At the ripe old age of "I stopped counting," I have become one of those people. I can’t stop myself. I’ve become a Facebooker. I don’t want to be one, but I can’t figure out how to kick the nasty habit.

I wake up in the morning, check my email and there it is. Right at the top of my inbox is a "notification message." It is a reminder that I haven’t visited the social networking site in about 10 hours. Oh my goodness — what have I missed? I don’t want to do it, but my out-of-control finger hits the FB link and there I am. For the next hour, I am consumed.

I learn that Dottie the dog had the cutest puppies and 13 people commented that the little canines look like their mother.

Jamey posted a video of himself playing guitar and learning a new song, which happens to be very difficult. He wants to know whether any of his FB friends know the third chord after the chorus, to which I reply, "I think it’s a C, but an A minor will work."

Darlene, who knows nothing about playing the guitar, commented that her sister is learning to play the piano and is going to the Bahamas this summer. Jamey replied that he thinks it’s an A minor. Joni commented that she once went to the Bahamas and heard a steel-drum band play the song Jamey is asking about, but she doesn’t know what chord came after the chorus. Joni does, however, want one of Dottie’s puppies when they are old enough to leave their mama.

Will has invited me to an event where his band, Soul Gravy, is performing, but it’s after 9 p.m. so that’s out of the question because it will conflict with my routine of watching reruns of "Old Christine" and "Frazier."

Help! I think my head is going to implode if I don’t get away from the madness. I eventually force myself to get up and walk away from the computer. I need to do some yard work, but it hasn’t rained since Moses came down from the mountain so the only thing I can do is go outside and watch the grass turn brown.

My dog walks up and informs me that there is nary a kibble or a bit in his bowl so I’m off to the Pig. At least now I have a mission and a reason to break away from the dreaded Facebook. But the social network is about to get even worse.

As soon as I get out of my truck, I’m accosted by some lady I don’t even know, and she demands to know why I haven’t accepted her friend request on FB. I tell her I haven’t even checked my friend requests and assure her I am sorry.

"Well," she said, "don’t even think you’re getting Dottie’s first-born puppy because I already have dibs. I called it when she was expecting and besides, if you had been my friend, you would have known it. I got dibs."

I go inside the store, grab a buggy (the one with the wobbly wheel, which I like because people can hear me coming from two aisles away) and head for the bread aisle, where a woman is squeezing every loaf, trying to determine which one is the freshest. I make my way to the green peanuts, which are "on sale" for $2.50 a pound, so I pull over my noise-making buggy and start picking out the big peanuts — the ones that have a minimum of four nuts in each shell.

I’ve accumulated a half bag when the bread squeezer busts me. "I’m telling the manager," she says. "You’re not supposed to pick out the big ones." I remind her that I didn’t say anything when she was mutilating loaves of bread. She informs me she was checking for freshness. I inform her I was checking for bigness. It got ugly.

I ran to the dog food aisle but the manager tracked me down thanks to the noisy, wobbly wheel.

"Are you going to pick out the kibbles and leave the bits or buy the whole bag?" she yells. For a moment, I thought there would be a riot.

I pay for my purchase and quickly hightail it out of the store, but now I’m the subject of all the grocery store gossip. Once this hits Facebook, I’ll be the laughing stock of all my Farmville friends. I’ll have to create a new FB profile. The whole cyber world will know that the peanut barrel at the Pig contains only culls because Vic’s got the big nuts.