the summer has ended...

it has been since mid-april that i posted and i did so for a few reasons:
1) my day job picked up outrageously and up until I went on vacation last month I was worked pretty much 60-90 hour weeks including the band from mid April until last month
2) everybody has something to say about everything. and everything is an epochal moment. and suddenly this is the most destructive thing we've ever witnessed. the way people run their mouths (including myself) makes me want to go to wal-mart and order fifty millions rolls of duct-tape and begin walking the nation with but one mission: to stop this wooden horse of troy malarkey. i'll get back to that allusion in a minute.
3) because everybody is talking, few people are genuinely listening. who needs to listen when so much can be said about nothing? and by nothing i mean the political circus, no, worse than a circus, the politcal rave that has sprung forth like the waters of the Gulf across the levees in NuOhlans, of the past five or so months since I last posted. What has really happened? Can anybody really remember the minute to minute, blow by blow accounting on the major news networks, the outrages and indignations, the interviews and crosstalk between the talking heads, and more importantly, does any of that matter? What did people do before society possessed a large, and largely segregated population of people whose sole job was to run around with cameras and film people and ask silly questions? How on earth did they fill up all twenty four hours of the day...how could they have possibly arrived at a conclusion about anything since they didn't know anything to begin with? For that matter, can anybody remember what was being said across the great bloviated blogosphere about, say Terry Schiavo, and how that was going to bring down Dubya?
4) the bloviation of the blogosphere continues. as a matter of fact, it's kind of bovine in it's bloviation. while i marvel at the variety and the vast amount of raw ability that the blogosphere brings to bear, it's important to bear in mind that all of these talents existed before the sphere. it's almost better to think of the blogosphere as spherical rather than something merely two-dimensional, which is the only representation we get physically. but really, the sphere is merely the abstraction of the physical world--it is every blogger's transcendental existence. it is the technological equivalent of the metaphysical, because here, we, bloggers that is, are able to if we wanted to, to record every waking thought, every idea, every nuance, every transgression, everything if we wanted to and for the first time in human history anyone with an internet connection can read your experience, your point of view, your way of looking at things, and say, to themselves, well golly gee, i remember reading that blog once and now i can't remember what he said. while hugh hewitt may disagree, which is fine, but the information revolution has not yet produced a reformation--at best, we're still writing our theses to post on the doors of the MSM and other detritus of industrial and preindustrial and primitive civilizations that still haunt the planet. there is now more information on the internet than is contained in the entire library of congress and that amount of information will only continue as we add to our already sizeable collection of literally billions upon billions of web pages--some of them containing very useful information, but for the most part, what we have collectively done is equivalent to several hundred million people fingerpaint and then make several billions photocopies and mail them to everyone a hundred times over. The sheer magnitude of information that exists is enough to make one's head spin if you really think about it, and what has it wrought? For the right side of the sphere, it has allowed for a healthy discussion of ideas and an honorable debate on just about everything; for the left side of the sphere, it has made them more conscious that somewhere, someplace, someone is doing something that they don't approve of and by somebody who they generally don't believe in, something has to be done about it, usually the government, which of course, they have very little say in right now and will probably only have less in the foreseeable future (we hope). For the people who have no interest in politics as a pasttime, the two sides of the sphere are mutually exclusive. Caricatures are the primary means of identifying the various poles and little thought is given to the idea that either side is right or wrong; to those who have no interest in the political process, both sides are ultimately only interested in what benefits them--the idea that a person, a political person whether pundit or elected official, might actually have a real idealogical position and actually hold firm to it is completely implausible, because they themselves have no understanding of history, philosophy, political science, economics, the concepts of the rule of law and marginalism and most important of all: they have no interest in educating themselves. For them, the past five months of hyperpartisan activity by the Left hasn't happened, nor will it be remembered, for them, this has been a really nice summer man. Sure, gas prices were high, but fuck it.
This is a point that nearly everyone across the entire spectrum of the sphere completely neglects to mention: what about the people who just don't give one rats ass about the trade deficit, right to die or right to choose, same sex marriage, budget negotiations, the Supreme Court vacancies, etc., etc., ad nauseum blah blah blah. I remember Nat Hentoff writing most frequently about this but only to point how uninvolved our civilization really is. A population of nearly 300 million, and a 120 million votes cast for President. What percentage of our population is underage? hmmmmmmm....not 180 million I can tell you that much. For those people, there is no history, there was never a past and there will not be a future: there is only now and the question that ranges on their minds is: what the fuck are we gonna do tonight, man? Generally phrased in that sort of language too, and while I am generally far more comfortable infusing my speech with colorful metaphors than most people, after a while, if used every other word, loses its potency and becomes nothing more than a slightly glorified modifier, a word that holds a special place in everyone's hearts for more than one reason alone. Now, strange as it is going to sound, I much prefer that they remain out of the loop for the sole fact that there are enough people out there running their mouths and their keyboards who honestly think that they know something when in fact they are only reporting about how the feel about some particular issue or another. With the left, it's always, well, I feel so, terrible about those poor people (and by poor we mean their socioeconomic status of course, not, those poor, poor people, you know the difference) and I want to help them. And of course, because they generally have feelings about how other people should live their lives and not about their own they usually tend to be interested in only effecting that change among people who are different or believe in different things from them. How else can one explain, that very nearly spontaneously, the urban areas of the country have become this last bastion of feelers, people who genuinely believe that everyone who doesn't live in the city is a Neanderthal. In Atlanta, people call it OTP. Outside the Perimeter. Got invited to a "gathering" of apparently people who know hundreds of other people and call them their "friends" at a bar ITP (inside the perimeter). Talking about this and that with one the girls who invited myself and Brett (she saw us at a show) asked again, where did we live? And the immediate response, "Wow, you guys are so OTP."
I couldn't help but be astonished at her complete and total assumption of superiority for having chosen to live inside the city. I can't stand American cities, terrible to drive in, horrible traffic, (this seperate from the terrible to drive in--all those damn untimed traffice lights!), significantly higher crime rates than the suburbs, and of course, all those make me feel better about everyone else regulations that just drive me absolutely spare.
More to come