While I try to figure out where the fuck WordPress had hidden basic stuff like where I set the category and keywords of a post, I’d like to talk about the upcoming year.
Oh, for crying out loud, I’ve accidentally published this episode already, while I have yet to find how to set the category for my post. You know what the next episode will be about.
ANYWAY, it’s a new year and I have resolutions. Actually, only one resolution. Communicate. I will talk to my friends this year. I’ll drop a message every now and then. I’ll post here on the blog on a regular basis. And most important of all, I’ll start reading my email again.
I have come to hate noise. It’s why I never visit Facebook anymore. And my email is so filled with noise that I have simply stopped reading it. The terrorists (and the marketers) have won.
This year, at least I start talking again. I was never much for listening anyway, except for the comments here at MR&HBI, which is honestly the social contact I pine for the most.
The Noise. Yeh, all that. As us ‘ham radio’ types might say, “Loud. 20 over 9. Booming in here!”
So the spousal unit ‘n I are fighting back. Phone rings. Another damned spam/scam boiler room droid. We hang up. Every time. Many times we pick up the phone, wait silently for a voice at the other end. More often than not, no voice. Nothing. We hang up. If it’s truly step-daughter calling, she’ll have said something, or will call back. Gov’t promised to plug the spam/scam calls. Typical gov’t. “Eff the promises. We didn’t really guarantee we’d do it, did we, boy?” They didn’t. Corporate money overrides promises like a spring tide over sand bars.
Internet. Facebook can go to hell, pulling all the others with it. Sucker bait. Tasty bait wrapped around a hook that reaches far deeper than we’d ever imagined. It rips open our lives. Razor blades in the candy.
Communication? Wife and I sometimes stroll slowly through the box stores, warehouses where we’re expected to dodge among the pallets and hand-trucks, searching for that elusive item that sold out on the shelves six weeks ago and hasn’t yet been restocked … if ever again. Maybe that size of Men’s Briefs didn’t make the Central Office Marketing Director’s sales goal and will never be restocked. The store manager, if asked, checks the computer and shrugs. Maybe. Maybe not.
Strolling, we weave among throngs of shoppers, most of them staring down at glowing pads, thumbs jabbing and stroking. Some pressing the slab to an ear, walking on auto-pilot, vacant eyes cast skyward or flicking about, delighted or aggravated. Who knows? Communicating? Or paying obiesence to the great church of digital obligation. Who knows? Does anyone really care? It’s there. Do it.
A young couple, boy and girl, at a fast food table. Pads in hand, thumbs busy, neither looking at the other. Communicating?
Advertising, messaging swamps our senses, overwhelming our consciousness until in self-defense we auto-turn it off. Our eyes stop seeing, ears stop hearing, and minds stop responding. We’ve achieved a defense against our suffocating environment like the tinnitus that rings in my head, I lose awareness of it. Only when fatigue overcomes my defenses and the tinnitus blares full 20 over 9, do I become conscious that not all is well.
Other than that? We’ve come to the perfect place in our culture: nothing matters.
-=GB=-
I love you, man.
Also, I never answer my phone, except when it’s the Official Sweetie of Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked ideas. Seriously never at any other time. Telephone communication is broken.
Caller ID was made with the same stupid “why would anyone lie?” assumption that makes faking email origins so easy. Even less excusable in this case; since the origin could easily be authenticated by the provider.
I’ll have to add a stop with the caller id people to my “Time machine trip to slap the idiots silly before they create an international standard that ignores consideration for bad actors” tour.
When you start a new post, upper right corner, click the gear, categories & tags are the second & third items.
WP’s recent “improvement” is a fucktastic fuckbasket of the worst sort of fuckery.