that has revealed to me how Americans think.

I may just be a pompous ass or I may have come to an edge where I end and others interface with me and for the first time I see it clearly.  At least clear enough to write about it.

I left Facebook yesterday.  I found that being single and living alone has great advantages.  So long as you don’t spend much time on FaceBook.  Truly that is graffiti for the elderly.  Like all graffiti it represents a lonely, often disturbed, way of thinking that can only be expressed in meaningless short bursts.  The possibility of a meaningful discussion cannot take place where the objective is to prove oneself smart and correct.  Forget logic, forget facts, forget reality could be the mantra for FaceBook.

I worked as a neuropsychologist for over 30 years.  People would share their thoughts and their problems and I LISTENED.  I would return home to my world of friends and listen some more, although I did get to interact in a meaningful way.  If I learned one thing,incidentally, from all that therapy and evaluation it was action seldom ever matched verbal output.

Case in point as I cleverly bring you back to FaceBook.  A professional woman preaches love, respect and even has a course she teaches in the subject.  On FB she posts intolerance toward a group of people she does not agree with.  In the real world she tries to get local people here in a poor country to work for free.

You might say she is acting like a hypocrite.  But I am faced with the real issue.  That issue being that my patients escaped the U.S. and brought that culture of thinking here to Ecuador.  They post the need for higher wages but here they want a service for nothing or cheap.  They readily see this behavior in others but they act it out here differently.

If a person lies one time and I notice it I will look for a pattern of lies and I will still be friends with that person but will always know that meaningful dialogue would be a waste of time.  Here comes my pompous ass part.  If others see the lies and agree  with the person who promotes this behavior then I shy away from that group.  It becomes a herd mentality.  So I got off FB.

I am now living and conversing and befriending my former patients.  I found that being with other people who do not think like you is a rich and wonderful experience.  I call it the EDGE.  At this edge I want to know how they got to that way of thinking and behaving.  If I judge then the EDGE is gone.  I must accept their beliefs as plausible.  But what keeps repeating will be revealed in future blogs.

Two people said things that prompted my urge and surge to blog.  My dad possessed a very quiet demeanor which is to say my mother ran the show. (I sometimes feel bad that my parents were so good because I can’t claim bad child rearing as an excuse, I can’t garner sympathy and I can’t claim first hand experience in any of today’s maladies)  When my dad turned 65 he suddenly exploded in verbal communications.  He had opinions on everything.  He opened a piece of his inner make up with me during an Everglades fishing trip.  He said he had listened all his life to people telling him what and how to do things.  Now they can’t take away his job  (he retired) so he was going to say what was on his mind.  Boy had he stored up some things.  He expressed feelings and thoughts I never believed in him.

The second influence came from a friend who said that she would not get involved in a relationship because she feared the person would project in her his feelings of how he wanted her to be.  That statement has hammered my thoughts for several years.

I am 65 today.  I am going to follow in my father’s footsteps and unleash what I think.  My friend’s statement has opened many doors as I attempted to figure out what she meant.  I quit FaceBook and believe that her statement has something to do with that decision.

I would read all these Posts about love and sweetness and the sun shining and the butterfly changing and the Dalai Lama said.  These messages came in between the vitriole related to the politicians.  I realized that FB is graffiti for the elderly.  On a good day nothing made sense.  I never felt any of the love that they preached in fact the innuendo in many of the posts were filled with anger and dislike.

My friend, who believes that projected feelings are to be avoided, lost a friend because she voted for Obama.  I can surely see the anger in that exhibition.  It stems from a belief that your thoughts are right and another’s thoughts are wrong.  But all of FB is like that.  Somehow they call it social.

So my story begins here.  I write to clarify my thoughts and reserve the right to change my mind.  I also will keep the blogs short because of limited attention spans.  So tom