I don’t know why I hadn’t discovered this before. I mean, it’s not like it’s something I haven’t longed to find for months. I’ve often wished that I could press a button and make certain people vanish into the ether, and although my rudeness, inability to show empathy, lack of interest in personal problems, slovenly appearance and raw pulsing apathy is often more than enough to put people off, there are some unwanted specimens who persist in following me about and telling me all about their uninteresting social lives. On Facebook. Now I know that once somebody is my friend on Facebook, they can’t help it that every single minute detail of their uninteresting and pointless life appears on my News Feed. They can’t help it that every morning I’m forced to scroll through the fifty billion pictures of them pretend-lesbiangrinding their fat greasy mates at Oceana. It’s not their fault that I’m obliged to endure every ‘I LOVE YOU!!!XXOXOXO’ comment that they post on their equally hambeastish best friends’ walls. And it’s certainly through no wrongdoing on their behalves that from time to time I get quality insights into their lives emblazoned across my computer screen in the form of photos like this:
I DON’T KNOW EITHER OF THESE PEOPLE. I understand that there’s no problem with any of this. I understand that there are people out there other than me who have fun and rewarding lives and to be honest, good luck to them. Good luck to all of you with your adventures and your parties and your drinking and your active social lives. But the thing is, I just don’t want to know about them. There are some people who are interested in the human zoo, in widening their understanding of the world, seeing things through the eyes or camera lenses of other people. Not me. I’m quite content with pretending that Lauren Furbank (seriously who are you and why were you ever on my friends list?) doesn’t exist and never did. But for the longest time I didn’t know how to stop these people from spreading their shit onto my Facebook account and I had to put up with clicking ‘ignore’ every time Verity or Emily posted another photo album full of blurry off-centre shots of them drinking Bacardi Breezers. But that was just a temporary cure. Sure, I was shooting the Viet Cong guerillas, but I was coming no closer to reaching the communist slanty-eyed supercomputer.
I guess there was the pride issue to face too. When you first join Facebook or MySpace, there’s a temptation to garner as many friends as possible, to go on a kind of Pokemon-style collectathon. Except instead of Snorlax it was Cassie and instead of Alakazam it was Rose and instead of Scyther it was that boring anorexic girl from Guildford I met at that party in 2006 and instead of Ekans it was Tiffin Girls. It was like, the more friends I had, the more of a man I was. It was a caveman pissing competition between me and my friends to become as Facebook popular as we could possibly be and I’m sorry that it ever got that far. And I paid for it. I swapped quality of friends for quantity. And then I paid for it with the reams of crap I had to sift through every day to get to interesting gossip about people actually gave half a shit about. It all got too much. It nearly tore me apart.
But then came the fateful day when I realised that I’d gone too far. It was after seeing four announcements that a series of people who I didn’t know were breaking up with their boyfriends who I didn’t know, then idly clicking on the aforementioned people’s walls to read several sympathetic wall-posts from more people I didn’t know, and then getting so depressed I read a wall-to-wall between two people who I didn’t know discussing going out to Oceana to get wasted. That was rock bottom for me. I was like THIS IS IT I’VE HAD ENOUGH and in a fit of mad rage I scrolled to the bottom of the profile and for the first time saw that strange and beautiful button ‘Remove from friends’. My eyes were opened. Dare I do it, I asked myself. Dare I no longer be privvy to Jessica’s most intimate and heartfelt thoughts and personality? Dare I cut myself off entirely from the source of gossip about Fit Dave and her mum who is like totally a knob? After a minute’s hesitation I bit the bullet and deleted her.
:o
And do you know what? It felt GREAT. Cathartic. Exhilarating. There was a mad rush of adrenaline that flooded my system and turned me, just for a second, into a God. I was almighty. I was banishing people from my life with a click of a button. I was taking matter and reducing it to nought. I had the power to say to somebody ‘I have no interest in ever hearing from or speaking to you ever again, Begone from my sight and from my life’. For those of you who haven’t experienced it, it is a Rush. Not only does it cleanse your Friends List – it cleanses your life. It’s like burning a diary, or hurling a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow into a furnace or mincing a corpse or shovelling a puppy into a furnace. I AM LEGEND you scream as you the sensations grip you and you go mad with power, dancing through the galleries of your social life, ripping a painting down here, torching a small book of annotated drawings there, throwing ancient statues to the floor and kicking over exquisitely carved models of ex-girlfriends and old acquaintances into shards of easily-discarded memory. Then you pull yourself away from the Friend List and fall back, panting, exhausted, feeling both cleansed and exhausted. Post Coital.
Anyway, just to keep you all informed, I’m about to go through my list again (you understand, this isn’t the sort of thing that can be achieved in one deleting session, there are a LOT of worthless people on my list) and I’m going to be deleting the following subspecies of people. Don’t say you weren’t warned:
Anybody who I don’t know. And when I say ‘don’t know’ I mean ‘I look at your name and as much as I wrack my brains I can’t remember ever meeting, or speaking to, or hearing about you, and I can’t picture your face, and then I look at your profile picture and I don’t know who you are, and you aren’t even hot enough to keep around as eye candy’.
Anybody who has stupid ‘themes’ to their statuses. Like writing them with square brackets or adding an ‘x’ at the end of them every time. Yeah very clever, fuck off.
Anybody called Georgie (or any orthological variation thereof). I’m sorry but I’ve never met anybody called Georgie who was worth knowing and it’s frankly put me off the whole name.
The above also goes for anybody named Callum.
Anybody who uses their profiles to keep me updated in intricate detail about their cyclical social lives, eg: ‘Susan can’t WAIT for tonight!’ ‘Susan is getting ready!’ ‘Susan has the best friends ever last night was AMAZING!!’ ‘Susan is bored’ ‘Susan can’t wait for tomorrow night’ ‘Susan can’t wait for tonight’.
Anybody who in any way references Soulja Boy in their status.
The majority of people who answer the 'Political Views' section of the profile seriously as though it'll make some sort of point.
Anybody with an ill dog who keeps me updated on how ill the dog is, whether or not the ill dog is going to make through the night, the relative illness of the dog compared to how ill the ill dog was yesterday, and predictions as to how ill the ill dog is going to be in the upcoming days or weeks.
On the same lines as the above: Horse Updates. No. Just no.
Anybody who joins political/environmental Facebook groups, esp. those who seem to believe that having a group list full of 'Save Darfur' or 'Come on guys stop Global Warming' will make a mosquito's precum's worth of difference.
Friends of friends who I have met her a few times, and I have nothing against, but frankly they’ve had ample opportunity to prove to me that they have the capacity to write a status message that isn’t entirely inane (‘Catherine actually has a side to cheer for in the boat race now..bizzare’ … ‘Catherine is wondering what it is with people called ben and the wednesday adams joke..’ … ‘Catherine is truly surprised how much she enjoyed the children of bodom concert’ … ‘Catherine is singing 'rabies mouse', to the tune of spiderpig, with a 10 year old. sweet. (does he foam at the mouth? yes he does, he's RABIES MOUSE’… etc). Sorry love, you didn’t make the grade. Come back next year.
Anybody with an emo Facebook status. Wow, you quoted either a song lyric, or a poorly written bit of poetry about how the world is a dark splintering hole that fractures your blood oh shit I deleted you by accident.
Anybody who uses their status message to advertise a shit club night – this is usually accompanied by using an @ sign to replace the word ‘at’. IT DOESN’T LOOK COOL, YOU PRESS THE SAME NUMBER OF BUTTONS AND FRANKLY THE @ SIGN IS MORE EFFORT TO TYPE.
Anybody who keeps me constantly updated on their awesome Gap Year. Fuck off, I hope you catch AIDS and tigers eat your shoes and monkeys wee on your face.
People who continually upload photo albums that are literally 40 photographs of the same eight faces in rotation at the pub, club, park, etc. Hey wow another photo of you Hannah and Dave? Sick, I'll add it to the collection.
People who constantly upload photo albums that are just them and their bezzie mates messing about on Photo Booth. Wait, you say there’s a fun warp feature that makes you look like you have two faces? That’s pretty cool I guess, but what I’m really craving is 55 pictures of two people exploiting every single possibility of two-facedness while pulling silly faces. Can you sort that out for me? You CAN? BRILIANT you’re deleted.
Jews. Only kidding, I didn't have any Jews as friends in the first place. Only kidding, I love all races and creeds equally.
People who have the same moronic posed smile in every single photograph. Ditto for anybody whose profile picture is themselves facing to the left and pouting. Ditto for anybody whose profile picture is a clearly posed, carefully lit and made-up glamour picture of themselves.
Offensively Ugly Girls who are just a little bit too fat but haven’t quite caught on to how fat they are and so still think they aren’t too fat to wear flesh coloured boob tubes and stick their sweaty armpits all over my facebook pictures.
Anybody else who invites me to that fucking Facebook Forest group.
Anybody with more than seventeen applications on their profile (esp. two or three forms of 'Superpoke'). This isn’t MySpace you fucktard. In addition, anybody with that application that loads a picture of every single one of their ugly beatnik friends in one long block that takes the page twenty minutes to load but also ironically means that it’s impossible to delete them as friends because the ‘Remove from Friends’ button keeps moving down as the individual lines of photographs load ONE BY ONE. Cunts. AND THEN THEY INVITE ME TO JOIN THESE APPLICATIONS. I CLEARLY DON'T WANT TO HAVE A VIRTUAL FISHTANK. AND IF I WANTED TO BE SUPERPOKED BY HANNAH 'THROWING A COW' AT ME THEN I'D LOOK UP THE APPLICATION MYSELF. DON'T KNOW YOU. LEAVE ME ALONE. FUCK OFF. FUCK OFF. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE.
Negative people who bring the whole communal spirit of the social network down.
Righto I think that should cover it for the moment. By the way this list is not exhaustive and there’s a good chance I might delete you just because you stupid added-time-multi-chin face pisses me off. Also I only delete a few people at time to stop myself from becoming drunk on power so there’s a good chance that even if I haven’t deleted you, you fit into one of the above categories. Consider yourselves incredibly lucky. You’ve managed to escape the sword of Damocles this time. You’ve been spared the executioner’s axe. Now is your second chance.
Clean your acts up or next time I’m coming for you.
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OMG GUYS WE HAVE A LATE ENTRY INTO THE LIST OF PEOPLE WHO I WANT NOTHING TO DO WITH ON FACEBOOK: THIS GUY
Who the fuck is "Gavin" and why did he just poke me on Facebook? He isn’t even one of my friends. He isn’t even friends with any of my friends. Why is he poking me. Plus he lists his Religious Views as ‘Girls Aloud’. What a knob, get away from me.
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