The Fine Art of Embarrassing Yourself and Everyone You Know at Scale
Obey the prime directive - don't be a douche'
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I really like sort of disappearing.
— Katey Sagal
“You don't have to be invisible to disappear.”
― Rebecca McNutt
“I’ll be right back.”
― Amelia Earhart
Five years ago, right around this time, a good friend of mine went missing.
He just vanished without a trace.
None of the events leading up to his disappearance seemed unusual or out of the ordinary.
There were no clues, not even a goodbye note left behind to indicate his fate.
The debate among our mutual friends as to what might have happened went on for months, but nobody had the slightest idea.
Like Chuck Cunningham on Happy Days, one day he was just gone.
I’ve known Cory for over 30 years.
We first met in middle school and quickly became fast friends.
We hung out together almost every day and our friendship continued throughout high school.
But as we moved on to college, and then into our mid-twenties, our lives started to go in different directions, and I began to see less of him.
From time to time we connected at the odd get-together or reunion, and because of our shared history, we’d fall back into our old rhythms as if no time had passed.
Outside of that, neither of us made much effort to stay in touch, and I wouldn’t say we were close. However, in the years before his disappearance, our online interactions increased.
Re-birthed as digital friends, I regularly followed along with the events and milestones in his life - which he shared in bulk and at scale - mostly revolving around his two young children and wife of twenty-seven years.
Which is why his sudden disappearance was even more puzzling.
Oh, I forgot to mention, he disappeared from Facebook.
Facebook is a strange beast. A platform that half the world is on, but nobody will cop to using anymore.
That’s because Facebook is everyone’s dirty little secret.
It’s the dad jeans of social media. The ex you don’t want to be seen with. The fling with a hot hook-up from the bar that you now regret.
It’s an algorithmic graveyard of past relationships, awkward photos, and ill-advised, often drunk, status updates. The attention-suck you’ve sworn off too many times to count, but still keep on your phone, because, well, you never know, that high school sweetheart who broke up with you in senior year might finally realize the error of their ways, and…
One day I went to post something on Cory’s Facebook timeline, and I couldn’t find him. He wasn’t there.
Nor was he listed among my “Friends,” and all inquiries in the search bar came back empty.
I didn’t have his phone number or email address, nor did I know exactly where he lived, so for all intents and purposes he was gone, having slipped the surly bonds of Earth, or at least the social network.
Then, about six months later, as I was wasting away the precious minutes of my life comparing myself to the most highly curated, perfectly contrived moments of other people’s lives, a miracle happened.
As suddenly and unexpectedly as he disappeared, Cory reappeared.
In what can only be described as a Lazarus-like event, he arose from the digitally dead, announced by a photo of two crystal flutes brimming over with champagne and strawberries, perched upon the windowsill of a high-end hotel room overlooking the Vegas strip.
The caption read.
“Having strawberries and champagne with my baby right now. Life is good!”
“Honey?” I yelled to my wife. “I found Cory.”
“What?” she replied. “Where?”
“On Facebook. He’s getting divorced.”
“Wait, what? How do you know? Did he say that?”
“No,” I said. “But he posted the ‘strawberries and champagne’ photo.”
“Oh,” she replied, “his poor kids.”
I’ve seen this phenomenon play out on a disturbingly regular basis.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, the “strawberries and champagne” photo shows up on a Facebook or Instagram post.
It’s the universal code for “I’ve left my wife and I’m now engaged in a contrived, overly performative, highly clichéd version of romanticism with a chippy half my age, all in an effort to convince the world that I am not only doing awesome, but the awesomest of anyone you know.”
Although not as common, I’ve also seen the analog version from a few of my female friends.
It usually goes something like this.
A photo pops up on their timeline showing a martini glass filled with green liquid and a cherry, and obviously taken at a bar, with a caption that reads.
“Out with my girls tonight, rocking the appletini’s!”
When you see this posted on a mother of four’s Facebook page on a Wednesday night, you can be quite sure that the divorce papers are in the mail and she’s already sleeping with a personal trainer named Vinny.
In fact, you can almost tell how expensive the settlement is going to be by the type of picture that’s posted.
If it shows various meats, cheeses, crackers, and olive tapenade next to chilled glasses of Chardonnay, with a view of the Manhattan skyline in the background, it’s going to be bad.
But when you see a post from a 5-star resort in the Maldives captioned, “Luxuriating with my new man before our spa treatment,” somebody is going to get taken to the cleaners big time.
Social media didn’t create infidelity and divorce, it just gave outsiders front row seats to the aftermath.
And once the “S&C post” goes up, as we will now forever call it, the offending party - who nine times out of ten falls on my side of the gender gap - follows a pretty standardized script, as did Cory.
His status immediately changed from “Married” to “In a relationship,” hyperlinked of course to the profile page for the new love of his life.
And though our protagonist had reappeared on his timeline, other things began to disappear, like anniversary celebrations, birthday parties, family vacations and pets, the ex-wife of course, and shockingly, even the children. All the inconvenient reminders of a time prior to meeting his soulmate were scrubbed, methodically replaced by a new treasure trove of gym, beach, and pool selfies, night club poses, the self-help book du jour, and 87 different shots of his freshly inked “Never look back” tattoo.
Then it got weird.
And by weird, I mean bizarre, as a string of random, airy, and forced, faux-deep posts like the following materialized over the next few days.
Sometimes in life, we look for things we shouldn’t.
And it takes someone special to show us that what we want, what we desire, what we yearn for is right in front of us.
Often we get lost in the hectic pace of this crazy world and I’m blessed to now be at peace with that world.
I’m so thankful for all my friends, and family, and the special people in my life who are there to support me.
I love you all and can’t wait for you to join me on this journey to the next chapter of my life.
A life that is oh so good thanks to my new best friend, my life partner, my baby!
Then comes the coup de grâce, a new profile picture, which prominently shows our poetaster alongside the subject of his vapid verse, tastefully dressed in a low-cut top, skin-tight leather mini-dress, and six-inch heels.
“My baby!” reads the caption.
The thing that bothered me the most about this process, besides everything, was how Cory’s “baby” just appeared one day, without explanation, context, or a heads up, as if she’d always been there.
As if perpetual.
Even stranger, nobody seemed to care about or question her abrupt appearance, like Gazoo on The Flintstones.
Mutual cyber friends just posted comments like, “Dude, so happy for you both,” or “So glad you are in a good place now in your life.”
I wanted to post a comment as well.
Hey dude, I guess I’m happy for you too.
But I’ve known you since sixth grade. I know you’ve been married for twenty-seven years. I introduced you to your wife. I was at your wedding for Christ’s sake.
I mean, at least message me first and fill me in on the backstory bro!
For some reason, the cloak of social media allows us to believe we can pull off things we’d never attempt in the real world.
Imagine a group of married couples, who’ve known each other since grade school, and go out to dinner together once a month. Then imagine that one of the couples disappears.
Nobody knows where they are, and nobody knows what happened to them.
Fast forward six months, when, out of the blue, without warning, the husband shows up with a new partner - who’s so young she gets carded by the waitress.
And imagine he doesn’t say anything about her, or who she is, or why she’s there, or why his wife of twenty-seven years - your mutual friend and the mother of his children - isn’t there.
Of course, you’d be polite and try to include the new addition.
But she doesn’t know the shared history. The nicknames. The inside jokes. All the little subtleties that make relationships special.
So, in the end, you’d just stare at her with a vacant smile on your face, knowing that in another six months she’ll probably be a memory anyway.
And you’d look at him and think, “what an ass.”
Not long after Cory’s return, I started to question my continued presence on Facebook.
It wasn’t just that I’d seen too many others pull the same crap he did, it’s that what once was the place you went to reconnect with old friends, was now the place you went to say the most awful things to those same friends, or at least the ones who didn’t agree with you, about politics, the pandemic, and everything in between.
The place you went to become the worst version of yourself.
I was already on the fence about the blue devil when I received a friend request that made up my mind - from Cory’s “baby.”
So, I downloaded my photos, quietly unfriended everyone, and turned my account to private.
It was my turn to disappear.
Read more stories from The Anecdote.
Brian, you are brilliant.
Excellent article Brian! Really enjoyed.