I've been going to the same nail salon in Culver City for probably the last six years or so. It's a nondescript but tidy little place staffed by about twenty-five exceptionally cheerful manicurists of Vietnamese descent. They've always done a good job on my feet without gouging me, either literally or financially, and their pedicures last for months.

I went in there early this evening, about six, and plunked down in a chair with the December issue of Vogue. I don't speak Vietnamese, so I generally tune out all of the chatter around me; the women cracking jokes with each other, probably about us, the customers, at least some of the time, and a few male staffers quietly attending to their customers or kits. About halfway through I heard an explosion on the television, and glanced up to see the Mel Gibson film "We Were Soldiers" on.

I've never seen the film all the way through; I can't do movies with that kind of visible violence and bloodshed anymore. It gives me courtroom flashbacks. (people who know me will know what I mean by that and no I am not explaining it.) I looked away and pondered, for a moment, what I was really seeing.

It was nearing the end, a horrific battle scene with all of that shooting and blood and gore. Vietnamese extras playing Viet Cong soldiers against actors playing American ones. Guns and yelling and shots of tattered U.S. and VC flags. 

I looked around me and realized that everyone in the shop who wasn't working on someone was completely engrossed in the film, staring up at the television.

What do you feel, as an American, watching a film that takes major liberties with the history of the Vietnam War while you are surrounded by people for whom that war was their history, and their families' histories, too? Where their people are painted like so, and ours are painted like that, and none of it is reflective of reality?

I can't listen to the television, all I hear is U2's "Bullet the Blue Sky" wailing up into my head. The song is about El Salvador but it may as well be about any conflict, really, that we don't belong in.

Across the mud huts where the children sleep, through the alleys of a quiet city street

Take the staircase to the first floor, turn the key and slowly unlock the door

As a man breathes into a saxophone, through the walls you can hear the city groan

Outside, it's America; outside, it's America

Across the field you see a sky ripped open

See the rain through a gaping wound

Pounding on the women and children

Who run

Into the arms

Of America.

Isn't it ridiculous that I, as a professional communicator, have become so wrapped up in a marketing- and advertising-driven universe? My closest friends think it's one part hilarious and one part mystifying. I tell them that the world, as it were, is Flat, as Thomas Friedman likes to say, and it's true that communications and PR and marketing and customer service and business development and investor relations are all squishing together into the back of pickup truck flying for the border of Topsy Town.  I'm situated firmly in the center of that right now, and while it is exciting and interesting, it is also anxiety-producing and harrowing, and it is a train I am not always comfortable being on, if you want to know the truth, which you probably didn't, but there it is and it's not like I can take it back or anything. I know, I said it; it is, as Gary pointed out, Shit My Conscience Says.

One of the things I have become over the last few years is a student of the public management of a private emotion called grief.

I was terrible at it in the beginning. Oh, good lord, the things I wrote, the things I said ten years ago. Not that I regret having felt any of it but I cannot imagine putting any of that on the Web for the world to misinterpret and crucify me for now. I got better at it, if you can call it that, mainly because, well, enough practice, and one gets better at these things. I had a lot of practice because I have lost a lot of people to untimely death in the last ten years.

Death is, by nature, an everyday occurrence but these seemed like freak tragedies to me; I guess that's because you never think it can happen to someone that you love. The first one was a friend to murder, in 2001. The second was a friend, and soon-to-be roommate (my last call to her was about the apartment I had booked us to look at) who was in a horrific car accident in 2004. The third was like an uncle to me, a friend of my family for forty years, whose daughters were my age and I'd grown up with, and would have been legally responsible for my sister and I had my parents met an untimely end, succumbed very suddenly to a brain tumor in early 2005. The fourth was the death of a child; the daughter of a close friend, in birth, one month later that same year (2005...kind of sucked). The fifth was someone I loved very much, someone I was always convinced was a case of right person, wrong timing, and that someday, I'd find a way to tell him how I felt about him and we'd find a way to be together; he was taken in a horrific motorcycle accident in 2006.  The sixth cause hasn't quite yet been determined; I have heard that so far, it looks like an intentional suicide, which absolutely kills me. I found out this past Friday morning.

These friends all came in and out of my life at different phases and times, and were of varying closeness to me at varying points. I have photographs of myself with each. The earliest was Bill, when I was three; I'm on a rocking horse at his house and he's behind me and their old, crotchety Daschshund, Willy, is milling around in the background. I haven't seen the photo itself in years but it's burned into my brain like any other memory; a hard-fired moment in time: There's Bill, and Siobhan, out in the backyard of Bill's old house in Hope Ranch. I can feel she sun on the top of my head and I can hear him telling me to smile for the camera.

There's a photograph of Britt that I love; it's from 1996, the year we met, and he's standing in my living room in my old fleaflop on Cahuenga Boulevard, and he's holding a gin gimlet and saying something, so he wasn't smiling; he's midsentence, but the photgraph makes him look somehow regal in its candidness. His hair is undone but he's got a bit of eyeliner on and he's wearing a Death t-shirt (for the uninitiated, when I say Death I mean the Neil Gaiman character). I think he's wearing his old leather jacket; I'd had one just like it, with these weird circular pads on the lumbar strip, that I wore throughout high school, only to lose track of it one night at Kontrol Faktory in 1994.

There are other photographs. None of them were posted to Facebook. They're posted to my brain, though, and there they live. But as the space, as it were, has evolved, the collective reaction to the death of the people we love, who have also interacted alongside us online, has changed, as has my own. We interpret the absence, and manifest our grief, much differently now.

When news of C's death started to percolate through the diaspora of those who knew her during her tragic and short life over the weekend, my heart sank. Would this become a free-for-all? I checked her profile, hoping that everyone was being nice, at least. Everyone has friends, but everyone has enemies, too, and when those we love pass on, it brings out the best in some, and the worst in others. Predictably, a particularly nasty, small-minded ex-boyfriend had to weigh in on it. I didn't have access to the post but I heard about it, on Facebook, of course. I shut my eyes and tried to pretend I hadn't read it but I wanted to hit something. She's gone, you jackass, can't you focus on something besides you for once? Focus on the love you once had, who you used to be? Who she was? 

(And admittedly, did any of us really know who she was? We all had lost her, over the recent years, as she pulled away, the demons that plagued her forcing her inward, withdrawing from all of us and into a different life but we did love her. We just hoped that she was off straightening her life out and that eventually, she would come back to us.)

But this is Facebook, this is the Web, and even if I see him in a crowded nightclub, I'll never look at or speak to that guy again, I'm so embarrassed and angry. What we do online has an impact offline. I see the words and I can choose how to react; and in this situation, in this place, my reaction is one of deletion. Get out of my brainspace.

And there C's profile sits. Forever thirty-five. Forever frozen there, only the next time that something steamrolls over the Last Great Social Network, she won't make the jump with us. Her mother has posted comments twice in the last two days, desperate pleas of a woman in a grip of pain I can scarcely contemplate. I want to reach out and hug her, tell her it's going to be okay, but I can't do that. All she has are profile pictures and a random assortment of status updates from the last few years. And a lot of questions: what happened? why? and who are all these people? and I think my mother would probably think the exact same thing, if she were in her place.

What happens to a Facebook user when they die? It's not a technical question. It's an emotional question. Certainly not one we asked when Wendy died in 2000; we didn't have social networks, at least, not in their present form, then. Hyatt's Livejournal still exists, though she was removed from life support on my 30th birthday: July 31, 2004.  So does Britt's (he had one, too). There they sit; their accounts, untended. As the Web has moved on, there they remain.

I know that so many people know that she's gone, and yet, there's been near-total silence about the whole thing. I don't get it. In an era of the overshare, we've all gone mute. It's scary, and strange. I think most of us are afraid of saying the wrong thing, being tacky, or inappropriate, so we're doing nothing. Saying nothing. Wondering if we should report it, or something. Hoping someone, anyone, posts the details of a funeral date and time and place so we can show up in person for our friend instead of leaving comments she'll never see on a Facebook profile that apparently doesn't accurately represent her or what was honestly going on in her life anyway. Time magazine say they have answers. I disagree.

In her photographs, she looks so beautiful; that never changed. But she also looks happy, and I can see the supportive, cheerful comments to her friends and the upbeat tone to her interactions and that's where the deceptive nature of Facebook kicks in. Everyone looks happy, and relaxed, and normal, and we know now that that could not have been further from the truth; she wasn't happy. In fact, we should probably just assume that nobody is.

It's been a year.

My return to public blogging? Hardly. But, as with anything, forming a habit takes time and some sort of effort, and so, I pick up the keyboard again hoping that something interesting will come pouring out of it.

(This will not be that post. Sorry to those of you who were hoping for a miracle but in the interim, I have lost my ability to write the way I used to.)

I don't know what I was trying to say a year or two years ago, when I opened this thing. I don't know what I was trying to say when I opened up a Tumblr account, or a Twitter account, or a Livejournal, either. I don't know what I'm trying to say now. I am online all the time, practically, when I'm at work, because the kind of work I do (social business communications) sort of demands it; if I'm not looking at competitors, I'm looking at best practices, I'm trying out tools, I'm checking on client work, I'm answering emails, drafting documents, whatever. It's all about the power of the real-time Web, and I gotta tell you, after watching the world lay itself out online, for good or for ill, for over ten years now, and having to try and wrangle everything I know and everything I feel about it into exceptional client strategies, the very last thing I want to do is put one more iota of myself upon it. My heart isn't content for people to consume.

The personal is indistinguishable from the professional, to many, and I simply lost my ability to explain myself or try to keep the two separate so I disconnected from it, ever so slowly. Odd, for someone who was on the bleeding edge of blogging (I started one in 1998) and lived it for YEARS, with no monetary gain, no impressions generated, partnership deals, BlogHer Ads, conference attendance, or ignition of Social Media Fails. I didn't make a dime, I made a few friends, and I made a lot of enemies. After a while, I could no longer afford, emotionally, to tend to it as I once had, and so submerged, hoping that nobody would notice my absence.

It worked. Nobody has.

Steve Rubel talks about the Attention Crash and for at least the last year, the public Note on my MS Office Messenger has been, "I *am* the attention crash." 

What have I done in the last two years? I worked. A lot. I worked so much I didn't date. Then, I stopped working so much, and I tried to date, and that didn't go very well. I fell for someone who abused me so quickly, and so terribly, I still can't find the language to talk about it. But then I put aside some time and I met someone, and he met me, and oh, boy, has that ever been a trip. It's weird to have a human priority in my life. I hadn't had one in ten years, I mean, not like that, not a priority that did me the same favor.  I let go of my notions of family, finally. I realized that I have a family that loves me and makes me better and values me, and blood has nothing to do with it. I lost a cat. I have a new roommate. I gained sixty pounds, and lost ten of them. I went blonde. I read a few books; more in '10 than I did in '08 or '09.

Mostly, I've been trying to put myself back together in a world that's completely fallen apart. And I think that's where the problem lies, or the key insight, as they say in the marketing biz. This world, the one I once lived online, is no longer as cohesive as it was when I left it. And in that time, I have changed, too.

I don't know what I'd write about anymore, in this space or anywhere else. I am out of practice, and if the last three years watching the real-time Web unfold have taught me anything, is that very few of us have anything of any value to say, and I include myself in that. I have become completely convinced that whatever I'd put here has no value at all and my resentment of people who assume that theirs does makes me want to slam doors and throw things. I don't know what compels me to even try it again. Perhaps going into this with an attitude of, "I'm writing this for the people I love, so maybe they'll understand what goes on in my head a little better" is the only way through that.

Yeah, this is public, anyone can read it, I'm sick of filtering and password-protecting and ratcheting down everything so some nutbag can't get near me. I did it, got the t-shirt, and my personal life is totally off-limits now, and I like it that way, and it's going to stay that way. I'm using this because a lot of my friends don't care much for Facebook, so whatever. If you're going to go through my entire social-media footprint, scouring for little bits of evidence that prove to you what a rotten person I am, fine. I don't care. I'm not here for you. If I'm just content for you to consume, well, you get out of it what you put into it. Here, I'll lay out what you guys want to know so you don't have to come back: yeah, I got fat. I have another tattoo and my hair is still blonde and the blonde is STAYING so if you don't like it go kick rocks or something. Yeah, I met someone awesome. Yeah, we've had some death up in these parts and the disease isn't far behind. I'm still at Edelman and I like it here, as frustrating as it sometimes is around here. I'm not going to tell you where my love goes. I'm not going to tell you how I feel. I'm not going to bother you with hoping you like me; I know who my friends are, and they make themselves known to me.