Still Wearing Sunscreen

Sometimes, not often, I stumble across something I've written at some point in the past and am impressed by a turn of phrase or an insight. HEY! I said sometimes. Okay, not very often. 

Other times, I'll re-read an older posting and wonder what I was getting at. And on other other times, like this one, below, I am afraid to touch it with a barge pole. It originally was titled: 

Kurt's Blurt

I think we're on our way to being a nation of impatient mind-readers. Don't furrow your brow or make that face (I know 'what face? I wasn't making a face!' Were, too.). 

You may phrase it more elegantly (I would certainly hope so), but with apologies to Beckett, we're NOT Waiting for Godot; rather, hoping the other one shuts up real soon so we can talk.

It's taken me forever to warm to texting anyone at any time on my cell phone. I get hung up on spelling all the words with all the right letters in the proper order, with capitalization and proper punctuation for all. 

In the wonderful world of two hundred and eighty characters, such fastidiousness can make you roadkill with hair on the human highway, and more often than I'd like, I've been reminded that he who hesitates is lunch.

I've received follow-up texts to the original while I've been struggling to type a response to the first note. It feels a little bit like piling on, to be honest. It's hard to count to ten and get a grip on your annoyance while holding a piece of plastic with more computing power than the computers NASA used to put a man on the moon, while some touch typist is kicking your thumbs.

We're the same in person-to-person communications, too. Those Sunday morning public affairs programs the major TV networks used to have, so the FCC would cut them a break at license renewal time, have evolved into snarkfests where folks who remind me of terriers in need of Ritalin just yap at one another when they're not shredding some 'guest' like an old chew toy.

We're all rushing to get someplace other than here, and once we do, we're off again. My German wife calls it kein ruhe im arsch, and she would know as she's married to one (mit ohren). 

When you next converse with a real, live person, try to listen to the interaction between you, not just to the words but to the silences as well, and you may be surprised at how little of the latter breaks up the stream of the former.

I used to tease acquaintances and associates, disquieted at how rapidly I spoke, that people from my home state of New Jersey couldn't afford a pause to catch our breath or collect our thoughts, because with so many in such a small state, if you stopped speaking, you wouldn't be heard from again for years. In light of Jersey Shore et al, that may not be such a bad thing anymore.

So now we talk, type, and (for the most part) think in shorthand delivered in staccato, acronym, and emoticon, all masking, while masquerading as meaning. Instead of technology and our tools helping language and literature to flower as arts and culture flourish, we've continued to dumb down and throw majesty and meaning over the side.

I came across a quote from Indianapolis' #1 Son, Kurt Vonnegut, that makes me smile and think every time I read it. If it does half as much for you, it's worth the inclusion. "...do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college."
-bill kenny (Rutgers University,  Class of '74)