On not wanting to be a pirate...

The unwanted phone calls I posted about a few days ago are bad enough, but they’re just the tip of the proverbial (and now melting) iceberg. Threats to privacy abound, especially on the Internet. When a financial institution warns me about phishing, how do I know this warning isn’t itself a phishing expedition? Meanwhile, Amazon clutters its home page with what I recently browsed. Google now knows what I’m looking for before I finish typing it in. And from what I understand, Facebook is a minefield all its own.

I haven’t joined, although I admit to lurking on Beth’s page just to see what mutual friends have to say. So when Facebook sent me a message that an old friend wanted to friend me, I was taken aback. Said friend had just signed up and, I guess, supplied to Facebook emails of anyone likely to be interested. So let me say, friend, should you read what I’m now writing, it’s not that I’m disinterested in your postings; I just revert to Jerry Seinfeld’s whiny response when Kramer tried to coax him into wearing the puffy shirt by suggesting it would make him look like a pirate: “But I don’t wanna be a pirate!”

Facebook can also say a lot by what’s not there. While browsing its members I found some people I used to work with 35 years ago who back then were all tight with one another; today none of them are “friends.” Friends come and go, and faces fall out of recognition – so much so that I had to look twice at a couple of those former colleagues to be sure it wasn’t somebody else with the same name.

Part of my reluctance to join up has to do with being a bit leery of public exposure, which is why I recently adopted a more anonymous identity for this blog (which used to show my name as ID). I figured that if I were to post something outrageous enough that a stranger stumbled upon it and took offense and wanted to invade my privacy, I was as vulnerable as the old Beatles song put it: “You know my name, look up the number.” So now I’m nothing more than just another opinionated geezer with a cat on his head.

But if by chance you ended up at this blog after googling on me (which perhaps led you to the blog profile despite its no longer bearing my full name – a testament to the tenacity of cyberspace), you might recognize below the cat (which covers dermal expanse where once was hair) someone that you formerly knew. Who despite everything still doesn’t want to be a pirate.