bizarre mediator, attempting to bridge a time-gap older than 15 years. Misunderstandings that possibly would've occurred anyway, but magnified to quite a terrifying degree by Facebook, and all based on a false sense of familiarity. I'll happily rip off another old school friend who I met about a month ago; he looked at me over his glasses and said, "a gap of 16 years suddenly vanishes with one click of a mouse button".

Thankfully, my worst mistake was sending someone a Runrig track, because I remembered she loved the band as a teenager. What a stupid thing to do though? How dare I just assume someone hasn't changed - an awful way of breeding a fake familiarity through broadband wires. And she likes Green Day now anyway.

To digress very briefly, perhaps this muddy decision was made through a fog of nostalgia, not helped by the fact that our surrounding media seems to be going through a psychedelic mind-fuck of slamming the past into the future, in the hope of catching this zeitgeist of, um, reliving the past. That's GOT TO be a paradox, right? The very meaning of zeitgeist is capturing the spirit of a current time! Okay, I'll give you a few examples and this'll maybe explain what spurned me on, possibly sub-consciously. As anybody who knows me very well, I love "Doctor Who". I also utterly adore "Fawlty Towers".

It didn't help matters for my current state of mind when a gap in my brain of over 20 years got bridged shockingly in "Children In Need" and I watched in slack-jawed amazement as Peter Davison appeared in front of David Tennant and started conversing with him, BOTH playing the eponymous Doctor. I glanced briefly at my mobile phone, with my blood pumping full of cheap lager, and thought I was having some sort of weird out-of-body experience. There were the phone numbers of Buddhist Cop and Asp Man, snugly nestling alongside friends from... well, the PRESENT! THE CURRENT TIME PERIOD! Some two hours later, my cerebellum came dangerously close to leaking out of my ears, as I witnessed Prunella Scales playing Sybil Fawlty, running a contemporary Hotel Babylon, for fuck's sake! To further compound this mind fuck, Kylie Minogue decides to do a comedy sketch show the following week, where Jason Donovan meets her. But this isn't a repeat of the Neighbours wedding, it's them NOW! In a freaking comedy sketch! Playing postmodern versions of themselves at that, with Jason failing to recognise his ex-girlfriend. Funny, yeah. But a real head-fuck, let me tell you. Particularly while boozing.

I mean imagine what happened if my past self met my current self. He'd probably gob on me, knowing him... um, I mean, knowing ME??! Arrrrghhhh, give me some more medication, nurse!

But enough of the digression, let me tell you this - there are three things that have remained consistent during a fourth genuine meeting with school friends that I haven't seen in over a decade after a Facebook natter.

1) Expect the unexpected
2) Expect to be moved to sadness and genuine tears
3) Expect to laugh till you can't breathe

I enjoyed the company of my codenamed colleagues (and friends from school), Baileys Belle and Lab Dancer, on Saturday night and went through the above three movements exactly. No, I'm not going to fully explain their nicknames either (although Baileys Belle was the movie quiz queen from Part I of this article). Yes, Baileys Belle did have the occasional Baileys Irish Cream between glasses of white wine, but the full explanation would require you to be a fan of "The Mighty Boosh" and, even at that, would still not make a huge amount of sense in whatever context I spinned it in. Meanwhile, Lab Dancer runs a successful lab cleaning company - and I'm not going to explain the dancing bit either. Just take it as read that they're appropriate nicknames. Anyway, back to the three movements; the arpeggio (expect the unexpected), the adagio (sadness and genuine tears) and the allegro (laugh till you can't breathe). This is exactly what happened, bang on schedule. Specifically with reference to Baileys Belle, we ended up being stunned by unexpected revelations, such as certain hidden relationships and dating that we were unaware of. We ended up moving each other to tears when talking about a mutual school friend of ours in London having a VERY tough time. Plus, we ended up laughing like a couple of twats, remembering some of the things that teachers tried to do, to appear cool. Dimly-held memories suddenly became the flashbulb moments again and I was almost moved to tears again, when Baileys Belle remarked on me being a "catalyst" and having "blossomed" (and eliciting a VERY rare schoolboy blush). She then dragged me to the Brazen Heid pub, which Lab Dancer thought was the funniest and unlikeliest combination ever; the High School 'Prom Queen' (she'll kill me for that term) and the High School geek in a rowdy Celtic supporters' pub. In fact, he was so utterly baffled at the collision of two time-periods in such a strange juxtaposition that he repeatedly told us all that this was the 'weirdest night' of his life, while he eyeballed us both as if we were Bill Gates and Cate Blanchette walking on the red carpet together. Mercifully, that was an old perception quickly and dutifully disregarded to the dustbin of history. We all tended to focus on the superficial at school, the cliques that people formed, and so on. Surprisingly, some years after the event, turns out that both Baileys Belle and Lab Dancer liked people I wouldn't normally countenance and strongly disliked some others that I assumed they got on well with.

"Am I missing something in life?" is what I was asked near the beginning of the mini-reunion night by Baileys Belle. Thankfully, for the first time in a while, I was able to be confidently say "No" to that question. In fact, it's precisely because I'm feeling fairly happy with myself that I CAN go and seek all these people out on Facebook from my school years and have mad insane evenings with them. But that's not Facebook. That's me. Facebook is still evil. If nothing else, me and my two new friends (and they are NEW friends - I'm not mistaking them for the past ghosts that we all were) proved that by closing the Internet Explorer window and having mad visceral fun, a proper connection is made - not one based on Facebook Pirates Vs Ninjas.

Meanwhile, Buddhist Cop and Asp Man are missing out - they really are, 'cos they're in London being busy all the time and only able to really communicate in snatched minutes at their laptops. Trying to prove a connection by sitting something like the Picture Personality quiz ("See? See? Aside from us being in a club/at school together/in rehab, I STILL have a connection to you - honest"). 'Cos that's what Facebook is - as speed dating is the natural end-product for starting a relationship in the 21st century, Facebook is the 21st Century busybody's speed-"friending".

  But speed-"friending" by sending Mortimer the travelling bear onto someone's Superwall ain't gonna cut it, particularly if you HAVE been to school with that someone and haven't seen them in over a decade! A non-existent fricking teddy will only help in the short-term, for Presley's sake.

So, back to the school reunion. I am now one of the happiest people to be organising it, after being so cynical. You get to see a perfect example of psychological longitudinal studies standing in front of you and you're allowed to do that because of that lonesome link of you once sitting together, being bored, whilst being taught about General Haig. And, just like a psychologist, the experience is even more enjoyable if you arrive with no preconceptions, no judgements and always ready to be surprised. Life is so much more exciting like that, when you don't bring your cultural baggage with you. It's also caused me to look at my current contemporary friends (that I DIDN'T go to school or Uni with) in a new light and marvelling at the life experiences that made them the wonderful, rounded, fleshed-out, fantastic funny characters they are. As the humanist and writer Wordsworth observed: "The child is the father of man." Christ almighty, it's even got me picking up my guitar again and writing songs - like the reborn teenager that I'm becoming again, but with the benefit of life wisdom. Surely, THAT is a big reward in itself.

And Buddhist Cop and Asp Man are still missing out. While I'm happily getting back on the phone and enjoying physical contact with the people behind the Facebook avatars, Asp man is distraught at smoking servers, and Buddhist Cop is arresting criminals while chanting a Mahayana sutra.

Probably.

Chris Nicholson is fully aware that this latest blog entry features none of the stereotypical tales of woe, embarrassment and slapstick that normally encounter scenes in his life, together with pithy, incisive and deadpan comments. He is fully aware that this is what the public expect of his blog. Chris Nicholson promises normal service will resume for the next blog entry.