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Odd Nerdrum One Story Singer
June 17, 2014
CONTENT CREATION, KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

Content Creation: Talking to Yourself Is Healthy

I’m on Reddit about as much as I’m on Facebook. What amazes many other Redditors is we get far more comments and likes for our posts from strangers than we do from actual friends for our posts on Facebook. Your contributions also don’t appear directly on other Redditors’ feeds; you post by subject, or ‘subreddit’, and hope for the best. So why bother posting to Facebook at all? It lost whatever negligible cool it had long ago, after all.

Many of my friends and most of my small family have either never signed up for Facebook or have dropped away. “It’s a waste of time and distracting,” an award-winning writer-director friend, who cancelled his account well over a year ago, said to me the other day. This guy is so cool he can carry off a polo shirt and actually make me hesitate as to whether I might need one or two in my wardrobe as well. (I don’t.)

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By James Killough
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Butch Cassidy Sundance Kid
June 21, 2013
KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

When It’s Time to Break Up with a Friend

I’ve been of two minds whether to write this piece for a few weeks now. Writing about relationships of any kind is more Oprah’s purview, but a case may be made that all writing is about a relationship of one form or another. With that self-serving justification in hand, let me proceed.

What finally prompted me to examine the end of friendships—or even putting a friendship on indefinite hiatus; you can never be sure what might happen down the road no matter how final the termination feels—is a close friend of mine called it off with another close friend of his today. There have been epistolary battles via emails for some time now, a veritable bloodbath of character assassinations.

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By James Killough
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April 8, 2012
KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

Trick or Tweet

THE WEEK FROM MY VIEW

by James Killough

My good friend Shawn Riegsecker, whose unique brand of seductive enthusiasm should be patented, set a goal for me three months ago: I should have one quarter of the amount of comedian Rob Delaney’s followers on Twitter by the end of the year.  After he fixed that target and I set up my Twitter account, he actually looked up how many followers Delaney has: three hundred thousand, which makes seventy-five thousand for me by 2013.  “Hah!” Shawn said.  “You’re fucked!”

Real men use BlackBerry.

I am currently at seventy-five followers, three zeros short.  It will probably drop to seventy-four by the end of today once Twitter’s algorithmic bots sweep through and find out that @CoastalOptometry isn’t so enthralled by surreal, esoteric quips about atheism that it has followed me, but is in fact a spammer. This means I have to increase my base by over one hundred thousand percent in eight months, if my primary-school math still holds.

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By Pure Film Creative
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October 20, 2011
KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

L’Enfer, C’est Les Autres

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

by James Killough

Well, it appears that I’m stupid.  Or at least not nearly as intelligent as I think I am.

That’s no surprise.  My father once asked me, after telling me my whole life what a genius I was, “Has it ever occurred to you that you’re not as smart as you think you are?”  This might have had something to do with dropping out of college for the second time.  I don’t remember.  I just tucked the statement away in my trophy cabinet of family resentments—it falls to me to keep them shiny and updated—and only vaguely recollect the circumstance, just how his face was red and his jowls were shaking.

We must, of course, lead with a picture of Mama G. shashaying in her favorite nougat muu muu. I never got to comment about how she kept a scrapbook of clippings dedicated to her obsession, Condoleezza Rice. Had the revolution never happened, Rice was going to be her Halloween outfit.

I joined Facebook very late in the game and still remain extremely ambivalent about it.  No, I’m not ambivalent.  I think it’s… Not my thing, to avoid other invectives.  I find it really creepy, for instance, that it seems to know that I have some connection to someone I do have a connection with, but Facebook couldn’t possibly know given my current friends list because there are no mutual friend connections to that other someone.  Facebook just knows.

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By Pure Film Creative
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Taschen Big Penis Book 3D
May 12, 2011
KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

Mark Zuckerberg Has A Small Dick

Yes, this is a deliberately provocative title.  No, I have no idea how big Zuckerberg’s dick is, but with a bank account that hung, who cares?

Facebook is not for the modern misanthrope, and I am no exception.  I don’t care what your mood is, what you’re thinking, whom you’ve tagged, whom you want to overthrow.  I understand it’s the hugest, biggest social revolution in the whole wild world ever, and I heartily applaud positive events that it has helped engender, the Egyptian revolution in particular and the shaking of the Arab world in general, out the private middle ages that it’s in.  Teens harassing teens into suicide and stuff like that is unfortunate, but not Facebook’s fault; that’s more the bullying culture of America, which needs to be addressed in another manner.

I have two Facebook accounts, one to promote this blog and a personal one, and I have no idea why I did that because I only go on there to promote this blog, and then I dash off again before the chattering crowds drown me with their thoughts and likes and comments and links.  I think I have a combined eighty friends from both accounts, and that really surprises me; I didn’t know that there were eighty people I liked, much less who liked me.  And that’s perfectly fine; I have no desire to be popular, no will to amass more friends than I already have.

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By James Killough
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