Look, I don't know about you, but I'm getting frustrated, a flowery word, which borderlines discombobulated, undirected, impotent misanthropy, a term that will hopefully be taken lightly but not to the extent to which your eyes drift to the world above. You know I've been "into" environmental--apocalypse-driven--shtuff, things on the web that I glean off Google News and of course, friends. That doesn't particularly lead to amazing revelations on a happy humanity. Then in the life apart from the computer, I serve calorically-saturated, whip-creamed-nonfat/full-fat syrupy drinks to either very skinny, well-dressed consumers or very large, distinctly dressed consumers or other mall workers funneling their mall wages back into the mall. Couple this with scanning the follow-up blogs on nationally-ranked newspapers, the kind that are open to the reader, that are positively overrun with inappropriate punctuation, poor grammar and misspelled words, totally gagging on their very strong, mostly abysmal, and overall (I'm striving against pretentiousness here) uneducated (
unthinking is more correct) remarks which inevitably disintegrate wholly into name-calling and religion invoking, utterly fallacious comments and you have this current entry, which perhaps could be seen as a rant, but I personally see "rants" in themselves as temporal and generally self-serving. Which this easily could be.
As you might notice, life after Arizona (timely! sort of) has been less than thrilling/mood-enhancing and I take this fact as well as the typified spoiled only child does (no offense intended to the only children here. you are not typical. and also i don't think anyone reading this is an only child). This has led to much internal negotiating and reflections based on the words of cynical narrators/writers (the pomo ones, at least). Thus, in this maelstrom which involves an increasingly inward spiral of conversations and a brief stint in delusional, technological schemes via hermitage as well as infrequent intellectual, actually significant external conversations and a respiration system that croaks out self-induced ennui and worldly pessimism, the following vices and "real" inquiries of thought have loosely converged:
(not in order of importance, please note)
vice 1) baseless political divisiveness (which i am a definite, self-proclaimed advocate OF and a thing that i'm very incrementally trying to change as I see it to be an infuriating reason as to why the government/general national population suck/s so much, militarily, politically, economically, racially, religiously, educationally, environmentally, socially, and intellectually. (not technologically---idea-crush here). But on second thought, if it weren't reps v. dems. t-ps as the easy public scapegoat, it'd probably more realistically be something else...)
"r"iot 2) the next step? this is where I almost always fail. despite the american studies degree which rather than leading to many potential solutions and in turn hope has led much more to a burdened conscience, cold aloofness, partially hardened apathy, and totally impotent fantasies. so my question is WHAT NEXT? the speculative fiction writers say the world will spiral into violence (plus four), ruled by corporations (plus 5), crumble into environmental disrepair (also plus 5), and/or burst with technological advances (plus two). the news reports seem to favor this with all their doomsday freakouts. and of course others say nuffin's rong, y'all, keep pollutin/keep shootin'/keep doing ya thaaaang
"r"iot 3) Are we eventually going to become people content in our jobs, taking joy in the small pleasures like baked bread and chicks hatching and ipads with 483957293475901gb and infinitely fast wireless and chatting with our good ol' friends and remembering nostalgically and looking out our windows at something green and maybe a sky austerely blue and think that this is it? And feel detached and chuckle and shake our heads at the sad, overdone, emotionally-touching aka manipulating things the news discloses and think then too, what is it that we can do and at that moment feel okay that the answer is nothing?
vice 4) I'm worried that I'm setting a life path that makes #3 possible.
I think that i'm just severely overwhelmed by the factious American voices that are all essentially clobbering one another and of course astounded by the middle and upper classes who are doing essentially nothing but half-living, mostly ignoring and wholeheartedly blaming (which I also can probably claim a part in this conspiratorial selfishness) and then also sorta pissed at the lower classes for un-pc reasons.
***sorry for the overwrought sentences. dfw does them so much better. and without reaching SAT/GRE words/synonyms.
OPTION 2: We could have a minnesota reunion. Reminisce about good times in good ol' northfield with nate, maybe spend some time at briana's and leah's, and we could even road trip to my cabin in canada for some crazy fun this summer.
