I might actually mean it this time.

How many times have I threatened to leave Facebook? How many times have I caved in and gone back? This time might stick.

For the record, I have never liked Facebook. Search this blog and you’ll find more than a few posts where I’ve bashed Facebook in one way or another. (Here’s an example from January.) While I will admit that it is a great place to reconnect with people from your past and keep in touch with people you know and like who might not live nearby, it has recently become a tool for the spread of misinformation, helping to divide our country — as if it needed any help. Even after unfollowing or unfriending or even blocking the folks with crazy ideas, there seems to be more arguments on update comments than anything else. It’s also depressing when you realize just how crazy some of your friends or even family members can be.

But what became the last straw back in February was when Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and the guy who gets a healthy chunk of Facebook’s revenue, donated $120,000 to CPAC. CPAC, if you don’t know, is the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual event where right-wing blowhards bash progressives and liberals for being…well, progressive and liberal. Normally I wouldn’t care much about this event, but this year it had made the news by proudly inviting Milo Yiannopoulos, a person who makes his living by publicly trolling people he doesn’t like on Twitter (until he was banned, anyway), Breitbart News (where he was a staff member), and elsewhere. Apparently there’s a lot of money in the trolling and hate speech business because an imprint of Simon & Schuster had signed a book deal with him for an advance of $250,000. I guess the folks at CPAC like the crap Milo was selling because they were welcoming him as a speaker, despite the fact that he’s gay (which I always thought conservatives had a problem with). I have no patience for trolls of any sort and I think that giving credibility to someone like Milo will only further the divide that is destroying our country.

The way I saw it, my participation on Facebook was generating the content and activity that Facebook uses to sell ads. In a way, part of that $120,000 donation made by Zuckerberg to CPAC was coming out of my pocket. I didn’t like that. So I posted a link to the Media Matters article I linked to above on my Timeline, informing my friends and followers that I was out of there. Then I logged off from everywhere I was logged in — there’s actually a link buried in Facebook settings to do that — deleted all the cookies in my browser so Facebook couldn’t follow me around anymore, and deleted the Facebook app from my mobile devices.

I suffered from withdrawal for about two days. Then I pretty much forgot about it. I did step up my Twitter use a bit. I’m enjoying the political activism there. One of my recent tweets to [so-called] President Trump went viral and was mentioned in a magazine article. That was kind of fun.

I’m in California now, helping out a friend with a few spray jobs he has and doing some recreational flying now that my helicopter is out of overhaul. (I’m going to Lake Berryessa today, hopefully to see its “Glory Hole.”) I’m also trying to set up a lunch date with my friend Shirley, who lives in the Sacramento area. She and I usually get in touch on Facebook — frankly, she’s one of the people I miss from Facebook — and I wanted to see if I’d missed a message from her. (I never used Facebook Messenger on don’t plan on starting.) So I logged in today.

No message from Shirley, but two messages from friends. One was a link to a neat airport home in Bisbee, where I’d recently visited with friends. The other was spam from a new “friend” who I’m starting to think is an idiot who needs to be unfriended. There were also 57 notifications that I looked at. I started to follow up on them, but grew bored and discouraged after just a few. Same old shit. Seriously. This person liked this. That person commented on that. These people liked that page. I realized, with a start, that I really didn’t care about the notifications. And when I found myself reading an update written by one of my friends, I realized that I could easily get sucked back in anyway. So I logged out.

I’m not going to try to convince anyone to stop using Facebook. I know it’s a waste of my time but it’s apparently not a waste of other people’s time. Besides: who am I to tell people how to spend their time, which is the most valuable thing they have?

But I’m so glad to be off Facebook and I really hope I can stay that way.

Oh, and in case you missed the news, Milo lost that CPAC speaking gig, book deal, and Breibart job.

Karma, baby. It rocks.