As it would turn out, my little poll/slash/experiment/foray into the psyche of vox populi yielded a plurality of votes for the Facebook Defriending option. I knew that was going to happen. Here’s why.

• Raging about my fellow man’s unwavering interest in astrology involves me cutting on them.
• Yammering about the obscene, discrepant chasms in shaving tech involves me—cutting on myself.
• Facebook schisms involve people cutting on each other.

So, on the meat-market of unprovoked polemics, you get the greatest dollar-to-pound benefits. Plus, there is something slightly sick and inherent, hoping to see some cloistered, robed-out pseudo-Ceasar give a thumbs-down to the bedraggled gladiator class, what with their “likes” spears and “comments” maces, and defriending machetes sitting there at the ready.

Of course, this vote is comprised of nineteen people only. But nine of you are sick.

But as promised, I’m going to lay out my:

 Top Ten Ways To Get De-Friended From Facebook:

1) Keep reposting that stupid meme that starts with “no one reads my wall.”

Right out of the gate, you’re the Star Trek equivalent of a red shirt—those dispensable characters from the show that were guaranteed to get killed. I’m saying that because, by now–NO ONE believes you did anything but cut and paste an antediluvian lament that would otherwise place you outside the city walls in the leper’s camp, decrying your interpersonal persecution-by-shunning. Also, when the requirement for me to respond to your petition also means I have to paste the same generic lament on my page, I’m doing a D.B. Cooper over our Facebooking interfaces. Peace out!

2) Keep it up with the cat memes

I’m telling you right now. I don’t like cats. I won’t exactly say I have a vociferous, reflexive hatred for them, but I see no good in them. It’s bad enough that they are the ONE pet owned by others that are allowed to roam free in my yard, tear up my work shed blankets, and bear kittens on the wheel well of my dormant vehicle. And somehow, some sick, United Nations level of perverse diplomacy has guaranteed that I somehow become the problem when I raise an objection of any kind. Any animal that has this amount of ambassadorship for its vices needs to stay off my Facebook wall. Because, after I’ve chased away nine of them from my yard, as well as scooped the vile, acidic poop out of my flower bed, I don’t need my life  goals and chirpy, optimistic points-of-departure underscored by a cat picture with a snarky observation.

3) Keep mocking things sacred to your friends that you’d never mock to their face

There’s something about the insular nature of Facebook that says, “hey, since my finds aren’t sitting right here, I’m going to post a meme that says their beliefs prove that they are complete inbreds!” Or, “wait till they see THIS poster that says they’re going straight to Hell, they’ll get it!”

In reality, an endless stream of these kinds of things starts to wear down even the most tolerant among us. I Have one friend in particular, whom I have been tempted to launch into the blue-and-white ether with his knawing, anything-but-clever broadsides about Jesus. For some reason I don’t. Even after a steady diet of blasphemous, baiting jeremiads about my Savior, I don’t do it. The very minute I stop by his work to see him, he’s nothing like that at all. But I do have to tell you, I am extraordinarily tolerant. He has worn a few down to the nubs WAY before I ever started to flag along Meekness Blvd.

Besides, if I de-friend him, I can’t tell him he’s going straight to . . . um, MySpace.

4) Keep re-posting every last thing you come across

If you’re the person that keeps my Facebook screen updating and scrolling like the giant Videoplex ticker in Times Square, you’re going to the “bad person” category. While it’s okay once in a while to be a relay point for the interesting and/or informative, it’s another to just become an indiscriminate salad-shooter, running up the click-counts like a senior gunner on the front lines of some major conflict. The more you keep on with the “rat-tat-tat” of shares and reposts, the less anyone will believe you’ve actually read them all the way through. In fact, sometimes you actually post really-horrific and borderline pornographic stuff and don’t even know it, because you never investigated anything past the feature photo in the link. Good job, reverend.

5) Post that Susan Boyle video one more time. I dare you!

I’m not saying that you have to be completely plugged into pop culture or anything to be on Facebook, but c’mon. by now, the Amish are chatting up a plethora of “unlikely and aesthetically unpleasing underdog meets Simon Cowell and blows him away with an out-of-left-field set of dulcet tones” videos. They are nearly every day. The only thing that changes is the volume on actual pathetic knob for each story–any day now, I expect that soldier from Johnny’s Got His Gun to be wheeled out to the stage, under an oxygen tent, and suddenly start banging out Metallica’s One on an Ibanez wired into a Marshall half-stack.

6) The Ice Bucket Challenge is over now. Please. Keep it that way.

If you’re the “turtle firefighter finally getting to the conflagration” type, just stop, please. Groundswells are more fun when you’re on the burgeoning side of them. Trying to ramp up a major grassroots movement that has already peaked is like running around a toy store yelling “HEY! YOU’VE GOT TO CHECK OUT THIS THING CALLED A RUBIK’S CUBE!”

7) That goes double for this GOLD AND WHITE dress.

It took this photo approximately four minutes to circumnavigate the entire planet, hit the parallels, and most likely infiltrate the darkest corner of North Korea. The discussion was over with the same expediency a guy with a sawdust suit is engulfed when opening a furnace door. Stop it now. You’re getting launched if I hear any more belated insanity about “blue and black.” I couldn’t stand it when it was vogue, I won’t stand for it now. I don’t need any sense-bringing dissertations about “perceptions” or “cones,” or anything else. I know what I see. And I see that dress is white and gold. The only thing that’s black and blue is your track record with me if you post this thing one more time.

8) Keep it up with the passive-aggressive shots-over-the-bow at someone “who knows who they are but I’m not going to name” in your status updates.

Chances are, if you’re the type of person that has to continually write “obviously-directed-but-my-target-shall-remain-anonymous” potshots at others, that you are an unmitigated tool, whom people only pretend to like for the purpose of fulfilling a social contract. This doesn’t mean you don’t have company, because a whole passel of idiots who have the “inside baseball” scoop on your epic-level of butt-hurted-ness will chime in with cacophonous harmony in the “you go get em, tiger!” and “Can I GET A WITNESS?” tenor and alto sections. Here’s the deal: if this IS you, then do us all a favor. Grab yourself a grip of the social-media Hemlock root and chew away. Come back when you can address people directly.

9) Selfies.

The infamous Stevie Selfie

I realize the very word has been adopted into even the rhetorical circles of those stuffy inbred members of the cognoscenti tasked with rendering new words for the Oxford English Dictionary. But I’m not decrying the word, I am decrying the deed. You know exactly what I mean. I’m not talking about those moments where you had no other option to do this, like the time I ran into Stevie Wonder’s ridiculously dense entourage at the NAMM show, and got “moved along” promptly. NO ONE was about to tolerate an impetuous cracker with a beanie running up on Mr. Superstition. No, I’m talking about you, Narcissus—and your inability to overcome your milk-trance fascination with your own visage.

10) Make every issue a segue into a marijuana legalization tirade

Look, I’ve already said here–that I could care less if you want to be a loadie.  But to charge into the anterooms of dialogue from the kitchen with a four-bud contact high and try to wrest everything government does as a Snowden-level conspiracy against you and your need to burn one is just lame. And so are you.  Quit treating pot like the stems cells from your own placenta.  It’s an herb. It makes you high.  It might help with nausea.  But apparently it must be smoked in a drum-circle for it to take effect.  Just chill, man.  I don’t want to have to harsh your mellow by dialing down your friend numbers.

Honorable Mentions

Food Pictures

Basically,this is the equivalent of you going over a loudspeaker, and saying “Guess what?  I’m going to put this biodegradable perishable into my stomach and digest it. Bet YOU think that is amazing, don’t you?” Quit. It.

Chemtrails

I know a few people who are always on about this.  I’ve no idea what they’re doing, or why they would do it, or what the supposed cropdusting is supposed to do to those of us down here. . . And now, it occurs to me,

• those guys up there also live down here
• Maybe this is a giant perpetual motion generator; chemtrails in the sky cause reflexes in others that make them want to photograph chemtrails.
• chemtrials also apparently make me want to defriend chemtrail people.