Fb game - Hide and seek or Pin the tale

The jig is up. Like most fb games, you have played along unwittingly – that is, the rules get explained to you after you have ‘liked’ something. In this game, only the unwitting part was true – perhaps – but by the end of this brief explanation you will know who was doing most of the playing, and you don’t have to do something silly for playing along.

I never wanted to lie very much, and certainly not to make fools out of anyone. The biggest lie was my name – a pseudonym. If you were looking, you will see that I left clues to the truth everywhere. There were a broad scattering of false tracks.

Listen to what Wendell Berry says in ‘The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.’

Be afraid to know your neighbor and to die.

And you will have a window in your head …

When they want you to buy something they will call you …

As soon as the generals and the politicos

can predict the motions of your mind,

lose it. Leave it as a sign

to mark the false trail, the way

you didn’t go. Be like the fox

who makes more tracks than necessary,

some in the wrong direction …

Anyone with a lick of sense can find the whole poem if they want to read it.

But hence, the fox.

I didn’t lie about my gender, so fb referred to a boy named Sue. And most of what I said I liked, I do like. I mostly misled in what I didn’t say.

I ‘friended’ only a few people who I was fairly sure wouldn’t mind getting entangled a bit in my little game. I did no harm. Except for my playing around now and then in fb, I actually ‘did’ very little at all.

And yet I thought quite a bit about what it means to be truthful. I considered and rejected a strategy of going out into the highways and byways of fb, friending perfectly willing strangers so that when I finally came back and requested your friendship it would be from inside a thicket. It became clear as I set things up, that fb is a place where some people could be almost whoever they wanted to be and never get caught.

But if you simply ‘follow’ a friend because they’re ‘following’ a friend, beware. And, of course, not everyone that I asked actually even accepted my fb friendship request. And for all I know, I remained for most of you simply a strange name lost in fb space. There wasn't that much to 'like.'

I decided to play this game so as to be found out and to play with human beings who I know are my friends. But I suspected that it’s indeed easier to win at hide and seek if nobody knows they’re supposed to be looking for you.

But it is also easy for any of us to hide parts of our identity from others. Indeed, we don’t know quite a lot of the truth about ourselves and our friends. In every relationship we are selecting what to reveal and what not to share. That, I think, is in fact how we should play the game of life. But here’s the thing: how much of me do I want you to know about me and how much of me am I waiting for you to discover – in part, because life might be more fun to play that way, too.

Let’s not dangle the hide and seek metaphor too far.

You know me better as Bert, in a complicated relationship since December 21, 1985. I didn’t mention her name, Dawn. I said that I worked for Kaw River Bridge Publishing (KRB) and that I live in Lawrence. I was hardly more deceptive about some of these details than many fb folks are. I was my first fb friend and I and me liked each other’s stuff – naturally.

There’s more – the better you know me, the more obvious the clues. But you have to have been looking to see them, I think.

I would like to ask you to tell me if you knew who I was - if or when and how you knew that Sue and Bert were merely two personas inhabiting the same mind and body. And was it ever fun for you?

I’m still thinking about what to do about Sue. He’s a foxy fella.