And I can only imagine the cruelest father in the world, raising his kids vegetarian so he can then strap them into the car, go grab a Big Mac and eat it in front of them.

I wish I'd thought of that.

Though now I'm afraid that iPods and Virgin Mobile phones will electrocute me.

Unless you're the sort of person who feels unjustified self-esteem on a regular basis. Then it's Fully-Justified Self-Loathing Day. Try spending some time where you belong, jackhole.

Because social software is high school, all over again.

Since I can't see what's going on behind the doors I'm not invited through, I know -- just know -- that there are people back there, laughing and drinking beer and probably having sex and talking about me and, and, and screw them! I'm perfectly fine, sitting here reading science fiction and waiting for "Matlock" to come on Channel 5 at 11. Perfectly fine. I choose to be here. They're all dumb and drunk and having sex and I wonder if there's any ice cream in the fridge and, oh God, I'm not going to fall asleep on the sofa tonight trying to watch porn through the scrambled signal. I'm not, I'm not. Screw them.

This, um, may just be an issue for me.

And, OK, that's what makes social networks social. The computer needs to have things spelled out for it, defined by simple relationships. Also like the Bush Administration.

But at least residents of totalitarian governments only had to answer the questions once. ("Ve know you hav-- Oh, vait. Mien bad. Ve already gotten you.") With social applications, simply labeling someone a friend isn't good enough -- you have to tell everybody, over and over and over again.

If I'm friends with, say, disreputable playboy and gadabout Andy Baio (or if I was before this post) and have gotten him to admit the fact to Flickr, it's annoying to have to coerce the same admission to Vox, and to LiveJournal, and to LinkedIn, and to Eventful. Aren't computers supposed to be good at sharing information? Doesn't it have weekend plans to get around to being free? What ever happened to FOAF anyway?

Single sign-on, the holy grail of cross platform user simplicity, will probably never happen -- TypeKey and OpenID and Passport and LID and Liberty and God knows how many more attempts at it notwithstanding. There's too much power in locking users in. And that means that the metadata attached to those users -- like, say, their social relationships -- aren't going to be shared between providers, either.

But as that metadata becomes more complicated, more useful and more valuable, re-entering it into every goddamned site that you want to selectively share information from is going to get real old, real fast. ("Flickr, meet Vox. Vox, Flickr. Vox, Flickr and I go back a bit and you should get him to tell you who all my friends are-- What? Well, why not? Well then, what about Upcoming? LiveJou--? Oh, for Christ's sake!")

And, admittedly, these complaints are largely theoretical coming from someone with three two friends. But given the power of social data -- and the features that can be driven by it -- the information is too important to be locked up in proprietary databases. If single sign-on isn't going to happen -- and it isn't, given that even Vox doesn't use either of Six Apart's SSO protocols -- then at least give us a common, reliable and simple way to import and export the data. FOAF, something new, it doesn't matter. Just don't make me go through the tedious process of begging people to acknowledge our friendship again.

Because I think I'm on thin ice as it is.

People -- human beings, all of us, to a one -- are messy, ugly, disastrously disorganized creations. We don't make sense -- don't fit into comfortable categories, don't follow reliable rules, don't have any sort of structure to how we function, communicate or express ourselves.

Computers hate that. They can't cope with it. The idea of trying to catalog anything but the simplest metadata about people in a format that's easily parsed by a computer is ridiculous. It's hard enough getting a few pieces of information specifically designed for machines right, much less the swampy mess of human-to-human interaction.

Not that people haven't tried, of course. Tried and failed, again and again and again.

The history of "social software" -- an important part of this nutritious Web 2.0 start-up -- is composed almost entirely of spectacular failures to capture all but the most rudimentary relationships between people. Most are divided into two camps: laughably simple and laughably complicated.

Too-simple social software has been the more successful to date, because it's actually usable. While too-complicated software attempts to stuff a doughy blob of human interaction into the square hole of the third-normalized form -- "This person is a friend," "This person is a friend if he's buying," "This person isn't a friend, but will get all pissy if don't add him," "This person is an asshole" -- too-simple software punts on the problem of actually reflecting reality and divides the world (usually) into four giant camps: me, my family, my friends and everybody else.

To which a functioning human being -- loose in the real world -- can only say: Ha.

Which family? Nuclear? Biological? By law? Former? Which friends? Work? School? Neighborhood? Electronic? Various combinations of all of them? Each of these groups can and do have competing agendas and competing reasons to access information, and each must be handled differently. Anybody who thinks that "the family" is a single, cohesive unit has never lived through a Thanksgiving dinner.

Flickr and Vox and LiveJournal and Upcoming and all the rest of the simple-social software products are produced by very smart (and attractive!) people, and they know that their division of relationships into four boxes is unrealistic, but they've apparently given up on doing anything about it. But the answer is staring them right in the face.

Flickr, for instance, pioneered the move away from insanely complicated and incomplete organization hierarchies by using tagging, and letting the user decide what their organizational structure would be. I was dubious of tags a couple of years ago, for all the boring semantic reasons. But they've proven to work spectacularly well: instead of trying to capture and catalog the whole of creation, simply give people the tools they need to do it themselves, for themselves. Don't try to get the computer to understand the world, because it never will. Let the human's do the work of cognition and evaluation and just return the damned database records. Easy, simple and "good enough" in exactly the right way.

So why not apply the same approach to social permissioning? Let the users decide. Don't make them force their lives into arbitrary categories -- give them the tools they can use to build their own. Not "Family," but "My parents" and "My sister's family" and "My wife's crazy grandmother who gets jealous if she sees too many pictures of my kids with my family" and God knows what else. Oh, sure, use the four classic groups -- "Me," "Family," "Friends" and "World" -- as defaults and that will satisfy some significant portion of users. But don't limit everybody to that overly-hierarchical, overly-simplistic worldview. It doesn't work.

Human beings (and their relationships) are complicated, messy, ugly things. A smart computer would want nothing to do with them. But if social software is going to insist on wading into the muck, it's going to have to be willing to get messy, too.

Because otherwise the hate is going to flow both ways.

But more and more, it feels like it is.

It was great while it lasted -- a whole year, longer than anybody had any right to expect, and a lot longer than any other relationship I've had. It was intense -- good intense -- a lot, and intense -- bad intense -- occasionally, but what's finally going to bring it to an end, I think, is a sort of boring sameness. We keep dutifully going back to it, you and I, but it doesn't have the same spark. No, no. Don't deny it. You know what I'm talking about. We've learned each others tricks. You're not providing the rush anymore and, honestly, I think I'm as good as I'm ever going to get. That's embarrassing to admit, but it's probably the truth.

Battlefield 2, I'm breaking up with you.

I still love you, of course, and I always will. But I think it's time for me to start seeing other games. One of your annoying habits -- the fact that you keep track of everything -- shows me that I've put almost a hundred hours into us, into our relationship, and all I have to show for it is a pretend gunnery sergeant's rank, a sore palm (oh, wipe that smirk off your face, Battlefield 2) and a bigger back-log. I've loved the time we've spent together, but I'm not growing as a person. You can only shoot someone in the face so many times before the zazz starts to wear off.

Yes, I know there are all sorts of fancy European frilly things I could buy to gussy you up. But I suspect that another trinket, another bauble, would only prolong what's inevitable. You were supposed to be a cheap date from the get-go, sweetheart, but you swept me off my feet and suddenly I'm upgrading my RAM and buying a headset and... It's better that we end it here.

Good-bye, Battlefield 2. You're great, and you deserve someone better -- a whole lot better -- than me. Take care of yourself.

And, um, if I don't find anyone by next weekend, do you mind if I, y'know, give you a call? For old times sake?

As an experienced parent, I, of course, take this to mean he's going to taunt his brothers. And sure enough: "Michael is crazy," he says, "and he is lazy." Then he gets the smug look that means he knows what a poem is, dammit, and that was a poem.

But before Mikey can throw something at him, I say, "My turn!

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,starving, hysterical, naked--" and the boys suddenly crack up. You learn early that Beat poetry is funny.

After a moment, they sort of sputter to a halt and into the quiet, Joanne says, "Naked." And they're off again, laughing their fake-sounding little boy laughs.

And after another moment, the silence settles in and Jo says, "Pants." And they're lost once more.

Beneath the din, she looks over at me and says, "They have your sense of humor."

"You said pants!" Mikey shrieks.

But I wonder if the traditional meaning of "inner harmony" actually translates to "will help you go poop."

But ahead, ahead heavy tendrils of ocean fog hang over the ridge like thick fingers grasping a rock, and it takes all of fifteen seconds to be consumed by what waits on the other side. The sun snuffs out and the windshield starts to wick up moisture and everything below and ahead suddenly vanishes into grey murk. Sound damps down to the thrum of the engine and you feel like the whole world has vanished.

And then, above, the fog swirls in some unexpected way and maybe, just maybe, there's something leathery and huge up there, beating at the air to stay aloft. And suddenly, bugs -- huge bugs. The size of a man's fist, with spinning translucent wings and tiny, angry mouths, and they hit the grill like over-ripe melons, with hard, wet thumps. And tentacles, oh Christ, tentacles, lashing at the car, a bleached-bone talon on the end of each gouging deep gashes in the metal of the roof and doors like they were paper. And, ahead, astride the road, a Lovecraftian nightmare, a horror from beyond time, leering horribly, blindly, mindlessly. And I know this world is no longer ours, and the ancient madness has returned, and I scream and scream and scream.

And then I hit Pacific Coast Highway and the fog clears a little and I head on into work, because, yikes, I'm already late.

I really need to get a radio.

As of now, you are no longer allow to claim your particular brand of rebelliousness, misery, dark brooding (and the like) if it takes you two hours to get it ready for public display. I don't care how precise you think your statement needs to be -- a couple of hours in the bathroom primping is not the prelude to an effective display of societal alienation.

Love,
Adulthood

This position leaves them looking down at the back of my head.

"Daddy?" Mikey said the other night. "Why can I see skin under your hair?"

"What?" I said.

"He's going blonde," Tom said.

"Blonde?"

"Like Lex Luthor," Tom said.

Every day, I'd make him something for lunch -- grill cheese, turkey on wheat, peanut butter and jelly -- and lay it on a plate in front of him, with a few chips, maybe, or a pickle. He'd lift the sandwich, regard it for a moment, then spin it around and start in on the butt-end.

At first I thought he'd seen some blob of mustard hanging out the back, and wanted to get it before it could get him. So I started being intentionally careful with the condiments, applying a smooth, even coat across the bread. Nothing dripping, nothing oozing. He still turned it over.

I experimented, which is where the trouble started. I put too much mayonnaise at the top of the sandwich and he still flipped it, took a bite and then wiped the splooch off his shirt. I bought rolls, without the mushroom top of pan-cooked bread, and he turned them over, too, leaving the rough underside facing up. I fed him a pocket sandwich, half a pita stuffed with chicken and lettuce, and he up-ended it anyway, tying to hold the contents in with his palms as he set to work on the underside.

I made a wonderful BLT, with thick bacon and heavy slices of tomato, and put one piece of toasted white bread facing one direction and the other facing the other. He turned the sandwich one-hundred and eighty degrees between bites.

Finally, I commissioned a local baker to create a round piece of bread, something light, a good French maybe. He ended up suspending the dough in the oven, hanging from a hook like sausage. After slicing, each piece was a perfect circular coin.

I laid a couple out ont he counter and spread some spicy deli mustard on both sides. I added thick slices of premium roast beef, brown and red, in two low piles and made sure to bring them together while he was watching -- the perfectly symmetrical sandwich, no up, no down.

I half-expected him to try to start from the center, digging his teeth into the middle of the sandwich. But that's not upside-down, is it? Or to open it up and go at it from the inside-out. But that would be more of a meat salad on toast.

Instead, he just stared at it. He turned the plate a few times and flipped the sandwich over once, but mostly he just stared at it, his brow slightly furrowed and his eyes making slow circles around the crust.

After an hour, I left the kitchen to take care of some other things.

He was still there at dinner, and still there the next day and the day after. The roast beef first turned a darker brown, and then sort of gray. The bread stiffened and curled up at little, shrinking. I never saw him sleep, and I never saw him move and when he died a few days later, they said it was from dehydration.

Now, of course, when I'm making a sandwich, I mark an explicit direction on it. Grilled cheese gets a burnt-butter arrow, pointing up. Peanut butter and jelly gets the side crusts cut off, and the top sharpened into a point. And no pita. Definitely no pita.

It's safer that way.

So I'm in the jewelry department, pawing through the ironically named charm rack: tiny little cell phones and Visa cards and martini glasses and I wish to God I was kidding. But a few are nice and so I pick those up and one last one catches my eye.

It's a book, a pinky-tip-size book, with a working hinge. On the cover it says, "I love you!" and when you lever it open with a thumbnail, the inside says:

And while, sure, you could interpret that as "You're the best [hug] [kiss]", I'd much rather believe that there is a monumental, barely tapped market out there: Mongolian plainsmen, buying delicate silver charms for their favorite plow animals.

At least they're easy to shop for.