A woodsy young man forsakes Facebook. . .

No more pondering-the-meaning-of-life status updates. No more party photos of questionable taste. No more “two people like this” under his latest social announcements.

My elder son is gone.

Gone, gone, gone.

Gone are our amusing strings of back-and-forths containing pseudo-hip inanities and in-jokes. Gone are email announcements that “Steev N. Lee has commented on your photo.” And gone are shots of him hiking, laughing, making faces.

Gone, gone, gone.

Anywhere Steven’s name does exist on Facebook, it does not exist in blue – meaning I can’t just click through to hundreds of adorable connections to his young and precious adulthood, and reminders of his verve and whacked sense of humour.

This is a situation I could not let rest. The boy currently lives in a cabin at the end of his mother’s driveway, so Kathy is a good source of all things Steven. “He’s cancelled me as a friend!” I cried into the telephone. “How could he do such a thing?”

After she had stopped laughing and picked herself up from the floor, Kathy explained that Steven had had a very bad night.

He couldn’t sleep. He tossed a set of drums out of the cabin and into the wild. The futon followed. He headed up to the couch at the house at 6 a.m., whereupon he began making everyone else’s life miserable.

The thought crossed my mind that he was much kinder than this on Facebook. Maybe there are aspects of his life and personality I can’t pick up in status updates and photo galleries and quiz results. Aspects he inherited from his mother.

Speaking of which, his mother had a theory. Perhaps your adorable lad decided, in the midst of his tantrum, that he didn’t like having his dad as a friend anymore, she suggested. “This is cracking me up,” she continued. “I have to go before I laugh out a lung. You made my day. Cancelled from Facebook. Hilarious!”

She was always so considerate.

Much self analysis followed. Was it my overall lack of hipness that cost me my friend status? Was I too fatherly? Or was Steven just sick of my keeping tabs on him? “He cancelled me, too,” his brother Joe finally reported. “I think he cancelled everyone. Quit Facebook completely.”

A little later, Steven contacted me the old fashioned way: via email. “I'm only accessible by email, phone and telegraph now,” he wrote. “Did you really think it was personal? Sorry, but I do find that funny. Here's the deal: I deleted everybody as a friend from Facebook. Myself included. I Deleted Facebook From My Life. “I figure, when in the middle of the woods, do as the middle-of-the-woodsians do. Will you ever re-add me as a friend in real life?”

I repressed the urge to lecture him. But if I hadn’t repressed that urge, I would have explained the technological facts of life. We, as in his parents, must have forgotten to do that when he was an adolescent, with technological inklings racing through his blood like confusing hormones.

Facebook, I would have told him, is pretty well the social networking pinnacle, these days. Sure, there’s Twitter, but it’s not replacing Facebook because it does different things.

Each advancement is piled upon the shoulders, diodes, nanotubes and plastic mouldings of its predecessors. Black-and-white TVs with horizontal hold problems begat colour TVs with built in record players begat projection televisions begat massive flat screens the width of entire walls in home entertainment centres.

Letters, phones, fax machines, mobile phones in suitcases, the Internet, email, smaller phones, phones with cameras, phones with email. Blu-ray machines teeter atop old-style DVD machines and VCRs.

Life is a great big mountain of this crap, son. And you can’t climb down the technological mountain. It’s far too dangerous. When something becomes antiquated and uncool, you use it as a foothold to launch yourself ever higher.

This is our destiny. It’s what we humans do.

Eventually everything will crumble into a post-apocalyptic, sci-fi world, but until that happens we gotta keep getting new three-year plans, new machines and new gadgets in our cars.

We must let our computers update mysterious software before they shut off. We must wave at washroom taps to make them flow. We must scan and weigh our own groceries, so the store can layoff some pimply kid standing in the way of progress.

We must keep climbing, son. We just must.

Steven has a different take on things. “I didn’t do it for any reason,” he told me. “I was just wandering into my settings, burning another afternoon away, and, alighting on the Deactivate Account button, I thought to myself, huh. What if? “Then, what the heck. Loosen the bonds, doncha know.”

I was still stunned. “How are you coping?” I asked. “Coping with gusto. Just sent a short story out to be judged in the Okanagan Short Story Contest. Keeping myself immersed in my art. And whaddaya know. Email is cool again!”

Indeed. But is that a creaking sound I hear from deep within the mountain of technological crap?

George Lee lives, writes and edits atop a broken VCR, three old cell phones and a Nintendo Home Entertainment System in Edmonton. Reach him at piecesofgeorge@featureswest.com.