Who Is John David?

My Dad hails from a different era.  Born during the Depression, he was raised in a time when you didn’t talk about your problems.  Times were tough and complaining did nothing to resolve the economic troubles that engulfed our nation.  Work was the only solution, and since everyone else was busting their rear ends to survive, just like you, you didn’t go griping to your neighbor in an attempt to make yourself feel better.  As a child, I don’t think I ever heard him complain about anything, aside from an occasional jab at my Mom, who is very high maintenance.  Nor did I ever hear him bemoan his mistakes for more than just a minute or two, and even that was a rare occurrence.  And while his go it alone, ever-positive approach to life is still admirable to me, I now realize that technology has forever left its mark on society by rendering that once heroic philosophy obsolete.

This blog entry comes to you from St. George Island, off the Gulf Coast of Florida, where my family, along with my sister’s family and our Dad have spent the last day or so relaxing.  Last night, we stayed up late into the night, talking about a number of things – some important, some not so much.  At around 11:00, my Dad, who had been largely on the periphery of the conversation, as he had busied himself with a 500 piece puzzle, asked a bizarre and random question.  “How do you unfriend someone on Facebook?” he asked.

A little taken aback, we hesitated before answering.  Up until that moment, we had spent a large quantity of time discussing my 23 year old nephew’s relationship status, as well as the characteristics he’s looking for in a woman.  Ben, who’s a very deep thinker, has an extremely shallow grocery list when it comes to women.  Somewhere between “flexible”, “built like an hourglass”, and “able to do a cannonball with minimal amount of splash,” my Dad had asked his question.  Something in the previous discussion must have triggered his question, but it was way too early for us to know exactly what.

I then explained to him the mechanics of the unfriending process.  With a puzzled look on her face, my sister Carla then asked, “why do you want to unfriend someone?  Did you get your feelings hurt by something they posted?”

“No,” my Dad said.  “I have a friend that I don’t know, and I probably just need to unfriend him.”

“Who is it?” someone asked.

“I’m not sure.  His name is John David, and I just assumed I knew him, because he sent me a friend request.  So I accepted it, and now I need to unfriend him, I guess.  Anyway, he sent me a picture of a naked woman this afternoon.”

Wait.  What?

We all looked at each other, not sure if we had all heard the same thing.  You could have heard a pin drop in the room as our minds went into high gear.  “He sent you what?” someone else asked.

Ben immediately piped up, “well… suggest him as a friend to me.” 

We all had a good laugh, then my wife chimed in, “Daddy, did he send it to you in a message, or did he tag you in the picture?”

“No, he tagged me,” said my Dad, obviously more than a little bothered at the thought of being sent a picture of a naked anything at this point in his life.

“Daddy, that shows up on your wall.  Did you delete the picture?” she asked again. 

“No,” he said.  “I didn’t know how.  I checked it on my iPhone, and when I saw the picture, I couldn’t tell what it was, so I clicked on it to make it bigger.  Once I realized it was a naked woman, I put my phone away as quick as possible.”

Then it hit us all like a kick to the groin.  The 75 year old patriarch of our family, and perhaps the most godly man any of us has ever known, had a nudie picture posted on his wall, and rather than deleting it, he just simply put his phone down and walked away.

Immediately, we all scrambled to get our online devices – iPhones, tablets, etc – to see if the naked woman was still on his wall.  I don’t remember the first to spot it, but within a matter of seconds, a chorus of, “oh my gosh’es” went up around the room in sporadic intervals as we surveyed the woman in question.

She was definitely naked, but simply describing her as naked doesn’t do justice to the level of nudity she had obtained.  Without going into great detail, she was well beyond the threshold of tasteful art, and in the dark and grungy recesses of the world of pornography.  However, we soon realized what had sparked my Dad’s recollection of the seedy photo – it had to have been my nephew’s mention of the word flexible.  I quickly asked my Dad how long it had been since he first got the photo.

“Some time this afternoon,” he said.  “Maybe 4 or 5 hours ago.”

As a family, we were shocked.  But not in a way that says, “oh my gosh, Daddy, how could you?”  No.  We were shocked in a way that said, “oh my gosh, Daddy, didn’t you realize that turning off your phone did nothing to get rid of this trashy photo?  Don’t you know that everyone from Pastor Larry to Mama (who has not yet joined us) has potentially seen this picture and flagged you as a pervert on Facebook?”

To say that we laughed hysterically would be a gross understatement.  I’ve had many friends, mostly female, who have laughed so hard that they wet themselves, but I’ve never actually considered I could do that to myself… until last night.  At one point, I considered the possibility of laughing up an internal organ, and by the looks of it, everyone else in the room felt the same.  We were dumbfounded that my Dad, when faced with some of the most unnatural poses known to photography, simply turned his phone off to make the problem go away.  All he had to do was ask for help, but instead, he simply lowered his head and went to work once again, hoping to put his troubles behind him.  But in this age of technology, you just can’t work your way out of a jam like this.  No amount of puzzle putting together can get porn off of your Facebook page.