You Can Get Home, but You Can't Get In

Some days, like Dr. Swain in Slapstick, I feel the gravity of the Earth is much stronger than it is on other days. I don't really believe this to be true but I like to say it and I am not surprised to discover I also like to type it, too.

We're getting ready to rumble here over the severe shrinking of the happiness horizon here in Southeastern Connecticut, the part of the state that doesn't have Terence and Buffy on polo ponies but does have lots of folks kitted out in uniforms for their new dream careers as casino change makers. Not agents of change, my brothers and sisters, two dimes and a nickel for a quarter types of finance. You'd think for smart people we could figure out what happened. You'd think that and you'd be wrong.

At one time we told ourselves to get a good job you needed to get a good education. We learned that from our parents who, themselves had learned it from theirs and we passed it along to our kids who ate it up with a spoon. What we forgot, as it turned out, was that the good job would be in a country other than the one they were raised in and that the term itself, 'good job,' was a relative concept, based on the standard of living being practiced wherever the offshore job express happened to drop anchor.

We reached sundown on the union a lot faster than they did in Wisconsin and Jersey and we were nowhere near as bitchy about it, let me tell you. The last decade and more have just gotten weirder and weirder. We've talked/cried/whatevered ourselves out marking the first decade of life after 9/11, but I don't think any of us really believe we have finished. What we are now is what we were when (before that day) we had all the other controlled chaos overwhelm the system from folks with speaking parts in Waco, Oklahoma City, Columbine, and hundreds and thousands of other datelines around the world that didn't even register here in the Land of the Round Doorknobs.

We are now scared of silence. We've basically outlawed it in our social discourse. The 24/7 news folks have been around for over two decades, but it's only in this last one they are so ubiquitous. Remember when you'd be waiting for a flight and the CNN Talking Head would be on and his mouth was moving on one of those TV's suspended someplace in the departure lounge? You couldn't hear squat, but there he was-like God himself watching over us. We, his flock, couldn't hear him, but no one minded.

But now the looners are running the amusement park and have cranked the crazy up to eleven. I was at the gym this morning wearing my earbuds (wtf? I used to have headphones), listening to my noise and news while outside, because we were all early, were a half dozen other people also tuned in and zoned out. No idea what they were listening to-I sure didn't ask 'em. As a matter of fact, if not survival, none of us spoke.

I believe I was the last person on earth to get a Facebook account because it would confirm what I already feared-I have no friends, not even virtual ones. But all of us now are members of the lonely crowd. I realized as I'm heading into the clubhouse turn towards the Big 6-0 (but tell myself it's the New Forty (and it's not, btw)) that we used to do all kinds of shit before there was anything like a Facebook and we told no one about it. Think tree in a forest. Now add sound. What? Exactly.

And now, we all have 'friends' who tell us when they change their picture or whose status update is that they have no update. Say anything-no matter how foolish, how venal, how incredibly self-serving, don't dare leave us alone with our own thoughts because we stopped thinking a while back and forgot how to start again. Thank goodness for the autonomic nervous system or we'd be dead. Sorry. What? Oh, you needed change for a buck-I won't even tell you what I thought I heard.
-bill kenny