Preface: I wrote this intending to submit to the Onion as a “hey, how about hiring me to write funny bits like this for ya” entry. Then I found out they don’t accept submissions. Alas. Thus, I present to you the fruit of my genius.
Area man and political activist Aaron Mulholland has no idea that not a single person among his 573 Facebook friends actually reads his multiple daily Facebook status updates, notes, and online game achievements. To the contrary, he believes that his “social networking” efforts not only boost the bottom line of his online candle distribution business, but advance his bafflingly wide array of political causes.
“Every time they click on my profile they see that URL for ultimate-candles.com, and those sales add up!” says the sad-eyed University of Oregon graduate, who did actually have friends in college but lost them through a series of divorces, ill-advised moves, parasitic outbreaks and natural disasters. “And for my friends, working to make the world better was always the most important thing, so I know they appreciate being kept informed of the struggles going on.”
Mulholland’s extensive collection of online friends was accumulated by a painstaking cross-indexing of multiple yearbooks and employer internal telephone directories with the online networking site’s “Search” feature, coupled with thousands of unsolicited “Friend” requests to anyone with a similar-enough name. Despite the tenuous or nonexistent connection he actually has with nearly all of those on his friend list, there are actually approximately 87 people who do not automatically block his never-ending series of updates on health care reform, political corruption, libertarian theory, Bolivia, and rumors from the sets of upcoming science fiction movies.
Forty-three of those addresses are in fact automatic spam harvester accounts, which send the greying would-be candle mogul approximately 99.998% of the e-mails which regularly fill his e-mail Inbox, contributing to the illusion that he is connected to anyone in the entire world. Of the remaining 44 accounts, 42 are people who actually did know Mulholland in his younger, much less annoying, days, and who for their own sense of being committed to keeping the social enterprise alive allow his rambles, oblique political references, and raving delusions to pass across their Facebook screens, quietly unread save for an occasional “Like” bestowed on a link to a particularly clever YouTube video. The remaining two accounts are Mulholland’s alternate account that he uses for cyber-dating, which he friended in a moment of loneliness one solitary Christmas, and his cousin Edward in Tuscaloosa, who registered for Facebook in August of 2003, accepted Mulholland’s friend invitation, and then never logged in again.
“In the end, what matters is that I make a difference. Almost every day, I add another friend from my unceasing cultivation of some tiny shred of genuine contact. And that adds up – within a few years, I’ll have a network of thousands of loyal friends! Friends who won’t desert me when some bitch runs away with my fucking best friend. Fuck me, Pete. I mean, fuck me.” Mulholland then collapsed sobbing on his couch, where he would cry for the next twenty minutes before regaining some sense of equilibrium, smoking three joints, ordering a pizza and settling in for some World of Warcraft.
