Just a week ago, in a whimsical act of self-promotion, I joined Facebook, a little late to the party, hoping to let old friends and business associates know that yes, I am still alive, and to alert them to this blog. It’s been a fascinating and revealing experience. First of all, I had no idea that so many people I know are using Facebook and that they would be happy to hear from me. I had set up a MySpace page a couple of years ago, primarily to plug my bookstore, and about three people contacted me, including Randy Jones, one of the members of the Village People, which thrilled me. But in just a handful of days on Facebook, I now have 120 “friends” (and counting, like that sign in Manhattan ticking off the national debt) and have reconnected with people from all aspects of my past: grade school, Choate, Yale, my singing group the S.O.B’s and long-lost jobs. I even reconnected with one of my favorite counselors from Camp Becket whom I haven’t talked to since I was 14. It’s all a bit overwhelming and exhilarating. The experience is sort of like a giant group grope. I might have gone overboard on Earth Day, the day of my birthday, because I was sending messages to people I don’t even know. But I’m sure that is par for the course when one first joins.

Was it wise to “poke” Brian, a waiter I used to know at the old Moondance Diner when I worked at Quest? I’m sure I was just one of his regular customers and am now no more than a footnote buried in his psyche, even if I remember the exact cut of the apron he used to wear. And why did I search for John Guare, a favorite teacher I’d had at Yale? Could it have been the irony of his now-ubiquitous catchphrase “Six Degrees of Separation”? If anyone is over the implications of that apt phrase it must be John. Likewise, why did I ignore that old flame of mine from 20 years ago? Was it because I wanted him to remember me just as I was and not as I’ve become? There seems to be too much emphasis in the comments posted to the “Wall” (at least in the short-run) on how one looks, or to be more precise, in how one looks the same. We cling to our vain identities just as others cling to their memories of them. I’m glad to hear some people feel I haven’t changed a bit. But at the same time I want them to know that I am not the same person I used to be, that my once-effulgent voice is shot, my shoulder continually hurts, and I can no longer wrap my legs around my neck and jokingly call myself “the human pencil sharpener” as I used to do at dull parties as an ice-breaker in college. I am a very different person today and yet not the same different person to the various friends I’ve re-made.

Plus there’s the “absent friends” problem, the ones without faces on Facebook. While I was zealously seeking out friends to add to my members’ list, I dug up my current phone book which I haven’t glanced at in ages (cell phones make such things obsolete). What struck me instantly was how many friends I’ve still got listed in there who sadly are no longer with us. I’d been extremely negligent in updating my address book and removing or crossing out names of those who had died. Perhaps it was sheer stubbornness on my part — or guilty denial. Why is Jed Mattes still there, my former literary agent who died in 2003? Crossing him out would be like admitting I’d X-ed him out of my life before he died. And acquaintances such as Khalil Rizk, Peter Cain, Robert Woolley or Charles Henri Ford? Surely I can’t have forgotten they’d “passed on” — an expression that I like only a smidgen more than “passed.” But there they are, still scribbled in ink in my little leather book. Then there’s Sarah Pettit, my former editor at Out, who was such an inspiration to me. Clearly, in her case, I was just not willing to finally let go. I think she’d insist on my getting a new address book.

It amuses me to think what these friends would have thought of Facebook and other instant communication devices, especially this new-fangled fad Twitter, which seems to be the final death knell of letter writing as an art form. (In the future a writer won’t be called “a man of letters” but “a man of tweets”.) Some would disdain Facebook. Some ignore it. Others, such as the great gadabout George Trescher or my dear friend Brother Jonathan, a Franciscan monk and playwright who died quite a while back, would have cherished it. I wish, like in the days of Houdini, there were some way of sending messages to these lost friends. I’d “add” them to my list even if they could not “confirm” we were friends, or better yet, answer back.