The Cy Twombly Letter of Resignation bears an uncanny resemblance to a letter my little niece wrote me a few years ago. It’s not supposed to be funny, but it is. Still, I kind of want one.

Joana Vasconcelos at work. I think. I can’t read Portuguese, so who knows. The best images of the beautiful Contaminação project are on her portfolio site, in 2008.

Besides making us all immoral and stupid, Facebook is just boring. (Except for the world leader status updates.) I tried, guys, but I can’t get myself to give a damn. It’s so rigidly reciprocal and stiff. It’s new, but it feels old fashioned… It also messes with memory in a way I find frustrating. Characters from the past become real life adults with real names and present lives. I’m conflicted about pigmenting my memories with the runny ink of their Facebook-Christmas letter life précis. (No I’m not.) Those précis are just alive enough to force me to regard the characters in my memory (caricatures undoubtedly) as persons, but don’t contain enough to tell me if should care. So I don’t say anything. I don’t want to mistakenly injure an actual human by treating him like a character in my own story. But the truth is, real names notwithstanding, they are characters in my own story. They lived richer, more real lives in my memory than they do now in their variously smiling or intent portraits with their sometimes unfamiliar last names and backward-boastful updates.

Here are two people Facebook is always trying to pimp, drawn from memory and therefore probably unrelated to any sort of reality. I didn’t include the other three, to whom I was not so nice, just in case my memory’s better than I think it is. (Though who was taking notes back then? Oh. Yeah. The yearbook staff.)

01: I wanted to thank you for being so kind to me, but the truth is I don’t remember you all that well. You drove me around and sat next to me in silence lots of times. You poured me (far too much) of your parents’ wine and held my hand when I tried to stand up. You told me about your family and asked me about my classes but mostly you were a solid, kindly presence. I don’t think you were particularly talented academically, though I always had an idea you might be quick in some other way. You had the patient, shut down manner of a person waiting, something in retrospect I imagine to have been the boy shape of a few of the men I now love best. I could be wrong though, I never found out. I don’t recall you ever gossiping or being unkind to anyone. You were a good guy. I bet you still are.

02: You, I didn’t know very well. We were both nerdy teacher’s pets, you a good deal smarter than I. In my recollection you came from a large family too. You were quiet and obedient at school, and although I suspected you had a secret wit, I also detected a whiff of fundie Catholic about you. I doubt anyone else did, but it takes one to know one. I think that repelled me faintly. It still felt like a world I might not escape and I didn’t want to be reminded that that’s who I was and where I came from; I didn’t want to risk being trapped where you were. One time you sent me a note chastising me after hearing me make excruciatingly self conscious small talk about some sort of typically small town Texas drunken high school event the Monday afterward. I remember how suddenly pleased I was at being able to fit in, even momentarily, and how distressed and sick I felt when I read your note. I can’t remember what it said, but you used the phrase “role model” and I think you said you were disappointed. I was very angry, how dare you choose me as a role model, we were the same age! (My conception of authority and standards correlated directly with age at the time.) I think my disproportionate anger arose from a feeling of annoyance at myself. Even then I wondered why I cared so much what anyone thought and wished I didn’t. You look happy in the picture Facebook is always trying to push as Someone I Might Know. I bet you are. I’m sorry now I didn’t try to know you better in those days, but my parents might have liked it.