Don't let this man near your kidsIt's Thursday --well, almost Thursday. The online edition of the Ithaca Urinal hasn't even come out and we are going through that dangerous time of the day when we really don't know what's going on, don't have a clue. We sit around staring at the screen of our laptop blankly, blink at our cell phones, wonder why Bruce Hornsby's The Range is playing on our Ipod because, until a second ago, we had no idea who Bruce Hornsby ever was, let alone recall downloading him.
No, we don't want to go there. No way. Suddenly the idea started spreading through our consciousness that there might be holes in reality that all the plug in devices in the world can't fill, call them unprogrammable moments, if you will. Can you spell 'void?
Back in the late 50's and early '60s, folks experienced moments like this more frequently. TV hadn't really solidified its hold as the glue of perception yet. Eisenhower wasn't well, the Russians had all those devices in space, who knew if the next moment wouldn't be the unthinkable, that moment we had prepared for during all those air raid drills in school but hoped would never arrive; the time we'd get under our desks but it wasn't a drill and, in one brief second, kiss goodbye to our sad little sex lives before even had even been launched.
That uncomfortable moment in historical time occasioned real interest in things like Zen Buddhism and existentialism, the kinds of things that went along with the notion that reality couldn't be neatly packaged , that life was about uncertainty, gaps, holes in the fabric of things.
That was 40 or 50 years ago, no shit. Where do we go today when we're feeling anxious? Hopefully Google has filled in all the gaps, it would be comforting to know that there is nothing worth knowing that can't be brought by a search engine, that there is no need for empty spaces between the moments we spend listening to downloaded tunes, talking on the cell phone, delineating pixels. Let's face it, it's somehow reassuring to know that we've sold our consciousness to the corporate store.
Think about it, maybe in the evolutionary scale of things, all the available energy there ever was that could have been used to advance us beyond the stage we're in has been taken up reading package instructions, programming devices of some kind or other, trying to open unopenable shrink wrapped packages, wondering what the stock price for Google is, figuring out how to pay for college.
Maybe we're look around someday and wonder why our elders aren't wiser and realize that they've wasted too many brain cells, watched too many ads for steak knife specials on tv. Then we're realize that we are our elders or will be at some future date.
Holy shit.
(Hey, Ez is taking a break this morning, this is his Uncle Maury giving you a little bit of Svengalian wisdom.)
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 4:16 AM
