I don't know what kids do nowadays, but around the turn of the 90's, me and Alex and Lenny and a bunch of other friends used to hang out at a place called South Mimms Services on the M25. It was a 24 hour service station on a motorway intersection, just outside of London. Probably still is, I don't know. Haven't been there in years.
The good thing about Mimms was that you could turn up at any time of night, buy a little pot of the worst filter coffee in the land and then sit around a formica table smoking endless cigarettes (in those days you were allowed to smoke in public places) and talking shit till the break of dawn.
We'd all pile into whoever's it was's car.. we'd just got our licences and could practice reckless driving on the dark country roads out of Barnet (in those days there weren't any speed cameras) .. with the Pink Floyd turned up loud, we'd head out to Mimms. It became a kind of Mecca to us. A legendary, mythical, holy place – almost.
All kinds of people would pass through there in the middle of the night. Truck drivers. Police and ambulance crews. People in fancy dress, ball-gowns, tuxedos, football shirts. Insomniacs. Hitch-hikers.
I can't remember what we ever talked about. Maybe once or twice we figured out the meaning of life and then forgot it. We had a surreal game of chess we'd play using whatever was on the table.. coffee cups, plastic milk pods, cigarettes, lighters, teaspoons.. (not mobile phones, nobody had those yet..) There were no rules to the game, but there kind of were. It was kind of known what they were, though nobody could quite say. It was understood.
Sometimes we'd meet people we knew. Sometimes we'd have random conversations with random people. Mainly we'd talk among ourselves in our own unique little coffee fuelled bubble.. in this unreal place where time had no end – at the crossroads of the A1 (the great northern road built by the Romans) and the M25 motorway which encircles London.. maybe we knew we were at the crossroads of life too..
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That was nearly 30 years ago now. Since then we've gone our various ways. Alex is in India. I'm in Israel. Lenny's in England. The others are here and there. Scattered about. I see them on facebook, some of them, if not in real life. There's something somehow comforting in knowing that they're still there..
The other day, Alex posted on facebook that he's leaving. Leaving facebook, that is. Some people do that.. announce that they're going, hoping that others will follow their example, and then disappear. Others just disappear. Sometimes they reappear months later. Other times they don't.
I can't say I was surprised by Alex's (shock!!!) announcement. It wasn't the first time. Everyone knew about his scorn for the evil facebook by now. And we knew that he was right and we should all probably leave too..
One person did ask why, and he replied 'I don't know who 80% of my friends are.'
With me, it's more like 95%, as I have a habit of occasionally sending out friend requests to hundreds of guitar players, in the name of 'networking', in the hope of selling a guitar. That was the reason I let myself be convinced to join facebook in the first place, even against all my better judgement and intuition. Not that I regret it – even though it's mostly been a complete waste of time, I've made some very real friends and close connections with people I never would have met otherwise...
But his comment made me stop and think, 'Yes, he's right. I'm surrounded by people I hardly know and people I don't know at all. Why am I wasting my time here, being influenced by all sorts of people with all sorts of funny ideas..? Why do I even care what any of them think of me, or about anything..? I could disappear right now and nobody would even notice I'd gone.. at least for the first month or two.. then one or two people might pause to wonder...'
Hey, did you notice Lenny hasn't posted anything for a while..?
Maybe it was seeing his post then that made me notice I hadn't seen him on facebook recently. Lenny posted a beautiful, dark and moody seascape photograph along with the (truly shocking!!!) announcement that he'd suffered a heart attack a month ago – along with the better news that he was recovering and had decided to take up photography.
Had it not been for facebook, I probably wouldn't have heard. I never was one for keeping in touch. None of us really are, but that doesn't mean we don't care.
Had it not been for facebook...
Sure, we wouldn't have given away every shred of personal information and privacy to the most sophisticated data gathering, spying network ever created, run by people who would sell your very soul to anyone willing to pay cash...
But then suddenly it hit me.. the realisation dawned on me of what facebook really is.. what we're ultimately doing here..
Facebook is (virtual) South Mimms!
Oh yes it is.
Of course, we all knew that Mimms was a place with no soul. A corporate blotch in an asphalt wasteland. A nowhere place of flourescent lights and petrol fumes where for a minimum wage you could dish out all day breakfasts all night to an endless flow of sleepless humanity. We knew the coffee was the worst coffee in the land. It didn't matter.
On a busy night, there was a buzz about the place. Conversations would arch between tables – cigarettes, jokes, stories, passed between strangers, passing through.
Just like facebook – a dismal corporate construct - a place with no soul – and yet, a meeting place of souls. A holy place, in it's way..
..well, maybe that's taking it a bit far.
At any rate, when it comes to talking shit with old friends or random people, or even just drinking coffee and listening into other people’s conversations, there's really nowhere else like it.