More and more people I know are chafing under the inescapable digital surveillance of Facebook. They've proven themselves untrustworthy corporate stewards of our privacy and data, repeatedly over the last handful of years. I have soured a little on the sameness of the content of that site (I particularly noticed this during the summer of 15, while we were in transition between the Original Smith Park and Smith Park West), but as of yet I have not found the strength of will to completely walk away from it. I don't have the addiction to it I once had, the one I appear to have transferred part and parcel to Twitter now, but I feel totally helpless to let go of the connections I made and maintained because of Facebook. I doubt I'll let it go and close my account. I'm just less happy when I'm on the site.
The main reason I still open it every single day is to post the link to this blog. Even if Facebook shut down tomorrow, I'd still be writing every day, whether or not the few hundred people I am linked to on FB can see that I tried to come up with a clickbait-type teaser to put over the URL (that's the part I hate). I don't know what else to do to put these journal entries in front of eyeballs. I'd write even if I were shouting into a void, because the writing is for me. I'd be lying if I said I didn't like how it feels like a conversation with people who do read it. But people are inherently attracted to easy things, and if finding this blog were more difficult than clicking a link on Facebook, would anyone continue to track it down? Several years ago, I was struggling with the links not working, so I started the Twitter account, thinking it would be a better place to post links. I stopped that soon after, and now Twitter is where I let my political freak flag fly. (Unless you're interested in reading the lefty rants I retweet or looking at short cat videos, best not follow me there.) Every so often I ponder getting my own domain, without the Blogspot platform, and I quickly remember that I'm easily overwhelmed by things like that now (yay, aging and illnesses that affect my mental acuity). I don't know whether that would solve the problem of putting the links in easy reach of my audience.
My foster son-in-law laughed at one of the blog posts I showed him last week, because I had done what I often do, which is to throw in a picture of one of the cats at the end, apropos of nothing. Well, the pictures this time actually are metaphorically related to this mental knot I've tied myself into. It's all about the proper lure. See if you can catch my drift.
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