I could look back, and tell you, how long it’s been. I think a month, since I bathed in my Facebook feed.

Oh, my feed. My lovely, lovely feed.

Full of political outrage. Full of funny photos of baby animals. I haven’t seen a baby animal in a month. Full of the bits and bites of the lives of authors that are important to me. Michael Swanwick’s breakfast. David Gerrold’s latest six thousand words of effortless, sinuous conversational typing, in which he makes heartfelt points with which I always agree.

My political centrist friends will be arching their eyebrows, gently, at my social justice warrior friends, who greatly outnumber them. Sometimes the centrists are saying stupid things without knowing it. Sometimes they know, and just don’t care, that they’re being slightly dickish

And sometimes, they’re just kinda… right. Um.

Berniebots and $hillary fans are doubtlessly facing off against each other. I voted for Bernie, gave him some money, and I’ll vote for Clinton against whatever horror the GOP conjures up in November. Let it go. Let it go.

I’m writing this note, and letting a plug-in gently slip it back into the abandoned shell of my old social media life, to let whoever remembers me, in Zuckerberg’s arc, know that I made my word count today.

2000 of them, baby.

Now the struggle will be, I know, to wind down. To get ready to sleep; to slow my thoughts so that my brain works tomorrow. To obey the circadian rhythms laid down in millions of years of primordial hunter-gatherer noodling about.

To NOT blast blue light into my retinas, stay up all night and all day by electric light. To not work for 48, 72 hours and then collapse sick for a week afterwards.

The data shows, the tortoises win. Four hours a day, creative work, max, or your’e just running down  your machine. Blunting your mental scalpel.

Facebook. How I loved you. But I don’t think I’m coming back any time soon.

There are closed communities of writers; SFWA, indy writers on RRedit, people from whom I can learn, people to whom my chatter might matter and make more sense. I’ll move my social media party there.

I’ll let you know what I’m doing here; as I sink into the abyss of Facebook’s algorithmic afterlife, doubtlessly my posts will be deprecated; you won’t see my blog posts in your feed anymore. Not enough people will see them to like them or like them to see them or whatever, I won’t be making Mark Zuckerberg six cents a day with my 4-6 hours of gratis eyeball glue, so I don’t expect he’ll want to, you know, throw any traffic back at my little frozen banana stand.

That’s not how you get to be a billionaire. You don’t reward the quitters.

Someday, if I’m lucky, you’ll see a book with my name on it, or see an ad or a review for one, and you can buy it, and you’ll feel good about my absence.

Until then,

I bid you peace.

(Channeling an old PBS chef, who had an intern problem and then dropped dead. People in their 50s will remember him. Google it. Sad stuff.)

Ciao.