The Picture Comes with the Frame

Today is my birthday. That I have reached two and sixty, zwei und sechzig, kommt mir sehr komisch vor, strikes me as funny. Considering I am usually the punchline it's odd to have the last laugh, at least once a year. 

There's a small chance of cake and pony rides, I am a huge fan of BOTH, because originally the plan today was helping neighbors across town clean up a recreation area alongside an historic and breathtakingly beautiful Shetucket River dam. I am very much a believer that if you can't find someone who's making a difference in our world, then maybe you have to be one. Bad weather today has postponed our collective good deed but I'll let you know how that all works out.  

I should offer Natal acknowledgements because they are deserved as opposed to the ones I'll be getting all day long for really not doing anything but (unwittingly and unknowingly) allowing biology and gravity to have their say. My mom will call today because she always calls and we both know I should be calling her as she did all the work and yet she'll congratulate me on my birthday and I always but not quite want to congratulate her for starting with me. 

It was a very different world 62 years ago and she and her husband, my Dad, Bill Sr., set off on a New Frontier about a decade before JFK named it and told us all where we were going, and was murdered for his trouble. 

I suppose to my younger brothers and sisters, I am the practice child. Every family has one. That you got to stay up after seven PM on a school night was my doing, because I didn't. On the other hand, all of my clothes were mine and never somebody else's sometimes before, sometimes after and more often than not, both. Thank you not having tried to choke me out every moment of every day since we each became adults because you certainly had, and often still have, perfect justification for so doing.

That all said, since the last time I had an original idea it died of loneliness, I've dusted off some notes I offered a year ago because I liked the way they read then, and even more so, now. I might have been smarter at the time, especially if you remove the 'smarter' part.  

This is a new kind of birthday complete with my browser hovering over the Google Chrome logo and because I'm on Google plus (Michelle, our very smart daughter's, theory) there was a caption wishing "Happy Birthday William!" (I may have added the exclamation point; Google is very much a declamatory operating system). 

More interesting and amazing, as a man who can count his friends on fewer than five fingers of one hand (and you've guessed which finger I am), I received the most cheerful of greetings and salutations in Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Farsi (I believe), German and English as well as Jersey (ha-ha! THUNK! Sound of me laughing my head off).

I call all Social Media Facebook, FB, and I've mentioned the dichotomy of flesh and blood friends (F&BF) and Facebook Friends (FBF). With my mad math skills I calculated of the birthday greetings I received, 99.79% were from people I have never met, not shall I ever (in all likelihood). We aren't familiar strangers-neither they nor I would know one another if we tripped over ourselves.

Are the contrivances and edifices of Social Media a form of cloaking of those of us who are members of the lonely crowd or are we creating variations of Erich Fromm's egoism a deux? Are we now more, or less, alone than we were a decade, a generation, a lifetime ago and for what end and to what purpose have we allowed these invisible airwaves to weave a tableaux, a Story of Us, we can tell to ourselves to keep the dark of night at bay?
-bill kenny