Facebook made me do it

Thanks to Facebook, and my so-called friends, I’m now an e-alcoholic.

Wait, wait, wait, you say. Well, explain, I will.

Anyone who has Facebook has been bombarded by an absurd amount of preposterous applications involving such heinous things as rate and compare your friends; become a vampire, zombie, pirate, ninja, jedi or sith; poke your friends or send your friends e-drinks.

It’s akin to the amount of religious propaganda being spewed upon those timidly making the trek from the Quad to the Taggart Student Center. Except, at least, the Facebook applications involve drinking, and, as far as I know, don’t determine my eternal damnation. At least they don’t have that application yet.

But, why not focus on the fun part – the drinking, and the eventual e-alcoholism it facilitated?

I guess it all started, like most drinking experiences, by peer pressure. Or it could have been that there were beers and whiskey drinks suddenly appearing on my Facebook page, as if they were manna from heaven. But I can’t remember the details because I’m too e-drunk at the moment.

They look so innocuous, just a small glass of beer, a small, urine-colored whiskey sour with a little maraschino cherry or a Long Island iced tea. It’s all OK. Until one Wednesday night when you decide to drink all your e-drinks at once and then go out and cruise the net and get an e-DUI and end up in the e-drunk tank with other irresponsible surfers.

I know that’s ridiculous, but it’s not as ridiculous as the concept of sending drinks to your friend over the Internet. If you are my friend – or even if you aren’t, I don’t care – and want to buy me a drink, just buy me a regular-ass drink. Last time I checked, an e-beer tastes pretty skunky and isn’t ever really cold enough to be refreshing.

But if you are looking, here’s a with list of quality products I would accept: Coors Light, Bud Light, Miller Lite, regular Budweiser, MGD, Coors Original – or if you want to be even cheaper – Pabst, Miller High Life, Busch Light, Natural Light, Bud Dry, Steel Reserve, Old English, Old Milwaukee, Olympia, Hamm’s or Canadian Host – in the plastic, drunk-proof bottle, please.

Another thing that troubles me with this whole e-drinking is when it will eventually lead to e-vomiting or e-hooking-up-with-people-uglier-or-fatter-than-you. If Facebook is going to be in the e-drinking business, they might as well do it right.

First, I’d say we nix the e-vomiting idea. Let’s just put a positive image of drinking out there – one with no projectile, reverse digestion – because that’s the opinion of drinking we’d want young, impressionable kids to get – no consequences here kids.

Without e-vomiting, we’re left with the hooking-up-with-uglier-or-fatter-people-than-you-after-a-night-of-e-drinking application. I’m not sure how it would work out, but first you’d have to find someone who actually remembers one of these real-life encounters, and pick their hazy, alcohol-addled memory for the gory details.

Then, the next logical step would be the awkward-morning-after application. This is where you can invite your friends – who have a Mack truck spinning brodies in their head after their e-fifth of Jack – to wake up to an e-version of you. Maybe that’s where the e-vomiting should come in.

Here’s a better idea, instead, you could pick someone for your e-friends to e-wake up next to. All my friends would get celebrities, like Rosie O’Donnell, Gary Busey, RuPaul, Crispin Glover or Mia Sara – wait, I’d love to wake up next to her, scratch that one and put in Charlize Theron from “Monster.”

This chain of realistic e-drink-related applications could go on forever. You could even go as far as the e-alcoholics-anonymous application – Hi. My name is Dave and I’m an e-alcoholic. Hi Dave – the e-cirrhosis-of-the-liver application or the e-died-alone-and-penniless application.

We need something else to keep it positive, for the kids.

Good thing there are thousands of other positive Facebook applications, and I love coming up with these because I know some computer programmer with a pocket-protector fashion sense and a World-of-Warcraft worldview will attempt to make them.

For me and every other guy out there, we’d like to see the e-sex application – only as a supplement to our real-life sex lives, or lack thereof.

And since Facebook would have to support safe e-sex, you could send your friends e-condoms, because we wouldn’t want to spread e-clamydia or be the reason behind any e-shotgun weddings.

Maybe all this talk of applications needs some sort of public service announcement to, well … warn the public about the increasingly ridiculous things to come from Facebook.

My PSA would go something like this. Imagine me dressed as Ron Burgandy.

“I’m here today to talk to you about a grave danger infecting our world today.

“We live in a world where danger is all around – al Qaida, Nickelback songs, global warming, Hinder songs, polluted air, “So you think you can dance?,” senators with a wide stance in the bathroom, illegal immigrants and Burger King, which includes the menu and that damn King.

“But there is a more pressing matter.

“Our Facebook pages are being bombarded with applications. Applications do nothing more than force you to live in constant fear of being forced to compare your friends, rate your friends, send drinks to your friends, choose whether you want to be a zombie, vampire, ninja, pirate, jedi or sith. By the way, screw Facebook for sucking the awesomeness out of zombies, ninjas and jedis.

“It must stop.

“For a nominal donation of $17.98, you can join the Coalition for a Less Painful Facebook Experience. The first five dollars of your contribution go directly toward finding the creators of these applications, putting them in public stocks and throwing rotten kumquats at them. The other $12.98 may be used for other administrative fees, including, but not limited to, 12-packs of Pabst, half-gallons of cheap rum, nudie magazines or other necessities.

“Remember we’re not just doing this for our generation; we’re securing the future for our children, so they can freely post on each other’s walls without worrying about someone biting chumps or worry about what type of e-roofie got slipped into an e-drink they received.”