Fate & Fortune | t o n y t h a r p . n e t

With eight years of experience of winter in my section of the North Carolina mountains, you’d have thought I’d seen every version of cold this section of country could offer.

It ain’t so.

There’s cold and then there’s 2025 cold. So, yea, it’s been cold this year and cold during the tail end of 2024. Lots of cold to go around.

North Dakota cold.

But maybe some of it is my older bones. The late 70s tug on a man the way the late 60s haven’t yet learned about. In your late 60s, given a bit of luck, you occasionally can feel young and even carefree.

I can’t remember the last time I felt carefree.

My motorcycle hasn’t been out of the basement in two months, and, looking ahead, I don’t see a day on my calendar with temps anywhere near warm enough to break that gloomy streak.

You gotta account for sickness in all that. For 23 days I wallowed in the Asheville hospital with a collapsed heart, a superbug infection that go-carted through my blood like freaks on Fentanyl. I had the flu, the blues and no appetite.

I came out the other end weighing 20 pounds less than when I went in, battered, beaten, bruised. Alive.

Life. It’s a pisser.

After years of an off-on abusive relationship with Facebook, I left that social media wasteland for good a few days before the second inauguration of Donald Trump on Jan. 20, 2025.

I wasn’t the only one.

The nation’s billionaires had begun obsequious pilgrimages to the Dark Lord’s Florida castle. Among those eager to kiss the Lord’s ring was Mark Elliott Zuckerberg of Facebook. For me that was the final straw.

That, however, goes against the tide. Facebook and its associate platforms — Instagram, WhatsAp, Messenger and so on, are growing concerns. Facebook reportedly has some 2.11 billion daily users worldwide — a number that climbs roughly 5 percent every year.

Even if half of those are spam or fake accounts, that still leaves lots of real users. Facebook has reported deleting nearly a billion fake accounts in a single year — 2023. Still, it’s the largest social media site in the world. Bluesky and other competitors aren’t even close.

Despite all that, I’m outa here when it comes to Facebook. And, no, I don’t expect my personal protest against the platform to mean anything.

Leaving, though, has brought. up a dilemma: Years of work as a newspaper reporter and editor has left me conditioned — for better or worse — to the desire or need to keep a written record of my mental and physical comings and goings.

This website is an effort to continue that habit. While I don’t necessarily want to discourage visitors, there will be little to nothing posted here to interest anyone other than myself.