So did you hear? I joined Facebook. I joined Facebook, motherfuckers! Are you happy now, you little assholes? ARE YOU?! I kid, of course, but seriously it did feel sometimes in the last year like everyone and their mother has been asking for my Facebook info, with me having to sadly shake my clueless middle-aged head and say, "I'm sorry...I can't be anyone's friend." Ah, but now I can be everyone's friend! Hooray, fucking Facebook! And I of course immediately got why it's so addictive as well, the absolute first moment I got there and got my profile up and running, why it's so rapidly cannibalizing MySpace's former juggernaut crowd; because of that fucking crack-like "wall" of info over there at everyone's profiles, the way it streams in real time all the tiny little Twitter-like updates everyone on your friend list is posting at their own profiles, all their latest photos, all their latest links, all their latest smartass responses to smartass comments from yet other mutual friends, regarding goofy photos posted by yet other mutual friends. What it essentially becomes is a "cloud" of information, and by that I mean the classic Web 2.0 way that it's always meant when the term "cloud" is mentioned in the tech world; just this constant stream of info that's both of an insanely high volume and insanely customized just for you and you alone, none of it very important on its own which is why it's not a crime to miss checking it out for a day or two or three occasionally.

And to tell the truth, the straw that finally broke my back was my brother, who I finally got a chance to gab with in detail over the holidays on the phone; see, he and his wife have been in the middle of plans to move from San Diego to Dallas, so have been short on free time, which I don't mind so much although I do miss gabbing with him. Anyway, he was telling me over Christmas how he had become this addict over at Facebook recently, and had rediscovered just dozens of our old mutual college friends from the 1980s, way back 20 years ago from our shared days at the University of Missouri at Columbia (or "Mizzou," as I'll be referring to it for the remainder of today). He had recently posted a contemporary photo of me over there, and it had apparently sparked this giant conversation about me among all these people, which made them force him to promise to give me the hard sell over the holidays regarding joining myself; and this just happened to be at a time when I feel like Facebook is just months or maybe weeks away from its "tipping point" (it does have 75 million daily updaters now, after all, and 150 million members altogether), so thought this would be as good an excuse as any to finally join.

So I did, a few weeks ago now, and sure enough, there were dozens of old college friends just waiting there for me, and between them and the '90s Chicago poetry crowd and now my 2000s CCLaP audience, I had something like 200 friends within the first 24 hours of signing up. And hey, guess what it turns out that old college friends like doing? That's right, they like posting embarrassing old photos of you from college; in fact, they love doing such a thing, and in fact becomes this giant cloud of shame over there once all the gleefully mean-spirited comments are added by the rest of the peanut gallery following along at their own walls-o-info. See, that's the thing that makes Facebook so brilliant, is that the overlords there have built in these incredibly easy and powerful ways to make sure certain info gets disseminated out to a certain crowd; it's just a click of a mouse, for example, to "tag" one of your friends if they appear in a photo you're posting, which means the photo suddenly shows up in your permanent archives and their permanent archives and your wall that moment and their wall that moment, and the walls of all the people on your friend list and all the people on their friend list. Seriously, it's just this ingenious way to spread highly appropriate information to a vast number of highly appropriate people in this insanely quick way; under such a system, such a photo might easily appear on the profile walls of 500 people within just seconds of being posted, although just the exact and highly appropriate 500 people at Facebook who really do know the person featured in the photo, and who legitimately would get a kick out of seeing that photo. Compare that, then, to the endless billboard "Thanks for the friendship add!" crap over at MySpace, and you can suddenly see why Facebook is becoming the general-audience network of choice these days.

Wow...college. Wow. What a...what a thing I haven't thought about in detail for a long, long time. What a highly complex series of emotions and memories I have about it all, so many good and bad experiences I carry with me. I was there for eight years, for those who don't know, 1986 to 1994, a time period which seemed boring and pedestrian at the time but in hindsight now seems like surprisingly exotic years; the years punk matured, that goth and industrial music came into its own, when now-obscure bands like Fishbone and bauhaus and XTC and Skinny Puppy were an everyday and highly important part of our lives, as well as taking LSD every weekend, having sex with essentially every person you knew, and road-trips every other Friday to St. Louis or Kansas City for yet another all-night rave or White Castle run or an evening at the dog track or some crazy fucking thing or another. Ugh! I think back on those years now and sometimes just can't stop shaking my head in comical disgust, just this pure comical disgust over what a bunch of little shits we all were back then; malt-liquor-guzzling, poetry-writing, thrift-store-shopping, acid-dropping little freaks, little freaks, with a typical Tuesday night back then devoted to smoking joints in dorm rooms with a towel pressed in the door-crack, with some poetry major who most definitely wasn't your girlfriend while a hundred candles glowed and Dead Can Dance played softly in the background, until you got so high and so horny that you'd both wriggle off your pants around two a.m. and furtively rut in her beanbag chair, softly squealing and trying not to wake her roommate sleeping literally about ten feet away. Ah, college!

It's a shock, it is, to be on Facebook and suddenly see all these old photos I haven't seen in decades, photos of me in outfits I had luckily forgotten I'd ever owned, haircuts I'd luckily forgotten I'd ever had. Jesus Christ, I look so fucking young. And that's because I am; I think 20 or 21 years old in the photo above, for example, which I'm pretty sure was shot in 1989 or 1990, by one of these new Facebook reacquaintances from college named Dove, which so far is my favorite of the 30 or 40 photos of me now posted over there by old college friends. (I'm the one in the hat, giving you the finger. Of course.) Because this photo sums up to me how I like to remember my college years, no matter how checkered and complex my college years actually did turn out to be; nostalgically speaking, I like to remember it as a time of used clothes and warm afternoons on the pedestrian mall, high and listening to post-punk music and thinking about the latest crazy art thing we all had cooking up for just another few weeks from then. Because, see, that's the other thing to know about my old college years, for people who don't; that they were in many ways a trial-run for the successes I've ended up having in Chicago since then, and with me becoming quite the well-known little small-pond cult figure in my collegetown by the time it was all over, precisely for pulling off a whole series of high-profile artistic stunts that no one thought could be pulled off.

That's been another funny and weird thing about joining Facebook, of course, being reminded of all those old artistic projects for the first time in years, sometimes decades: the weirdo audience-participation play I did in the late '80s, for example, that accidentally became this giant city-wide cult phenomenon thing by the end of it all, then the student art gallery I started up in the wake of that, and the years at the student radio station, and the years doing comics at the student newspaper, and the comedy-improvisation team I was a founding member of. And of course who can forget the dilapidated houses that served as such strong social headquarters for all of us back then? That's probably the oddest and funniest thing of all about hooking up again with all these old college friends online, the growing group reminisces about the various shit-holes that these constantly-shifting groups of slackers and art-majors were always living in back in those years, "210" and "The Doghouse" and "Kunstwiescheisse" and "The Swing House," in whose crumbling back bedrooms just so much goddamned coke was snorted, and so much goddamned Style Council listened to, and so many Mod girls fucked, and so many poems written, and so many promises made and oaths broken. Sigh.

Yeah, as you can see, it's easy to develop a Vaseline-smeared purple-prose nostalgia for it all decades later, no matter how checkered those years actually were; and that's yet another thing about hooking up again with all these old college friends, is that reminds me of just how checkered those years actually were. It's strange, I have to admit, suddenly getting daily updates again from a whole series of women I once had sex with, who I had these sometimes very odd and awkward relationships with and then later odd and awkward breakups; it also reminds me of all the various little petty fights I had with various people within this group back then, the feelings that were sometimes hurt during drunken undergraduate dramas such as ours. It reminds me sometimes that I ultimately stayed in my collegetown for just too long; and that I was pretty miserable the last couple of years there too, and clearly realize in hindsight now that I should've packed up and moved to Chicago long before I actually did. And that's all part of my past, part of the things I can't change, and is simply a part of what comes with getting re-acquainted again with all the people you used to hang around with in those years, just as is the suddenly-recovered shameful memories of drunken fistfights at official campus art-gallery events, throwing phones through plate-glass windows at apartments, swallowing a handful of trucker pills at the beginning of a night out and washing them down with a 40 of malt liquor. These things are all a part of my past, things I'm now sometimes paying dearly for as a middle-ager with a rapidly crumbling body, things I simply have to live with and that I'm always reminded of at least a little whenever at Facebook.

But still, doom and gloom aside, in general I have very fond memories of my college years, and like to remember them as a time when I did exactly what college students should, that so many don't and then regret later -- when my friends and I took the bull of life by the horns, simply created artistic events and venues out of thin air when no one would have us or none simply existed, when four nights a week were devoted to drugs and fucking and the other three nights to the incredibly loud indie-rock bands providing the soundtrack to it. Jesus, how did any of us manage to make it to classes back then too? Oh, that's right, none of us did; yet I still somehow feel like I learned a lot of valuable lessons back then, lessons that inform who I am now and even the way I run things at CCLaP. It's strange but pleasurable to run into all these old friends from college over at Facebook, I have to admit, a jarring shock yet not completely unpleasant to suddenly be confronted with these dozens of embarrassing old photos from the '80s and '90s. Oh yeah, and Fugazi fucking rules! SITTING IN THE WAITING ROOM! SITTING IN THE WAITING ROOM!