Thank you, friends, for the well wishes concerning my car. They seem to have done the trick. We don’t really have a definitive answer for what was up with my car, but it is either a) nothing at all or b) a very minor issue that I don’t really need to worry about. So, that’s fantastic news.

On my way to the car dealership last week, I was forced to take a detour since a road was unexpectedly closed. The closed road was near a small town I used to live in, so while I was waiting around at the car dealership I pulled up Facebook on my phone and headed to that town’s Facebook page to see what was up. That’s where I learned that a tree had unfortunately fallen into the road and onto someone’s car. So, that person was having way worse car luck than I was having.

I have to admit, I am a terrible Facebook user. I can’t remember the last time I posted something there. Periodically, I make plans to be a better Facebook user and post and read posts regularly, but then I fail to follow through on these plans. So I apologize to all of my Facebook friends for being a phantom presence on the website that my sister regularly refers to as Facebutt. The one thing that I do find Facebook especially useful for, is to find out very local information.

Over the past ten years, I’ve lived in three small towns that are relatively close to one another, and as a result am still a member of all the local Facebook groups for these towns. When you need to find out, say, why a road is closed on a random Wednesday morning, these local group pages are extremely useful, but I have to caution anyone planning to dive into the wonderful world of local Facebook pages, they are also chock full of weirdos.

So, even a helpful post letting everyone know that the road is closed because a tree fell on a car, can turn into a matter of debate, when one local weirdo decides to air their grievances, and claim that this is all the state of Pennsylvania’s fault for not maintaining the road. Okay, first of all as someone who has driven on many a Pennsylvania road, I will say that PennDOT could definitely do a better job of maintaining roads, however the fallen tree incident is also clearly a case where no amount of road maintenance could have prevented the situation. I don’t know the specifics but nearly all the land along this stretch is privately owned. A big chunk of it is a steep wooded hillside that thanks to ash borer beetles contains many dead ash trees. So, more than likely one of these dead ash trees succumbed to gravity and landed on a car. Anyway, a lot of folks on Facebook shared my opinion that this wasn’t a road maintenance issue, and, well, a bit of a Facebook fray ensued in the comments section of a relatively innocuous post.

This is not an isolated incident. The other day a post with a picture on my own local Facebook page asked for help IDing a snake found on the poster’s property. Let me just say, I had no idea our little township had so many snake experts. Several of these self-proclaimed experts jumped in to say somewhat authoratatively that it was a rattlesnake, with more than one commanding the original poster to kill the creature at once. Thankfully, some more level-headed commenters pointed out that the snake was in fact a harmless garter snake and nothing to be alarmed about, and advised the poster to just let it be. That snake identification post generated 80 comments. I cannot stress enough that the town I live in has a pretty small population, though it is bigger than our rattlesnake population, which is probably around zero.

There are actually a lot of animal experts in my town. A few days ago someone posted a picture of a lost dog they found running around their yard asking if anyone knew who it belonged to. Thankfully, they did eventually get an answer and the pooch was returned to its people, but in the meantime the experts were out in force. More than one offering up the opinion that the dog showed signs of being abused (it did have some sort of cut or scar on its muzzle) and looked way too thin. Advice was offered to call animal control or the police and report the owners for animal abuse because it was obvious to these experts that the pet owners were abusing the animal and letting it run loose. As it turned out the dog, had recently been adopted from a rescue group and had been underweight when adopted, but the new owners were working on getting the pup back to its target weight, and also trying to figure out what to do about the fact that the dog was an accomplished escape artist. The reason I know all this, is because the owners were forced to dive into the Facebook fray to calm down the experts who were ready to bring in a SWAT team or whatever to rescue the “abused” dog.

That’s still not as bad as the local keyboard warrior, who decided to create a Facebook post complete with pictures complaining about the property owner next door to her mother’s house who had mowed the lawn and left grass on the road. She wanted to know if she should call the police or if there was some other authority she should report the neighbor to. A number of level-headed users commented that maybe her first step should be to speak with the neighbor like a normal human being. Then things took a turn when the neighbor in question posted on Facebook himself and pointed out that her post was ridiculous since she had taken her pictures and posted, while he was still in the middle of mowing the lawn (as she could clearly see) and hadn’t yet had a chance to clean up all the grass clippings.

So, if you need to find out why a particular road is closed, why the power’s gone out, or just feel like seeing a bunch of keyboard warriors lose their minds over the most innocuous things I highly recommend joining your own local Facebook group.

— Alissa

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Weekly Inspiration

What I’m Reading: Come and Get It by Kiley Reid

What I’m Watching: Everybody Loves Raymond

What I’m Listening to: “I Will Survive” Me First and the Gimme Gimmes

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Find out more about my books at alissagrosso.com

Find out more about my digital art at alissacarin.com

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My apologies for the typos and such this post is almost certainly riddled with.