Some Thoughts On... Getting Back On Track
So… I’ve been trying to think how best to start this off, knowing full well that it’s going to include a more or less anti-Facebook rant, and I’m forced to deal with the irony of losing myself on Facebook while trying to think about how to start it off. Like, several days running now, I’ve done this…
I suspect the best thing to do is just to disconnect from the interwebz entirely and make myself sit down (or stand up, as the case may be at the moment) to the task at hand.
Something’s been bothering me lately. Like, a lot. I work third shift exclusively now (no, that’s not what bothers me; I love the shift, and I work in a good place, so that scans just fine), and it’s dawned on me that the last time I did this (exclusively, not counting the relief audit/week trade audit at my last gig; it was fun there, I’m not bad-mouthing it, but I mean when my job title was only “night audit”), it was the latter half of 1998 and most of 1999.
Before the dark times.
Before Facebook.
I’m not looking back at that period of my life through rose-tinted glasses, believe me; it was not at all a good time for me, emotionally-speaking. I was going through some shit, and working graveyards was as much a coping mechanism for me as it was a means to put money in my pocket.
But there’s one thing about that time that really stands out for me as a truly positive experience: I read like a mad motherfucker.
Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Sartre, Brecht, Nietzsche, Morrison, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Artaud… I absorbed them all. I picked up Jung and Freud, studied the genetics and connection between creativity and insanity, hell, I even started to teach myself Latin, just because I believed (and still do) that it could give me a leg up to learning the Romance languages. I was a sponge.
And I wrote. Mostly poetry (some of it was even pretty good), but there were stories there, as well. Looking back on it, I remember now that I never committed two of them to paper (yes, paper. I wrote with a pen and notebook back in the day, none of this fancy gadgetry of today), but I still remember how they went, which means that it’s not too late to correct that error.
And I had time to do all this because it was really only about an hour and a half to two hours max (barring technical difficulties-not common, but they did occur) worth of work for the hotel, and the remaining six or so hours of the shift were mine to do with as I pleased, as long as I didn’t have strippers in the lobby or indulge any pyromaniac tendencies. And I pleased to read.
Now, like I pointed out, this was 1998-99 bf (before Facebook); not pre-internet, but you kids today woulda been like, “Whaaaaaaa…?” with what we had to work with back in the day. People hung out in these weird things called “chat rooms” which had nothing to do with Google; Netscape Navigator was still a thing, and Google itself, as well as Lycos (holy crap, they’re still around!) and Yahoo were referred to as “search engines”. We didn’t “Google” something then, we searched a thread on Google.
Yes, we were dinosaurs. Fuck you, millennial hipsters.
Point is, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube… None of that shit existed then. Hell, our work computers at the time would connect to the webz via Internet Explorer, but it was so restricted, we couldn’t do more than look up basic local business info for guests. So we had to come up with other things to keep our minds occupied. For me, it involved buying books by the truckload (as well as some heavy drug usage and a lot of time spent in movie theaters and strip joints. I already said it was a bad time for me, what else do you want?). It was an amazing feeling, as if I were shooting racing fuel into my brain and opening it up wide on the track.
Okay, I suck at racing analogies. Bite me.
Now, fast-forward to the present day.
I have a copy of Miyamoto Musashi’s The Book of Five Rings that’s pocket-sized, like three inches by two inches and, what, a hundred and fifty pages long? If that. I don’t have it on me at the mo’, I’ll hafta look later. Point is, it’s not a big book, both literally and in the fact that it’s not exactly a War and Peace-sized tome that you can use as a blunt object in the event of an emergency. I’ve been reading it for almost a month now, and I’m only on page 37.
Let that sink in.
Not only that, I’ve recently started re-reading the Dune series. I’m currently on House Atreides, and after nearly two months, I’m a third of the way through it.
Let that sink in, as well.
Now, I grant- life has changed quite a bit for me since those days (nights) of heavy reading; I have kids now, and an awesome girlfriend, even something resembling a social life, should I choose to leave the confines of my house for the evening. But, there are a lot of hours in my shift where I’m between having my work done and heading home for the day, and I’ve been making a horrible habit of filling that time with vapid social media. Endless nerdy meme wars, head shakes over mangled grammar, cat pictures… yeah, I’m guilty of it all.
And I feel dumber every single day.
It’s not the kind of the-more-I-learn-the-more-I-realize-I-need-to-learn kind of dumb, where I realize that Socrates was right, and for all I think I know, I know nothing. That kind of dumb I can handle. That kind of dumb is a goad, a spur in the mind to get one moving on the path to knowledge, to learning and growing, and becoming something more.
No, this is the kind of dumb that runs the risk of sliding into believing that Yahoo news counts as real journalism, of thinking that blurbs about Miley and Taylor and the Kardashians aren’t so bad after all, of saying, “Just accept it, it’s okay to know who’s breaking with whom in the celebrity news.”
And I can’t accept that. Not anymore.
I wish I knew when we came this, and how we accepted it as the status quo, this mindset that good enough is, well, good enough. I wish I could point to a specific date and time, and say, “There it is! Right there, that’s when we decided to just leave our brains at the door and accept strongly-worded opinion as fact, to settle for vacuous fluff items or pointless celebrity and call them news, to just derail the train of thought and accept the casualties!”
I mean, I’m not hypocritical enough to just point my finger and say, “Y’all motherfuckers need Jesus!” or what-have-you; I’m just as guilty of knee-jerk opinion bashing and “headline” scanning as the next person. But I know that something’s wrong with this picture. This is not who we are.
We are capable of so much more. And I think that’s what burns me up the most about the post-social media revolution: that we have surrendered the ability to think for ourselves and to learn and to grow for the chance to spurt out half-assed sound bites in a hundred-forty characters or less, not counting hashtags (hashtags my ass, that’s the fucking pound sign! I played tic-tac-toe on that bitch!). We have a world, literally a WORLD of knowledge at our fingertips and spend most of our time looking up humorous memes to indulge in meme wars with (guilty, right here). We’ve accepted Wikipedia as our fact-check go-to, and forgotten that this isn’t even a professionally-compiled site! Don’t believe me? Check the fucking grammar!
It’s at this point mid-tirade that I confess I stepped away to pee; and, having returned, curiosity got the better of me, and I just had to check that good ol’ newsfeed, just to see what the “news” is. In the words of the Joker,”Aaand… here… we… go.”
Wes Craven dead (okay, this one made me sad, I’ll confess it); Blac Chyna and Amber Rose something-something, Miley Cyrus host MTV VMA show (and look, her tongue’s hanging out like a dog in a car window again, how adorable); Kanye West says he’ll run for president in 2020 (I’m sure when someone else actually wins it, he’ll still interrupt the inauguration to say Beyonce should have gotten it); Kim Kardashian has a maternity outfit that shows off how huge her ass is (funny, I thought Kim Kardashian was what made Kim Kardashian’s ass look huge); Chrissie Hynde from the Pretenders is taking flak for saying that if a woman dresses like an easy target, don’t be surprised if the predators come a-callin’ (I see her point; why chum the waters when the sex sharks are swimming nearby); pictures from Mars has people all worked up and seeing rock formations as proof of alien life (I cringe and die a little inside as I type that last bit, as it simply reinforces the argument that Idiocracy is a documentary. Although, I know a guy who has a wonderfully entertaining theory about life actually being on Mars and they’re taking no end of pleasure in fucking with us); that guy from Supernatural that the women-folk are all a-drool over sings a Skynard song (dying a little more inside whenever I mention Skynard. There’s a story involved there, just ask and I’ll be glad to share it with you); and a woman loses half her body weight after she stops her four-liters-of-Coke-a-day habit.
This is our news, people. This is what passes itself off as information, and we’re snapping it up like koi in a pond. It’s everywhere; go to Wal-Mart and look at the magazines in the checkout lanes (you have time; there are only three lanes open and a quarter of the world’s population waiting to buy beer and tobacco, what else are you gonna do to ignore the screaming kids behind you than look at the covers of People, Us, and Cosmo?), what’ll you find? “The girls turn on Caitlyn” (more Jenner/Kardashian attention-mongering, yay), “Josh Duggar Cheated With Me!” (as if these pseudo-religious parasites haven’t sucked enough life out of us, why do we keep having to hear about what a piece of shit Josh is?), Demi Lovato showing some skin, but I guess she’s actually demonstrating her “edgy” style like she says in the Skechers commercials; “Kylie is the Meanest Girl in Hollywood!” (ah fuck, MORE Jenner nonsense?!); celebrities divorcing, celebrities marrying, celebrities doing shit that your poor lower-middle-class ass will never even be able to conceive of…
Why? Why are we selling ourselves so damn short? Why are we pissing away our minds and our souls on pointless drivel? How can we justify pandering to the lowest common denominator?
As of 2014, 14% of the population of the United States couldn’t read. That’s thirty-two MILLION adults. 21% of the adult population reads at or below a fifth-grade level, and 19% of high school graduates (people who have actually passed and GRADUATED FROM high school) are illiterate. Those numbers haven’t changed in nearly a decade.
Y’know… I just realized I can keep beating this dead horse. There are facts and statistics, and I’ll be here for days looking them up; it’s already been a week or so since I started writing this, and I keep getting lost in the search for factual support for this. This is an online rant, not a dissertation to obtain my Master’s. I’m not going to do that here. If you’re interested, do the research yourself. It’s right there. Put down the Facebook and look it up; it ain’t hard.
The failing here, I suspect, is in the mindset; it’s easier to just accept shit without going to the trouble of looking it up. Opinion has a higher approval rating than credible research, because opinion is free- free of effort, free of the burden of proof, free of responsibility. All we’re learning to do is break down what passes for thought these days into little easily-digestible chunks and spitting them out there for all the world to see, and assuming that everyone is just going to go along; woe be unto those who disagree, for they shall be the ones accused of offending people. And saying you’re offended is basically crying over something some other kid said on the playground.
You know what offends me? I just told you. It’s willing ignorance. It’s taking the ability to think and to create and to debate and to grow and chucking it straight into the crapper while looking at pictures of Kim Kardashians greasy hams that “broke the internet”. It’s accepting the intellectual equivalent of a Big Mac while throwing a T-bone steak out the door to the dogs. It’s unacceptable to me, as far as my own personal growth and development are concerned. I’m forty-four years old, and I’ll be the first to tell that you never stop learning, never. The minute you step outside your school’s front doors for the last time, the process doesn’t stop; it’s just getting started. That was the whole point of school, or should have been (don’t get me started): preparing you for an on-going learning process that will last you until the day you die.
The only excuse there is, is that we have simply chosen to stop learning, to stop growing. And we do so at our own peril; to stop growing is to stagnate and die.
I can’t make anyone wake up and look around and say, “I’m not taking this shit anymore.” I can’t make anyone pick up a book or research something they might find interesting. I can’t make anyone decide to take pride in themselves and decide to step up their game instead of settling for the lowest common denominator (yes, grammar Nazis, I am fully aware of the pronoun issues in this sentence. Fuck you, I’m on a roll).
Well, technically, that’s not true. There IS one person that I can make do all that, and that person is myself. I can make a difference in my own life, and hopefully, in so doing, perhaps inspire someone else to do likewise. And that person, in turn, may inspire two more, and so on and so on and so on. I can hope.
In the meantime, the choice that lies before me is a pretty simple one, really: I’m going to be limiting my online presence for the foreseeable future. I’m not disappearing completely, but I will be out of the Matrix more and more. I, for one, want to see just how far this particular rabbit hole goes, and that won’t happen if I’m up to my ears self-imposed mediocrity. Anyone who wants to join me, throw up a hand, let’s get a book club going, or crank up a good debate. Something. Anything. Seriously, guys, PLEASE, for the love of Goddess, don’t keep doing this to yourselves. Take the red pill and come join me. Turn off the celebretard “news”, turn off the Twitterspeak and the #hashtageverything and the YOLO and SWAG and shit. I’ll be willing to bet you all want more and better for yourselves, and that’s great. But in order to get it, you need to ask more and better OF yourselves. Be the change you want to see in the world, because gods know we need to change now, while we still can.
Peace and a bottle of hair grease, gang.
I suspect the best thing to do is just to disconnect from the interwebz entirely and make myself sit down (or stand up, as the case may be at the moment) to the task at hand.
Something’s been bothering me lately. Like, a lot. I work third shift exclusively now (no, that’s not what bothers me; I love the shift, and I work in a good place, so that scans just fine), and it’s dawned on me that the last time I did this (exclusively, not counting the relief audit/week trade audit at my last gig; it was fun there, I’m not bad-mouthing it, but I mean when my job title was only “night audit”), it was the latter half of 1998 and most of 1999.
Before the dark times.
Before Facebook.
I’m not looking back at that period of my life through rose-tinted glasses, believe me; it was not at all a good time for me, emotionally-speaking. I was going through some shit, and working graveyards was as much a coping mechanism for me as it was a means to put money in my pocket.
But there’s one thing about that time that really stands out for me as a truly positive experience: I read like a mad motherfucker.
Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Sartre, Brecht, Nietzsche, Morrison, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Artaud… I absorbed them all. I picked up Jung and Freud, studied the genetics and connection between creativity and insanity, hell, I even started to teach myself Latin, just because I believed (and still do) that it could give me a leg up to learning the Romance languages. I was a sponge.
And I wrote. Mostly poetry (some of it was even pretty good), but there were stories there, as well. Looking back on it, I remember now that I never committed two of them to paper (yes, paper. I wrote with a pen and notebook back in the day, none of this fancy gadgetry of today), but I still remember how they went, which means that it’s not too late to correct that error.
And I had time to do all this because it was really only about an hour and a half to two hours max (barring technical difficulties-not common, but they did occur) worth of work for the hotel, and the remaining six or so hours of the shift were mine to do with as I pleased, as long as I didn’t have strippers in the lobby or indulge any pyromaniac tendencies. And I pleased to read.
Now, like I pointed out, this was 1998-99 bf (before Facebook); not pre-internet, but you kids today woulda been like, “Whaaaaaaa…?” with what we had to work with back in the day. People hung out in these weird things called “chat rooms” which had nothing to do with Google; Netscape Navigator was still a thing, and Google itself, as well as Lycos (holy crap, they’re still around!) and Yahoo were referred to as “search engines”. We didn’t “Google” something then, we searched a thread on Google.
Yes, we were dinosaurs. Fuck you, millennial hipsters.
Point is, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube… None of that shit existed then. Hell, our work computers at the time would connect to the webz via Internet Explorer, but it was so restricted, we couldn’t do more than look up basic local business info for guests. So we had to come up with other things to keep our minds occupied. For me, it involved buying books by the truckload (as well as some heavy drug usage and a lot of time spent in movie theaters and strip joints. I already said it was a bad time for me, what else do you want?). It was an amazing feeling, as if I were shooting racing fuel into my brain and opening it up wide on the track.
Okay, I suck at racing analogies. Bite me.
Now, fast-forward to the present day.
I have a copy of Miyamoto Musashi’s The Book of Five Rings that’s pocket-sized, like three inches by two inches and, what, a hundred and fifty pages long? If that. I don’t have it on me at the mo’, I’ll hafta look later. Point is, it’s not a big book, both literally and in the fact that it’s not exactly a War and Peace-sized tome that you can use as a blunt object in the event of an emergency. I’ve been reading it for almost a month now, and I’m only on page 37.
Let that sink in.
Not only that, I’ve recently started re-reading the Dune series. I’m currently on House Atreides, and after nearly two months, I’m a third of the way through it.
Let that sink in, as well.
Now, I grant- life has changed quite a bit for me since those days (nights) of heavy reading; I have kids now, and an awesome girlfriend, even something resembling a social life, should I choose to leave the confines of my house for the evening. But, there are a lot of hours in my shift where I’m between having my work done and heading home for the day, and I’ve been making a horrible habit of filling that time with vapid social media. Endless nerdy meme wars, head shakes over mangled grammar, cat pictures… yeah, I’m guilty of it all.
And I feel dumber every single day.
It’s not the kind of the-more-I-learn-the-more-I-realize-I-need-to-learn kind of dumb, where I realize that Socrates was right, and for all I think I know, I know nothing. That kind of dumb I can handle. That kind of dumb is a goad, a spur in the mind to get one moving on the path to knowledge, to learning and growing, and becoming something more.
No, this is the kind of dumb that runs the risk of sliding into believing that Yahoo news counts as real journalism, of thinking that blurbs about Miley and Taylor and the Kardashians aren’t so bad after all, of saying, “Just accept it, it’s okay to know who’s breaking with whom in the celebrity news.”
And I can’t accept that. Not anymore.
I wish I knew when we came this, and how we accepted it as the status quo, this mindset that good enough is, well, good enough. I wish I could point to a specific date and time, and say, “There it is! Right there, that’s when we decided to just leave our brains at the door and accept strongly-worded opinion as fact, to settle for vacuous fluff items or pointless celebrity and call them news, to just derail the train of thought and accept the casualties!”
I mean, I’m not hypocritical enough to just point my finger and say, “Y’all motherfuckers need Jesus!” or what-have-you; I’m just as guilty of knee-jerk opinion bashing and “headline” scanning as the next person. But I know that something’s wrong with this picture. This is not who we are.
We are capable of so much more. And I think that’s what burns me up the most about the post-social media revolution: that we have surrendered the ability to think for ourselves and to learn and to grow for the chance to spurt out half-assed sound bites in a hundred-forty characters or less, not counting hashtags (hashtags my ass, that’s the fucking pound sign! I played tic-tac-toe on that bitch!). We have a world, literally a WORLD of knowledge at our fingertips and spend most of our time looking up humorous memes to indulge in meme wars with (guilty, right here). We’ve accepted Wikipedia as our fact-check go-to, and forgotten that this isn’t even a professionally-compiled site! Don’t believe me? Check the fucking grammar!
It’s at this point mid-tirade that I confess I stepped away to pee; and, having returned, curiosity got the better of me, and I just had to check that good ol’ newsfeed, just to see what the “news” is. In the words of the Joker,”Aaand… here… we… go.”
Wes Craven dead (okay, this one made me sad, I’ll confess it); Blac Chyna and Amber Rose something-something, Miley Cyrus host MTV VMA show (and look, her tongue’s hanging out like a dog in a car window again, how adorable); Kanye West says he’ll run for president in 2020 (I’m sure when someone else actually wins it, he’ll still interrupt the inauguration to say Beyonce should have gotten it); Kim Kardashian has a maternity outfit that shows off how huge her ass is (funny, I thought Kim Kardashian was what made Kim Kardashian’s ass look huge); Chrissie Hynde from the Pretenders is taking flak for saying that if a woman dresses like an easy target, don’t be surprised if the predators come a-callin’ (I see her point; why chum the waters when the sex sharks are swimming nearby); pictures from Mars has people all worked up and seeing rock formations as proof of alien life (I cringe and die a little inside as I type that last bit, as it simply reinforces the argument that Idiocracy is a documentary. Although, I know a guy who has a wonderfully entertaining theory about life actually being on Mars and they’re taking no end of pleasure in fucking with us); that guy from Supernatural that the women-folk are all a-drool over sings a Skynard song (dying a little more inside whenever I mention Skynard. There’s a story involved there, just ask and I’ll be glad to share it with you); and a woman loses half her body weight after she stops her four-liters-of-Coke-a-day habit.
This is our news, people. This is what passes itself off as information, and we’re snapping it up like koi in a pond. It’s everywhere; go to Wal-Mart and look at the magazines in the checkout lanes (you have time; there are only three lanes open and a quarter of the world’s population waiting to buy beer and tobacco, what else are you gonna do to ignore the screaming kids behind you than look at the covers of People, Us, and Cosmo?), what’ll you find? “The girls turn on Caitlyn” (more Jenner/Kardashian attention-mongering, yay), “Josh Duggar Cheated With Me!” (as if these pseudo-religious parasites haven’t sucked enough life out of us, why do we keep having to hear about what a piece of shit Josh is?), Demi Lovato showing some skin, but I guess she’s actually demonstrating her “edgy” style like she says in the Skechers commercials; “Kylie is the Meanest Girl in Hollywood!” (ah fuck, MORE Jenner nonsense?!); celebrities divorcing, celebrities marrying, celebrities doing shit that your poor lower-middle-class ass will never even be able to conceive of…
Why? Why are we selling ourselves so damn short? Why are we pissing away our minds and our souls on pointless drivel? How can we justify pandering to the lowest common denominator?
As of 2014, 14% of the population of the United States couldn’t read. That’s thirty-two MILLION adults. 21% of the adult population reads at or below a fifth-grade level, and 19% of high school graduates (people who have actually passed and GRADUATED FROM high school) are illiterate. Those numbers haven’t changed in nearly a decade.
Y’know… I just realized I can keep beating this dead horse. There are facts and statistics, and I’ll be here for days looking them up; it’s already been a week or so since I started writing this, and I keep getting lost in the search for factual support for this. This is an online rant, not a dissertation to obtain my Master’s. I’m not going to do that here. If you’re interested, do the research yourself. It’s right there. Put down the Facebook and look it up; it ain’t hard.
The failing here, I suspect, is in the mindset; it’s easier to just accept shit without going to the trouble of looking it up. Opinion has a higher approval rating than credible research, because opinion is free- free of effort, free of the burden of proof, free of responsibility. All we’re learning to do is break down what passes for thought these days into little easily-digestible chunks and spitting them out there for all the world to see, and assuming that everyone is just going to go along; woe be unto those who disagree, for they shall be the ones accused of offending people. And saying you’re offended is basically crying over something some other kid said on the playground.
You know what offends me? I just told you. It’s willing ignorance. It’s taking the ability to think and to create and to debate and to grow and chucking it straight into the crapper while looking at pictures of Kim Kardashians greasy hams that “broke the internet”. It’s accepting the intellectual equivalent of a Big Mac while throwing a T-bone steak out the door to the dogs. It’s unacceptable to me, as far as my own personal growth and development are concerned. I’m forty-four years old, and I’ll be the first to tell that you never stop learning, never. The minute you step outside your school’s front doors for the last time, the process doesn’t stop; it’s just getting started. That was the whole point of school, or should have been (don’t get me started): preparing you for an on-going learning process that will last you until the day you die.
The only excuse there is, is that we have simply chosen to stop learning, to stop growing. And we do so at our own peril; to stop growing is to stagnate and die.
I can’t make anyone wake up and look around and say, “I’m not taking this shit anymore.” I can’t make anyone pick up a book or research something they might find interesting. I can’t make anyone decide to take pride in themselves and decide to step up their game instead of settling for the lowest common denominator (yes, grammar Nazis, I am fully aware of the pronoun issues in this sentence. Fuck you, I’m on a roll).
Well, technically, that’s not true. There IS one person that I can make do all that, and that person is myself. I can make a difference in my own life, and hopefully, in so doing, perhaps inspire someone else to do likewise. And that person, in turn, may inspire two more, and so on and so on and so on. I can hope.
In the meantime, the choice that lies before me is a pretty simple one, really: I’m going to be limiting my online presence for the foreseeable future. I’m not disappearing completely, but I will be out of the Matrix more and more. I, for one, want to see just how far this particular rabbit hole goes, and that won’t happen if I’m up to my ears self-imposed mediocrity. Anyone who wants to join me, throw up a hand, let’s get a book club going, or crank up a good debate. Something. Anything. Seriously, guys, PLEASE, for the love of Goddess, don’t keep doing this to yourselves. Take the red pill and come join me. Turn off the celebretard “news”, turn off the Twitterspeak and the #hashtageverything and the YOLO and SWAG and shit. I’ll be willing to bet you all want more and better for yourselves, and that’s great. But in order to get it, you need to ask more and better OF yourselves. Be the change you want to see in the world, because gods know we need to change now, while we still can.
Peace and a bottle of hair grease, gang.