Mindless scrolling leads bad places

Someone unexpectedly popped up in my social media feed last week, on a platform relatively new to me, so I pay little attention to what I do on it.

I was busy eating my fifth grape popsicle for dinner. I’ve had the house to myself for weeks and, without my daughters here saying what I do wrong, I’ve reverted to practicing the daily habits of a 9-year-old boy.

So my popsicles and I were ruining our eyesight sitting two feet from the television, watching Speed Racer, wearing a KISS shirt and scrolling on my computer because, even if I reverted to 1976, I still need to know what all my 1,183 Facebook friends - some of whom I haven’t seen since 1976 - are doing at this precise moment 50 years later.

As usual, while visiting various Internet places, I eventually forgot exactly where I was geographically and what year it really was..

If you know, please call.

Without warning, up popped the feed belonging to someone with whom I’ve associated strong feelings in extreme emotional directions going both ways in the past, over some years. Pick an emotional direction and we’ve been there.

That was a complicated way of saying we had a relationship.

Unlike other relationships I’ve had - Salma Hayek, for example, who shows how badly she misses me by pretending to not know me - this person and I usually end up landing in the vicinity of Crazyville, USA.

Well, we did. We haven’t spoken in a couple years. This was all a relatively long time ago, in a galaxy not far, far away at all.

Seeing her back then sometimes generated that feeling you had in fourth grade when encountering at recess the classmate you’d decided was the smartest, funniest, talented, most beautiful human being in the whole universe, which you conveyed to her by throwing a rock at her face.

Do that in middle age and suddenly security guards and lawyers get involved and before you know it, the Strait of Hormuz is closed.

When my brain processed the surprise sighting which - like natives on a 1950s Pacific atoll suddenly seeing hydrogen bomb shock waves speeding toward them - I did not seek.

So I automatically moved to close the page … but not before hitting the little heart-button without thinking. Which kind of sums up the entire relationship.

“Uh … What the &@$% did I just do?”

The page then smugly disappeared, as if it got what it came for and was done. I could hear it cackling maniacally far away.

My brain shifted into hyperspace, where I calculated possible outcomes should any one of approximately 30,000 people see that.

A red heart.

I regretted not rigging my computer to explode powerfully enough to destroy us both, in case this ever happened. I don’t actually know if that’s possible, but I know a guy with an awesome set of tools.

I, of course, know various versions of the little emoji deals mean different things. My smirking children have told me this while refusing to disclose what I may have just texted someone.

This person happened to be the first human I ever texted those eMoby, eMoreCheese things to because … she started it. That’s when you know you’re in trouble - when you purposely don’t use emojis because you’re pretending to still have dignity, yet one text exchange has you frantically searching for the cutest land animal framed by a rainbow.

I just looked up “emoji” because I didn’t want people to laugh at me in case they changed the name and forgot to call me (which happens all the time). I discovered there’s actually something called “Emojipedia” that, among other things, tells you what they mean.

Well, I’m not entirely stupid. I knew what it meant.

But it means other related things that aren’t so embarrassing. Which may help.

When I was 16, I sent my then-girlfriend flowers of mixed colors, which I thought was rather creative, but earned me a stern talking to (warning) about the meanings of various colored flowers.

That was in the 80s’ Now we call them “Flowers of various colors.”

Of course, I was supposed to send her blue flowers. Which, in the case of roses, must be white roses dyed blue. I honestly had no idea sending flowers was as complicated as putting a man on the moon.

Nevertheless, I always sent blue flowers afterward. I believed I’d learned the secret of life: Dye everything blue when it comes to women.

Right. That quickly went bad.

So back here in whatever year this is, I went to bed and reviewed the situation. Instead of mindlessly scrolling (note lesson there) before bedtime, I should’ve been reading the excellent book next to my bed I’m taking too long to finish. We see books in the wild and immediately get excited, as if buying them automatically dumps the pages directly into our brains, without accounting for the time it takes reading them.

I fear I’ve become a scroller. Scrolling is about as useful as collecting Beanie Babies and really should be avoided, especially when a smug, galactic force with a twisted sense of humor is out there, controlling what we encounter to see how we’ll react.

Anyway, there was no reaction. I can go back to eating my popsicles and finding the next person to throw a rock at on the playground.

My daughters have a dad to feed, so please consider paying $8 a month to read these columns. Find more nonsense in Tony’s book “Lying Drunk,” available from Barnes & Noble at https://bit.ly/46xoaJJ or Amazon at https://a.co/d/cYNCUPp).