This morning, I was looking through my Facebook memories, and I came across a rather bizarre one. On this day in 2012, I have a very strange dream that I decided to go back to graduate school and earn a third master’s degree. But to get to the town where the school was, we had to drive through an abandoned town that had a bunch of kitschy stuff in it. It looked like it was something out of a horror film.
A former Facebook friend, who was still friends in 2012, wrote that he, too, had a strange dream that night. It involved the late Beatrice Arthur, you know– Dorothy Zbornak on The Golden Girls. This dude dreamt that he’d had sex with her, and she had smeared blue eyeshadow all over her nipples!
I asked him if she was living or dead when they had their encounter. He said she was still living, at which I expressed relief, since sex with a dead Bea Arthur would have been truly odd. I don’t think it occurred to me to ask him if Bea was young or old during their tryst. My guess is that he had sex with the Golden Girls version of Bea, since that was the character he related her to when he’d described his dream to me.
A few years ago, this guy– not someone I knew personally, but someone I “met” on the Recovery from Mormonism messageboard, decided to unfriend a lot of people. He said it was mostly because of his ex wife stalking him and invading his privacy. Apparently, one of his “friends” was a mole, passing along his postings to his ex wife, who then tried to use them in their custody dispute. Because of this violation of trust from a “friend” who turned out to be a stool pigeon, my former friend decided that he could no longer trust most of his social media contacts.
I was one of the people he unfriended, which to be honest, wasn’t that much of a hardship for me. I didn’t know the guy very well, aside from a few conversations we had on social media. He had seemed like a nice person… a proud father of a couple of young boys. Though he was American, he lived in Norway, which was where he’d done a Mormon mission in the 1990s. He’s fluent in Norwegian and was once married to a local, but they later divorced. According to my former Facebook friend, his ex wife is a jealous, petty, vindictive bitch who won’t leave him alone. So that forced him to go “underground” and unfriend people he doesn’t know personally.
I can relate to my old friend’s need to “hide”. I’ve felt that way myself over the past year or so. There are people out there invading my privacy and violating my trust, too, although my situation doesn’t involve minor children or ex spouses, nor do I think I’m in any actual danger. In my case, it’s more of an annoyance than anything else. At the time this guy disassociated with me, I couldn’t relate to his situation. I can, now. I definitely have some empathy.
I haven’t really missed this guy’s presence on my social media… although I think if we were friends today, I would ask him to tell me more about his thoughts regarding Bea Arthur and the blue eye shadow he dreamt was all over her nipples. I love a good discussion about weird dreams. Today’s featured photo even kind of looks like an areola, too.