Book face time.

It seems like everything is coming out of me today, literarily-speaking. Well, almost everything. I owe the Tree Explorer - and myself - the benefit of summing up the last couple of weeks.

There have been many changes in my life in the span of a Stanley Cup Finals series. Momentum swings and panic attacks. Offensive rushes and defensive collapses. Strategy and control vs chaos and, well, more chaos. New realities and new perspectives.

Like a tsunami spawned by an underground or offshore earthquake, the waves ebb at first, presenting a seemingly tantalizing glimpse at the unseen. And then the water rushes in, relentlessly flooding and flowing, scrubbing away the detritus of human life along with the humans. Hard decisions need to be made, in an instant, as everything quickly falls away. What to keep and what gets unceremoniously tossed? If you can never return - and can only take one car load - what do you grab in the moments in between the delirium and the dilemmas?

Five days to empty your life of everything that you hold dear, an already small list that had been whittled down and distilled in the last year's inner investigation. But important things, important lives. Actually, the things really don't matter. If prompted today and given only 3 things to chose to toss into the getaway car? My laptop and my two cats. That's an easy hard decision. And its just the start of a soon-to-be-written post about the last little while in the life of a newly evolved, homo home-a-less, a new breed of wandering men and suffering spirits. Mine, I'm sure, will get written with a happy ending to await. For now, endure...and eliminate those 'things' that don't truly matter.

If you've tossed out your life's contents in the blink of a desperate yard sale, fought against the backdrop of lawnmowers screaming and landladies glaring, you'll appreciate and understand the whats and hows of the other 'attachments' in your life. You ask yourself hard questions like 'why am I doing this?', 'is it ego-driven?', 'does it truly matter in terms of making my life and my world a better place?', and my parent-enthused 'couldn't I really be doing something better with my hard-won free time?'. And that brings me to my very recent decision to 'leave' facebook for the foreseeable future.

I hope, dear Tree Explorer, that you'll have a reference point for the facebook phenomenon and will require no further explanation from me. I also trust that any current readers of this post, poor fools who've fallen into this pit and can't get out, will require no education on the power of facebook to impact modern, social society. Or so we're told. Its the new bible, the new lingua franca. Its a great tool to market, promote, pimp and sell shit. Its a great tool to spy, stalk and snoop. Its creating its own languages, currencies, behaviours and mores. Its like Pandora's box, a gift with unlimited potential that can also cause death and destruction....and once opened, difficult to impossible to return to its holder.

(smoke break....amuse yourself for a moment while I collect my thoughts and indulge my bad habit....)

WOW - THAT WAS SOME SMOKE BREAK....FIVE FUCKING DAYS WORTH!!

Now, where was I? Oh yeah, my decision to depart from, for the moment and the foreseeable future, the world of Facebook. It was a hard decision. I don't have many friends in my life - at the moment. I used to have tons of friends when I had tons of money....strange that they should both dissipate in tandem.

I also had friends that I had been prepared to fight and die for, if necessary. Friends that I've sacrificed for; friends who I've betrayed my own good senses for; friends that I've been owed favours from....and never cashed.

After my marriage ended - well, actually, beginning a few years before - most of my friends stopped being my friend. Some left the country for better prospects; some left the area to hide from their problems, worries and shame. Some friends just stopped calling once it was clear that the party had stopped and I'd stopped paying. Some friends took issue with my thoughts, my beliefs, my decisions and, quite plainly, my life in general. Some friends weren't really friends of mine at all...more like hangers-on and good-time-Charlies....ready to take your offerings and return nothing by way of reciprocity.

And, to be honest, I did make a concerted effort to step away to heal my wounds (from the marriage break-up) and strip away the layers of he-and-her to find the real me. So, friends became fewer and fewer, though the ones who remained most present in my life truly meant the most to me. Friends that I knew I could count on if the chips were ever down (not that I'd imagined that the chips would fall so far). Friends that had my back if push came to shove...and then punch came to gouge. I had a small coterie of those nearest and dearest....and while some may have construed it as anti-social, I saw it as a stepping away to gain a fresh perspective.

Relationships play an integral part of every human's life. Our parental relationships will determine whether we make it out of childhood alive. Our matrimonial relationships will determine whether we make children. Our professional relationships will determine how far we'll go, how much we'll make, and what we can achieve in our working lives.

Our friendship-based relationships? They can add incalculable value to your life - or be the pathway to your destruction. Its a coin flip....and we rarely even notice, much less actually involve ourselves in the decision-making. We leave it to chance, in spite of our parents 'your friends can determine your future' speech.

I watched my WeW (Wonderful ex-Wife, for newbies) go through five or six best friends in a ten year span. I'd go from hearing a name for the first time to seeing the WeW spending her time and money trying to help new friend sort out their life. I'd watch as WeW would take her friend's troubles upon herself, suffering mental anguish and physical exhaustion. And then I'd stop hearing the friend's name anymore, gaining only puzzling glimpses into the reason for the 'break-up'. And the cycle would continue. I think it had something to do with the 'first friendship' setting the paradigm for all future friendships. Either way, it was a painful process to watch, and I patted myself on the back for maintaining tight friendships with a core group of 5-6 buddies, guys that I'd known for a while and believed I could trust.

Turns out, I'm not that great a judge of character. Of all my friends over the past 20 years, only Big Dave remains. I've helped him a bunch of times to get out of jackpots that his then-missus got him into. But he's been there for me, too. The first time I separated from the WeW, his was the first shoulder offered, the first 'chill and relax' message that I received. Throughout the years, Big Dave has been a paragon of strength, a man who says what he means and does what he says. And, today, its his couch I'm surfing on as I try to figure out where I go from here. His answer to my request for 'sanctuary' was a simple 'no problemo'. I didn't hear that from many others.

Which brings me back, in a roundabout way, to my decision on Facebook.

Everyone knows, in this day and age, that FB is the best way to reconnect with old friends and connect with new ones. I'm still not in the mood for dating, so the whole 'use FB to find a new gal' wasn't really in my plans.

I'd watched as the WeW built a friends-list of hundreds, complete with a crazy-good schedule of events and activities. I wanted some of that. So I signed up, friended two or three people who'd been bugging me to join....and then did nothing.

Eventually, as I got some time during a sabbatical to think...and write...I started to use FB as a place to capture my random thoughts, ideas and emotions. And, by and by, some friends from high school (Malvern C.I., to be exact), friended me, and then others, and eventually I had a group of FB friends that outnumbered my 'real' friends 10-1.

And I loved it. Reconnected with old friends and old flames (or at least flames-in-fantasy). Wrote and created with reckless abandon. Read everything - and posted the best-of. Tried Farmville...and felt guilty when I left the harvest to rot....and quickly left the Farm for greener pastures.

And kept meeting new friends, and old friends, and quasi-friends, and maybe-friends, and friends-of-friends. And kept on annoying everyone with my attempts at ego-free living....letgo my ego!!

At some point, about 9 months ago, my life got a lot more complicated. My bucolic bungalow in East York was rented, paid by my deferred salary package. Deferred salary packages are great, in theory, but only for as long as the employer stays sane or isn't running his own, small-scale Ponzi scheme to subsidize his late-life crisis. Mine, unfortunately, didn't. So off to CAMH he went (ah...the old 'crazy' defence...), and suddenly I'm scrambling to hold everything together in spite of the fact I've got nothing but duct tape to hold back the torrent of bad news and IOUs.

As it turns out, its a bad time to seek a job or ask a favour. Everyone is over-stressed, over-worked and over-stimulated. I sought out my planned returned-favours....and heard nothing but 'sorry can't help'. Or heard nothing at all.

Things got worse, I got worse. I've had a condition called Addison's Disease for 30 years now. Its the same disease that JFK had, non-functioning adrenal glands. Pretty easy to manage with a couple of pills a day. Unfortunately, one of the elements produced by your adrenal glands is a hormone that helps you (but not me) to manage stress. Ironically, during crises, I'm General Stoneface, cool as a cucumber and ready to find a solution. Post-crises? Not so good....Addisonial crises follow stress crises....and my weight falls away and I start to resemble a walking skeleton.

The only solution, dear reader, is a reduction in stress. But the reverse happened: stress piled upon stress, money woes compounded by brokenheartedness over seeing friends (who had owed me big-time) turn their back on me in my hour of need.

And then everything else fell apart. And I had five days to find a home for myself and my cats.

I had disappointing results in my search. Big Dave, of course, took 12 seconds to respond. Others said "I'd have loved to help but....". The WeW took in, temporarily (her new guy is very allergic to cats), my cats until I could get them into the Humane Societies 'witness protection program' (actually, owner surrender...but those cats don't get sent to pro-euthanasia clearing houses).

Swallowed my pride and begged for help. Asked others to post my plea in hopes that some kind soul would offer up something, anything that I could take as a symbol of hope. I think four or five thousand people, some who knew me, most who didn't, saw my desperate post. And no one replied with anything more than 'sorry'. Not that I really believed FB was a real tool for building real friendships. I just figured that if FB can be used to elect a president or generate global awareness campaigns, there must be a way that it could help me in my most pressing period.

Nope.

Which got me thinking, during the moments in between throwing my life to the curb, about what is truly real, what is truly important to me. In an instant, things that I had cherished for years, beings that I had nurtured from infanthood, were removed from my view as a result of my (self-made) misfortune.

Now, being honest, perhaps it was anger or a fit of pique that made me walk away from FB. Or perhaps, it was a simple bit of mental calculus: does this 'digital friendship tool' actually help me build tangible, rock-sold relationships?

Nope.

So, like my prized collections and my dearest housemates, I realized that I could live without FB. It might be painful not getting updates on friends' conditions and contentions. I truly enjoy watching your kids in their videos and school performances. I truly do read your articles about raw food, or social injustice, or sports as a metaphor; or view the pictures of the places you have been.

It made me feel closer to you - and, hopefully, helped you feel closer to me. But, dear tree explorer, it was an allusion. Those FB friends have their own lives and their own problems. I'm someone who might clog up their FB home page with silly poems or favourite songs. I'm just another digital soul in a soulless world of click-and-paste.

So, if I don't really matter in the FB universe, and the FB universe really makes no real contribution to my actual life, why would I spend any more time on it than necessary?

Truth be told, I have gone back once or twice in the intervening weeks. I missed you guys. I missed your updates, the latent egotism and my natural voyeurism.

But its not real, its not tangible and, in the great, grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter. I still have email; I've got this blog (and another unread one, too). I've got a phone - and plenty of time for coffee talk.

Interestingly, I invited everyone of my FB friends to contact me, off FB via phone or email, to chat or plan a meet up. Anyone want to hazard a guess as to how many have contacted me?

Nope. And it's just not worth thinking about.

So, for now, any today-humans reading this will not find my FB page with updates or responses. I will check on it, or more correctly, check in on a few tender souls. And if I see there's a need for a true friend, I'll call them, email them or just walk on over.

Because, after all, that's what real friends are supposed to do.