so there’s this guy with whom i’ve been friends since before my injury, that is among the people who have been, until recently my friends on farcebook. i know this guy has “political opinions” that i passionately do not share, that he’s into martial arts and that he used to be a LEO of some sort or another, but when i met him, which was in 2001 (according to my handy-dandy chart of when things happened), he was the press operator at one of the print shops at which i worked… and i’ve maintained friendly contact with him ever since my injury… basically, when carl fired me, he told me that, whenever i needed something printed in one colour, i could get it from him, and, in exchange, he picked my brain about macintosh computers up until what i knew was no longer current. i haven’t needed anything printed in one colour for a few years, and don’t anticipate ever needing anything printed in one colour, basically, ever again, so when i discovered that he had a farcebook presence, i friended him immediately… and, once he realised who i was, he responded “Frank Zappa had better add me to his friends list… Or I might be upset!”

which is why i wondered a little bit when my news feed started being populated with a lot of, to be blunt, bigoted, ignorant, right-wing propaganda which was posted or shared by this guy. i managed to marginally stem the tide for a while, but i noticed, especially when the supreme court decision regarding marriage equality was imminent, the ignorant and bigoted things he was posting reached a fever pitch.

it was at this point that i made some comment about how, if it was supported by a majority of americans, that keeping gay marriages illegal would hurt everyone, regardless of what “god” thought about it, and that i was shocked that he would post such hateful things.

to which he responded that he didn’t know where i was getting my information, but that gay marriage was something that, actually, only a very few people wanted, and that they had somehow managed to force their unwanted opinions upon a mostly disapproving populace… and then he un-friended me.

it doesn’t bother me that a rabid right-wing fanatic no longer wants to be my friend, what bothers me is that i thought he was my friend for as long as i did…

and what bothers me even more is that i am bothered by the fact that i am no longer “friends” with this guy. we were able to overlook the glaring, obvious differences we had, have pleasant conversations about things in which we were both interested, and we maintained that state for years, until farcebook inserted its finger in the pie. there’s a remote possibility that, at some point in the future, he might have been persuaded to consider a different opion, if i had maintained our pre-farcebook acquaintance, but, because of farcebook, that is no longer an option.

and to make matters worse, they changed wordpress so that my custom, hand-made emoticons no longer work, so i can’t say 8P and have the correct, disgusted emoticon show any longer. 8P