Good Reads and missing Flea

On Monday, I got an email from Tinny asking me to join her as a friend on the Good Reads site. Every here and again I will get a friend or family member asking me to join them on some social networking site and I always say no. Not cause I'm a jerk but because I don't want to expend energy on keeping up with it. My days seem short enough and I rarely, if ever, go to bed wishing I would have spent more time online. I prefer to keep in touch via email and phone calls and I find many of the social networking sites to be a very insincere way of communicating. I have a My Space account and I check in on it about once every month or so. I have thought of deleting my account on many occasions, but I do like to spend 15 minutes every now and then catching up on what my more distant friends on My Space are doing (as I only have my actual friends of mine as "Friends"). A little catch up, and then I'm off to go play outside.

Upon receiving the Good Reads invite from Tinny, my inner whiner started to crank up. "Jesus" it wheezed "another one of these stupid sties that will suck up my time and I will never check my profile and how can I possibly fit this kind of crap into my day? I have dishes to do and financial aid to find so I can go to school, I don't have time for this shit."

As a gesture of good will (and because I love Tinny) I went to the website to at least look at what it was about. It's a website where you build a personal book list. You list stuff you've read, stuff you want to read, and give little mini reviews. It will recommend similar books and when you get some friends, you share books and thoughts about books. Well, being an avid reader, the kind that would blow off going out with friends to finish a good book, I loved this site!! I don't know what the hell happened, but it triggered this excitement and kid like need to blow off everything and read fiction all the time. I started to compile my list of well loved books and write little reviews and the next thing I knew, it was two hours later and I have a huge pile of books on my virtual "already read" shelf. That was two hours I was supposed to spend creating a training manual for the kids who are going to be taking over my job, but it was so much more fun to talk about books!

I pine for the days where I had time to read for hours on end. I could probably find some more of that time if I stopped talking to people, completely ceased housekeeping (or hired a cleaning lady, something that I long to afford) stopped working and blew off planning my wedding. Plus, I'm so busy trying to know so many things that I have relegated myself to reading lots of nonfiction in the four or five minutes before going to sleep at night. Needless to say these days it takes a long time to read anything and I end up feeling kind of gypped. I want the cake of my nerdy bookworm life and to eat the joy of my currently life too.

While I was madly filling out review after review of delicious book after book on my new Good Reads profile, I started to miss Flea. Flea is the bass player for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. For those of you who have known me since high school, you will remember a time where I was entirely obsessed with the RHCP and was pretty sure they were writing entire albums just for me (specifically Blood Sugar Sex Magick). Every interview in every magazine I could get my mittens on was like gospel to me. At one point or another, each individual band member became my personal messiah. One interview featured a photo spread showing Flea lying on his back with a copy of "Jitterbug Perfume" next to him and he talked about how he loved that book and why. I had just read this wonderful novel myself and took it to be a sign that he and I were forever bonded.

Over the years, as I have replaced rock star obsessions with neato discoveries of me, the obsession with Flea and the RHCP has faded into laughable memory. Then came Fleamail. While on tour touting the By The Way album, Flea checked in with fans via the band website with his Fleamail. Day after day he would talk about the cool stuff he got to see and experience while on tour and he would always talk about what he was reading. I have found so many of the books he read and liked to be books I read and liked. He had such a great way of talking about books that I found myself obsessed again. I couldn't wait to get another recommendation from him. I read and loved every book he wrote about.

That was many years ago. He has since made a new album and on that tour was busy being in love with his wife and new baby. Gone were his book recommendations in his Fleamail. In their place were beautiful tidbits about hiking in the forest with his baby strapped onto his back or his tribute to Patti Smith or his devotion to Ornette Coleman. I can't blame him, I'm in love with Goat and when we have a baby (eventually) I won't read much either; I love Tom Waits and write about him all the time and will be writing about wedding plans and going to college for the first time at the age of 36. I understand that life comes in waves and each one you catch is a different part of the ride. On my current wave I'll get my book fix from the friends I make on Good Reads.

I just miss Fleamail.