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It’s Saturday and you’re not. The sun is relentless in her shining through, and you’re not. It’s colder than it looks, you’re not. That’s where the comparisons end between you and a day. Stacking all the days up, there are more without you than with you. Damn. If I put a tricky rhyme or two and come up with a few chords I’ve got an Indie song right there. I’m not entirely sure I know what the genre jargon is these days. I feel like I’ve been in an eighteen-month news block out. Maybe more of an overload and self-imposed exile.

The news is a bit like Facebook and vice versa. Too much of the same shit coming at you from subjective angles. I remember when the good guys or bad guys would accuse and the other guys would defend. Now it feels more like a personal injury attorney, accuse everyone of everything and let things sort out getting what you can. Huh. I guess that could be like a fisherman casting his net, it’s just that the fisherman seems more wholesome, and though his aim is the death of the fish, less hostile.

It’s not like I was all that happy with the smiley tanned news-anchor approach, like every market had turned into So-Cal. I don’t prefer fake smiles over fake concern or hostility. I’d rather the personality wasn’t the news at all. Oh, let’s not forget the decade or so where Dog Bites Man WAS news. And yeah, as the alpha dog of a Pit pack I could go on and on about how fucked up that was, but my dogs were their own ambassadors. I don’t have an American Peer pet to show people how to act.

This guy I know on Facebook … shit. I went to high school with him and like other people from high school, I don’t remember him, but I friended those I couldn’t ignore. Anyhow, he wrote this touching piece about his grandparents and parents in civil rights movements, a humble and humbling bit about how his generation (that’s be mine) dropped the ball and how he wishes ‘Our’ children the best of luck. It’d be a quick joke I set up myself to say he and I didn’t have children together, that I know of. So, I won’t. I don’t think he has kids at all, I mean I didn’t see any on his friends list, but I didn’t look real hard. I wanted to type something back like ‘unless you’re dying, you don’t get out of it so easy.’ I didn’t. I didn’t like the language I was using and then I forgot about it. There’s not really a good way of saying ‘I’m not sure I care for what you’re saying, but I like how you said it.’ Or, and mores the pity, an emoji.

The last quantum leap of personal computer technology seemed encouraging; that people were writing to one another again. We’ve managed to take the writing back out of writing again. Every smart phone in the world comes pre-equipped with smiles, hearts, frogs and a steaming turd with googly eyes. I had this little nap dream about rewriting the book of Revelations in emoji’s and found it doable without purchasing a dream pack of extra emoji’s. Yes, I know, I’m an advocate for punishment for writing about dreams and for the most part mine are lost in a fog of Ativan and Xanax. During the day, however, I’ll take naps short enough and unmedicated and get snippets of dreams. It would have been less cumbersome to just state the punchline and screw the source.

I’m not sure I believe my generation didn’t do anything either. For some reason I’m considered a baby boomer. We started out growing up with bomb shelters. We were the market for the cultural revolution (ok, some baby boomers were fifteen by the time I was born, them and I don’t seem like peers). We sure didn’t Nuke anyone, though that Nuke shadow was always hanging over us. Our civil rights activities were more paperwork than sitting in the front of the bus, more like affirmative action and homosexuals as a semi-protected class and I don’t know, trying hard to be comfortable in our own skin. Oh yeah and we started recycling and having less children and being environmentally aware in a sort of Fuck-we’re-losing-our-planet sort of way. Huh. Yeah, maybe we didn’t do much, nothing Velcro.

I don’t know, other people’s children seem to be reinventing critiquing the wheel. Mine are interested in topical topics but not as much as they are in living their lives. Another tech problem they face; when auto dial became a common feature, we stopped remembering phone numbers. With Google and Siri, we don’t have to remember anything, just trust that the person who wrote the Wikipedia article was solid. Maybe it’s not a real concern for most of y’all. I’m having memory problems and though I try hard to let it bother me until I remember, more often than not, these days, I’ll ask my phone. It’s a disturbing habit.

I’m doing better, paw wise. It’s probably not just one of those things, but it’s not bad enough to insist a doctor take it seriously. I don’t understand medicine or biology enough to make an educated guess, but it feels like a nerve thing as opposed to something that’s not a nerve thing. I know a little bit about a lot of things. Sometimes that sounds like a boast. It’s not, often that little bit isn’t enough and there’s no filter for a little bit of what.

I’ve probably mentioned this before, but, that Twain book, A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthurs court, fretted me something fierce. I felt completely inadequate for going back in time. I have no idea when previous eclipses happened, though I can put a stripped rifle back together, I can’t cast the molds for various parts, mine the metals and make a gun from scratch and … well it’s been almost five decades since I read it, but the guy, and Mark Twain, seemed much more in tune with how to do shit.

Oh, shit, almost forgot (unless I mentioned this like around Christmas). The downstairs TV died so I replaced it with a 4k (in part because that was the widest selection and much cheaper than they’d been). Everything looks a little too real. I don’t mean like you feel like you are actually in space or Jurassic park or catacombs. I mean you can see the set. It makes TV and movies look like plays. All those little details that in a blurry way seemed like, I don’t know, Winterfell, are too clean and look painted on. I always wondered what my dogs saw when we’d watch TV. Animal planet was different because of the sound, but we all had our TV watching positions. To watch TV at all begins with a suspension of disbelief; we convert the two dimensional into three dimensions and the color pallet or every TV we’ve owned, even black and white, into the entire pallet of the white light spectrum. That all is before any plot or urgent warning even starts.
I used to wonder about that as a kid; when we were all in the basement for a tornado warning the TV would update us, remind us of emergency broadcast and to stay tuned in case of imminent danger, like, a power outage. That didn’t make sense to me. The little bit I know about electricity is that the TV needs it to give us warnings. I didn’t stop wondering, I rationalized a few things, like some people have generators as do some TV stations, the lights and TV going out are demonstrable news and that maybe the emergency broadcast wasn’t really for citizens and broadcasting it was like one of those comforting white lies.

Come to think of it; I haven’t seen a test for the emergency broadcasting system in a while. You can also get TV on various battery and twelve volt operated devices. Though, I imagine, most folks go to the weather app and then text a friend. How come nobody makes downloading porn jokes anymore? Is there no longer porn online?

Ok, I’m done now.
Whew.