Mortality Slave

The only reason I follow you on Facebook is because I’m secretly hoping you’ll die or experience some horrible tragedy. Sometimes, that’s the only thing that keeps me going. The hope that one of my Facebook friends has been visited by some awful dark angel and, right there in front of me, I get to watch their shocking breakdown into despair and hopelessness.

I used to trawl through the obits. I have a list of people I want to see bad things happen to (a list I started when I was six, by the way), so I would research each one of them and keep an eye on their local papers for their obit. Each morning at work, I’d check into a now defunct site that had links to newspapers all around the world and scan the obits of the relative ones. I knew this was needle in a haystack stuff, but I didn’t want to miss a moment of the suffering of my enemies. Oh, so-and-so lost their mom. Awesome!

The goldmine then and now has always been the various alumni magazines that my idiot college and university send to me. The first thing I do when I get one is flip to the “In Memoriam” section and, oh god, it’s almost always worth it. Car accidents, diseases, plane crashes… An amazing and sometimes surreal litany of death and despair.

Then along came Facebook. Used to be, I’d celebrate the misfortune of those on my enemies list one line at a time. So and so succumbed to cancer, so and so passed in their sleep… Now those few, formal, grim words have been replaced by screaming drama that plays out for months.

A death wall is okay. The constant reminder of your death is much appreciated, me laddo. Thank you. But I prefer those on my enemies list to be alive and suffering. To lament daily their loss — the horror and the sadness. As they edge closer and closer to suicide, I become more and more addicted to their feed. Oh, god, please film it if you’re going to do it!

In real life, it’s hard for me to hear about tragedy visited upon others. Mainly because I can barely contain myself. I want to run home and check their Facebook page instead of sitting and sympathizing and saying how awful it is. I want to say: Yes, yes, retard, it is awful. Of course it is. Now… Let’s just take out the old smarty-phone and hop on to…yep…uh-huh…and, here we go. Ooohhh! Look! ‘It’s almost too unbearable to live!’ Oh my god! Refresh-refresh-refresh!