They're baaack!

My life has been previously sliced up into distinct, and mostly non-overlapping chapters. I've lived in Toronto, Montreal, San Francisco and New York (and a couple of adjacent suburbs that I won't get into). In each place there have been a number of people that I've known. In time, I've moved on and only marginally keep in touch with friends from the old 'hood. I'm what they used to call a lousy letter-writer.

It's not so bad. I have great memories from each place, and my life is organized into distinct chunks. I've gotten used to the idea of thinking in terms of  "so-in-so from my former life at location X". Frozen in time, these memories provide a nice back drop for my identity.

Now, however, Facebook is screwing it all up. My entire life (in people) since high school has all been sucked into Facebook. Everyone I've ever known is already there. And they're all friending me (or I them). Twenty years of time, compressed into nothing.

When yet another mysterious figure from my past "friends" me, I'm suddenly privy to some very disturbing photographs, where I can see the effects of 10 to 20 years of aging all at once. ("Dude, you have no hair! What happened?") Often they're accompanied by mysterious young short people in these photographs. Short people that weren't there before.

I feel like I've fallen into a time warp, or maybe am watching my life flash before my eyes. Except it's the life that I didn't live, all the paths that I didn't go down, with people that I didn't keep in touch with. They're all back. They're on Facebook, they're my friends and they've escaped from their neatly delimited chapters in the past to invade my present.