Not the Happiest of Reads

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

Maybe it's the weather, the changing of the seasons, the loss of reasons to be cheerful, or just plain old age, but I'm weary to the bone. And I'm not alone.

At one time we told ourselves that 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 anyone ever thought. The last couple of decades have just gotten weirder and weirder. Since 9/11 and all that followed it, we are scared of silence. We've basically outlawed it in our social discourse. 

The 24/7 news folks have been around for most of the lives of many of us, but it's only in the last two and a half decades that they are so ubiquitous. Remember when you'd be waiting for an airline 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.

I tell myself that 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 here on the Big Blue Marble that we used to do all kinds of shit before there was anything like Facebook and all social media mutations, and we told no one about it. Think tree in a forest. Now add sound. What? Exactly.

And now, we 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