Monthly Archives: July 2012

Teaching Facebook a Lesson

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Our bookstore attracts free spirits, intellectuals, and weirdos–sometimes all in one person. So of course some bookstore friends and I have enjoyed inventing a new game; it’s what creative, bibliophilic, dangerously over-educated and slightly maladjusted people do.

It started after the latest hoopla about “the big F is ruining our privacy and we are being sold as products to marketers via those little pop-up ads” escalated into “Homeland Security is watching you.”

Yeah. The government’s clear-headed efficiency dealing with every project undertaken to date has me quaking in terror about the laser beam of intellectual resources targeted at ferreting out anarchists like me.

Actually, I’m not an anarchist; I voted Democrat in the last election (in case you were confused on that point). But since I live in the Bible Belt’s buckle, that makes me look like an anarchist to some of the neighbors. I don’t mind. They usually send over fresh-baked muffins or rolls with their religious flyers. And when I leave flyers for the Democratic party on their front porch, I anchor them with a jar of homemade chutney.

It’s easy for the five thousand or so of us living here in Big Stone to remember that politics is politics, family is family, and ain’t nobody out there beyond the mountains who loves us as much as we love each other. The same cannot be said of The Facebook Community. I suppose when you get a billion or so people together, there are bound to be disagreements that become hard to settle. But the idea that someone, somewhere is keeping an eye on who disagrees with whom, about what, and why, is not nearly so plausible as that a whole bunch of someones (or, more to the point, somethings) are keeping tabs on what we talk about and what we “like” so they can sell us more of the same.

So some friends and I have started the game of “therapy posting.” Once a week, we get on our timelines and write statuses (stati?) like “package tour to Uzbekistan, small animal husbandry, 1900s German cookie molds, cute memes of fuzzy kittens, sourcing fertilizer, the collected works of Karl Marx and Charles Schultz, and yoga for parrots.”

Go on, try it; it’s fun! And it confuses the heck out of those little pop-up ads. Mine went from “promote your new book in ten easy steps” and “Petsmart” to “10 household supplies you should hoard” and “Lowe’s.” (I guess the Apocalypse Soon crowd would need a lot of building supplies….)

My friend Rachel posted a mess of stream-of-consciousness random ideas, and her pop-ups went from “a message from the First Lady” to “buy Sarah Palin’s autobiography.” She said she wouldn’t play any more after that.

So maybe search engines and cookies are easier to confuse than real people. Here in Wise County we live side by side, screaming obscenities at each other in the political arena, then sitting down to casseroles. ‘Twas ever thus in small towns, where the mayor could be your mortal sworn enemy, your church organist, and in all likelihood married to someone with whom you play on a ball team. And you’re all gonna meet at the bookstore anyway.

Facebook could learn a lot from us, if they were REALLY listening.

“Why is there a bullet hole in my car?”

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Even in a small town, stuff happens.

Jack and I rejoice in many good friends in Big Stone Gap, people who would feed us if we were hungry, mow the grass if we were incapacitated, take a bullet for us….

When our reliable Honda Hybrid developed a summer cold, gal pal Elizabeth lent me her green Subaru. She was working 12-hour shifts as the ER doc and, in her own words, “If I did want to go anywhere I couldn’t anyway.”

The evening before I needed it for an early morning meeting, E’s husband Mark parked the loaner at the end of our bookstore’s wheelchair ramp with the keys inside. (Ours is a small, safe town.)

About 11 p.m., as Jack read by bedside lamplight and I lay comatose, the book I’d been reading covering my face, a loud crack resounded–followed by every dog in the neighborhood going berserk.

As I stirred to awareness, Jack checked the bedside clock. “Drama’s running late tonight,” he said, and we thought no more of it. Our shop is across the street from the outdoor theatre that annually produces the Trail of the Lonesome Pine, a folk musical based on the novel of John Fox, Jr. –Big Stone’s most famous son. Every night about 10:30 gunfire signals the next-to-last scene.

The next day I blithely trotted down the ramp and hopped into the Subaru, whizzing off to my important college meetings, then back to the Food City parking lot a few blocks from our shop, again leaving the keys inside the vehicle without a moment’s worry.

That afternoon, the phone rang, and Elizabeth’s voice said without preamble, “Why is there a bullet hole in my car?”

It turns out the shot we’d heard had been an actual altercation, taking place at the house next door. A woman, two men, some alcohol, a loaded firearm . . . stuff happens. Police had been called to the scene, but hadn’t found the suspect (who’d fled) and hadn’t cordoned the area because, well, hey, it’s  a small town. Who was gonna be out there before they returned and studied the scene in daylight?

Me, with the 7 a.m. breakfast meeting. I’d driven off in their evidence, while an officer was literally in his car on the other side of the gym, grabbing some crime scene tape to block off the Subaru. (Imagine how HE must have felt…)

The cops spent the morning trying to find Elizabeth–whose car they recognized, since this is a small town and she’s the ER doc and police see a lot of the ER–and figure out who had the car, when, and where. E, having worked the night before, was dead to the world with her cell phone off at home waaaaay out in the valley. And the police were, quite frankly, kinda scared to ask her because the usual driver of that car would be Elizabeth’s teen-aged son.

A comedy of errors, it was. E found the hole before the police found her, when Mark returned from his day’s ramblings and took her into town to fetch the Subaru. Meanwhile, the smart bookshop owner with a writer’s keen observational powers drove to Wise (about twenty minutes away) and back in a car with a bullet in the door. As for the police officer with the crime scene tape … well, no one’s seen him around lately.

All’s well as ends well. They caught the misbehaving lads, insurance fixed the bullet hole, and the only gunshots ringing through the nights now are once again in the penultimate scene of the outdoor drama.

But Elizabeth won’t let me ride in her new car, a sweet little powder blue Mini-Cooper. I have pointed out to her that lightning never strikes twice in the same place, but she just smiles and says, “Let’s not tempt fate.”