I’m Having Mexican Food Tonight
Monday, October 12, 2009 at 4:00PM 
The first “social site” I ever got on was MySpace. I think it was sometime in May of 2007. I don’t want to go through all the gruesome details, but the year 2006 was one of the worst year’s of my life. I got so down that anything looked like up to me and finally in 2007 things started to get better. My doctor had suggested that I write about some of the shit that had happened to me as a way of coping with my depression and shattered nerves and even though the dumbfucker had misdiagnosed my appendix a year earlier, he was right about the writing. It made me feel better and I think forced me to deal with what was going on in my life at the time, which up to then, I was pretty much dealing with by drinking and feeling sorry for myself. I started one story and that evolved into a book about true-life stories that had happened to me. In May I had given it to a friend of mine who was going to design it and do the page layout. I remember feeling like a light switch had been flicked and all of a sudden things were somewhat normal again in my life. And I was grateful for that.
I immediately went into marketing and media whore mode and started thinking about different ways to promote the book. I knew press would be tough. Even though there’s some bold faced names in the book, it still is a collection of short stories about a writer (me) who is pretty well unknown. And then I thought about MySpace. I had registered a MySpace page in the past, but had let it lay dormant. I did some research and decided to make the page public and see what happened. Maybe I could market the book through MySpace.
I added a few people that I knew who were on there and before I knew it, my page had taken on a life of its own. In what seemed like a blink of an eye, I had over 600 “friends” and I was writing blogs and soon each blog was getting over a thousand hits and I was getting pages of comments from people telling me how great my writing was. I have to confess, I loved this instant gratitude you get from comments and started spending hours on my page and other people’s pages. I tried to comment on everyone who left me comments, spent hours answering emails and tried to send someone something on their page, if they put something on mine. Pretty soon it kind of got to be like a job and I started realizing from some people’s comments that they weren’t really reading my blogs, they just wanted to be seen and be part of the group of people leaving comments. I thought that was kind of weird. And every hour I would get between five to fifteen emails. And most of them were things like, “What’s up?” “How you doing?” Or people sending me videos from YouTube. And most of them were people I had no idea who they were. Pretty soon I became resentful of spending so much time writing back and commenting to people I didn’t know and didn’t really want to know. So one day I deleted about 525 “friends” and that started a little bit of an uproar. I got hateful and threatening emails from assholes I would never meet. People wrote blogs about me. But people’s attention spans on MySpace are so short that a day later, it was forgotten about. I didn’t spend as much time on MySpace, since I had whittled my friends down, but I was still spending hours a day there. And I was starting to feel guilty about that. Where had my life gone?
I did meet some cool and like-minded people there and I’m still friends with some of my old MySpace crew to this day. I did experience drama as does anyone who spends any time on MySpace. Basically this is because MySpace is kind of like a high school loaded with socially inept people who like to pretend they’re not and they hide behind a page and a profile picture that’s been Photoshopped five ways from Friday. Like I said, I met some real cool people there, but there’s a lot of freaks and weirdos there that I’m guessing don’t function too well in a little place I like to call, “the real world.” And I’m not talking about the MTV show either.
So anyway, I would take breaks now and again, but I always came back. And finally the day arrived. My book was done! It was called, “The Boy Who Would Be A Fire Truck” and I was publishing it on the Lulu website. Basically Lulu is a place that prints and sells your book on demand. People can go there, order the book, Lulu prints it and sends it to the buyer, they make money and I get a royalty fee. My strategy was to promote it on MySpace and my email list. By now I had added some more people to my friends list and it was over 100. And most of them were people that read my blogs and had told me they loved my writing. I figured they would all buy the book and then tell people they knew to buy it. If I could get a little grassroots success, that might lead to some press.
So I wrote a blog about my book, got lots of positive comments and then something funny happened. Hardly anyone bought the book. I guess it really isn’t that funny. It’s weird is what it is. And the weirdest thing of all was people were telling me they had bought the book, when they didn’t buy it! Lulu doesn’t tell you who buys your books, but they do give you a daily count of how many you sell and what your royalties are. One day at least five people told me they ordered the book, but no sales were recorded for that day. I can understand someone not buying the book, but I just couldn’t wrap my head around someone telling me they bought it and clearly they didn’t. Were they that stupid that I wouldn’t know they didn’t buy one, or was it their way of fucking with me? Because a lot of mind-fucking goes on on MySpace. So I learned one lesson: You’re not going to sell books on MySpace.
After that I backed away from MySpace and tried to think of another project to do. I published two novelty magazines on Lulu called Natalie Word, which I knew had no real commercial potential, it was more for my own amusement (although I did get one decent piece of press out of it, if I may toot my own horn and whoops, I just did.)
One day I read about a woman who had started a website about her personal life and after seven years she was making close to a million dollars a year from advertisements on it. The website is called Dooce and she posts pictures of her dogs, family and writes amusing and sometimes painfully honest tales about being a mother. She’s been called the Erma Bombeck of this decade and like I said, she makes a ton of money doing this. I looked at her website and decided that I would make the grand leap from print to the internet.
A friend of mine at work found a hosting site that makes it really easy to build nice looking, unique website. Even a moron who has never built a website could make it work. Which was good, because I was a moron who had never built a website.
So I started working on it. I decided to call it The Marty Wombacher Show. That way if it became successful, it would brand my name. Plus, I have to be honest, I like seeing my name attached to things. Most writers do, but won’t admit it. I have no shame, so I admit it. I thought I’d set it up with different categories and if you’re reading this, you know all about it, so I’m not going to get into it.
The one thing I thought was that MySpace people wouldn’t buy a book, but surely they would go to my website, it’s free after all. All I wanted was clicks on my tracker. I’ve heard that the magic number of unique visitors is 100,000 a month. While it sounds like a lot, if you can get people going and they tell people and you get some kind of press, it could happen. And people on MySpace were already on the computer, I’d just put up a link and one click and boom, they’re at my website.
By this time some friends of mine had started facebook pages and encouraged me to go there too. So I did. While I was building and thinking of ideas for my website I started a facebook page. Just like MySpace I added some friends and before I knew it, I had over 200 “friends.” And I was getting some decent amount of comments to things I was putting up there. So there was a whole new potential crop for my website. Between MySpace and facebook I had close to 400 “friends.” Even if only half would start visiting my website and told their friends and people they work with, it could take off real quick. And like I wrote earlier, it was free and these people seemed to be online 24/7 anyway. Why wouldn’t they check out my website?
Well, that’s an answer I never found out. By the time I got my website together, I was a merely a shadow in MySpace land. A lot of people had left and there wasn’t much activity over there. But I still thought I would get some traffic. I was really counting on people from facebook to get the numbers moving. After all, I could put up a status update about putting up my shower curtain and get close to fifty comments. So they were sure to love the show I was planning. And they were online anyway.
So the day came, and I started my website on May 4th of this year. I announced it on MySpace and facebook and sent out an email to close to three hundred people on my list. The first day I got over 200 unique visitors and I was thrilled. Then the next day I had 99 unique visitors and was a little disappointed. Then the third day came and I had 37 unique visitors and I was suicidal.
This website is a whole story unto itself, but I realize now why I didn’t get the numbers and some mistakes I have made. I think there was actually too much stuff going on and I’ve realized other mistakes I’ve made here. I’ve learned some lessons and when I do something and it more or less fails, I try and learn from the failure and move on. Which I’m doing, and which is why I’m just updating this twice a week now. I have a new website I’m debuting January 4th, so we’ll see what happens with that. If at first you don’t succeed...buy some Mega Millions tickets. It’s a cruel world out there. Anyway, back to the subject of this diatribe, social sites.
One weird thing that happened was that not only did I not get much traffic from MySpace and facebook, it appeared like some people didn’t like me doing this. I would put up links on MySpace and put up a blog and people might comment about it on MySpace, but not at my website. And if you do a website, you live for comments, because it shows people you have an audience and an active one at that. And people on MySpace know that. So I found it strange that people would take the time to leave me comments and pictures on my MySpace page, but not at my website.
And kind of like when people told me they had bought my book, but never did, people would tell me they just didn’t have the time to go there. Which really got to me too. Because someone would take the time to say that to me in a comment and post a picture on my MySpace profile page, why didn’t they take that time and go to my website instead? Very weird. So I got frustrated and dumped my MySpace page. Goodbye MySpace!
I then decided to promote my website heavily on facebook. People there seemed more normal and maybe if I tried there, I could build an audience. But once again, I failed. And again, it was a little weird, because I would post a silly status update and get a ton of comments, but anytime I posted a link to my website, I would just get a smattering of comments. And some of them would leave comments on facebook, but not at the website. Some people did leave comments here, but it was just a handful out of over 200 people.
A couple weeks after I started the website a woman from facebook sent me an email asking why I wasn’t posting as many status updates as I once did. She said she missed them. I responded by telling her I had my own website and if she wanted to read stuff by me, there was plenty there. She emailed back saying that you don’t get an avatar when you leave a comment and it wasn’t the same as facebook. I learned right there and then that promoting your own website doesn’t work on a social site at all. Be it MySpace or facebook or whatever. The whole thing reminded me of something that David Johansen told me years ago.
A friend of mine was friends with David Johansen and his (now ex) wife, photographer Kate Simon. She had given David some copies of my magazine fishwrap because he’s really into magazines. And much to my delight he loved fishwrap and told my friend if we were free to come see him that Saturday at the Bottom Line where he was doing a Buster Poindexter show. So we went and after the show we went backstage and my friend introduced me and we started talking and he asked me how it was going with the magazine. I told him okay, that I had gotten some press and the magazine was a little cult hit. But I told him it was weird, none of my friends subscribed or bought the magazine. And that’s when he gave me a little advice that is so true. He told me when the New York Dolls were critics darlings, they were broke and then he said this magic line: “You can’t count on your friends to buy your records and when they finally do, you don’t need them anymore.” Is that a great line or what? And it’s true. You need strangers to buy your product, because your friends won’t. I learned that with my Idiot Trivia game. I had people tell me to my face it was the stupidest thing they had ever seen when it first came out. Some people were almost vicious about it. But three months later after we got written about on a national wire and were on the Today Show, those same people told me I was a genius and they had bought copies for friends from out of town. But I didn’t need them anymore, strangers and people I would never meet were buying the game across the country and I learned how phony people could be. Cue the Grass Roots song, “Where Were You When I Needed You?”
So the lesson I learned is that you can’t promote product on social sites and they can chew away time faster than a dog that’s ate a bowlful of amphetamines. I would waste hours scrolling around on facebook, making goofy status updates, leaving comments. looking at people’s pictures and suddenly I would realize I had just lost three hours of my life, that I would never get back. I would feel guilty for wasting so much time and would swear it would never happen again. But it did. Over and over. I’ve realized that what can happen on facebook, MySpace and really about anything online, you can get lost in it and it gives you the illusion that you are doing something, but all you’re doing is nothing. And you’re really not thinking. But you’re typing and scrolling, so you get a false illusion that you’re accomplishing something.
A week ago I had dinner with a friend and we were talking about the internet and how you can get sucked into it. I told her I felt like dumping my facebook page, but sure enough later on that night there I was, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling...Rawhide! The next day I was going out for dinner and beers with my cousin and some of his friends. He called and said he was running late, so I went to my computer and went to my old time-wasting friend, facebook. I scrolled down and then was hit by this status update: “I’m having Mexican food tonight.” That was it. “I’m having Mexican food tonight.” Nothing more, nothing less, “I’m having Mexican food tonight.”
Now I can be fairly obsessive and I read this about fifty times and wondered what possessed this woman to put this up. And granted, I’ve put up my share of stupid-ass status updates, but there was something about this one. I mean it wasn’t even a proper sentence. Not to get all copy editor on the person who posted it, but it should’ve read: “I’m having Mexican food for dinner tonight.” And she could’ve spiced it up a little. How about, “I’m having Mexican food for dinner tonight and I just shaved my pussy.” That would’ve caused a little bit of a stir! But no, it was just “I’m having Mexican food tonight.” Congratulations sweetheart, you’ve just misproved Newton’s law of motion: “To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Because there really is no reaction to: “I’m having Mexican food tonight,” other than possibly a yawn.
I went out that night, came home and typed in a one word status update that said, “Bye.” The next day I got up and deleted my page and felt like a weight had been lifted.
And I’m not trying to be all high and mighty and say I’m above all this, because I’m not. I got sucked in and I wasted a lot of time essentially accomplishing nothing. But that’s just me, if social sites are your thing, more power to you. As John Lennon once sang, “Whatever gets you through the night.”
You say you’re having Mexican food tonight? May I suggest a flaming bowl of look out the window and try to get a life for dessert? Bon Appetit!
