Down to Zero in Normal entries

Yesterday I wrote a thingy-entry-rant-nonsense that was kind of lovely in it’s high grade cynical snark and outlying this as the “Opinion Age”. It was pretty much offensive to anyone with an opinion and didn’t overlook the irony of being opinion based; as much shit was splattered on me as on you. I have excuses, not sure whether I’m using them to excuse the writing or the not posting (though it’s more like not-posting-yet).

My Birthday is too fucking close. Something will go wrong, horribly wrong. Why? I don’t know, it just always does. I’ve avoided car accidents for the past decade by not getting into a car on my birthday. The other excuse is my little sister is coming to town. That’s a good thing. I’ve been cleaning up two stories of this essentially four-story house. And sure, my mom only uses one story, can only use one, so the other three are on me. It’s been a few years since I’ve done this. There are, or were, spider webs that were legacies, passed down through generations. The second story didn’t even know we had a vacuum cleaner.

My little sister is hardly a neat freak and wouldn’t even mention the state of the house. I just thought it’d be a nice thing to do. I have about twenty scratches (I was going to exaggerate wildly, 20 is a pretty good guess) and my back is a sneeze away from full spasm. A smaller but not unconsidered reason is offering up a controlled sacrifice to birthday luck. I know it sounds either overly superstitious or like I’m pulling my own leg (If I were pulling something it wouldn’t be my leg. Pardon me.). I’m minimizing. My birthday is disastrous, I don’t know why, but it’s way past the statistical norm for any given day of the year having bad shit happen.

I wore myself out between a treatise on what I’m calling “the Opinion Age” and house-cleaning. Ok, the treatise was what I did for a break. I slept for ten and a half hours straight, I mean in a row, I was bent and on sleeping meds, but I’m always on sleeping meds, the same dosage, the same meds for over five years now (it’s more like twenty years, but for five years they’ve been consistently prescribed, shit, it’s 2018, more like eight years).

Huh, this thing is uncommonly dull, perhaps penance for the Opinion age thing. Fuck it, I’m including the first half and going back to put finishing touches on my rearrangement of clutter.

It’s the day after valentine’s day, 2-15-18, someone in Florida went on a shooting spree. The ugly turn that social media has taken, and you can blame Trump, but social media been heading this way for a while now, everybody has to have a motherfucking opinion about every god damn thing. I don’t think we call this the information age any longer. We being media, I suppose, and probably after the fact.

I could make an app that would post a personalized form letter, like, for instance, “I’m against shooting people” with, you know added stuff, like a series of reasons, races, creeds, or like breeds of animals or something. I’m not being callous, well, my intent isn’t to be callous. But, you know, think about the last guy in his or her group of friends or online acquaintances, to post his or her opinion on valentine’s day and senseless shooting tragedies. That motherfucker went ahead and said his or her valentine’s day was not good he misses his wife/husband or her boyfriend or girlfriend, and what happened in Florida was such a tragedy and how can people be so mean. What an arrogant prick or vagina! He or she read all his or her friends or online acquaintance’s opinions (for that matter after the first hundred, everyone was doing that) and still needed to add his or her mediocre crap onto the crap pile.

Let’s pretend for a minute that people read the crap pile, or, better yet, the handful of people directly affected; making it a political point is offensive to their grief. I happen to be in favor of gun control, I was yesterday, I will be tomorrow, today that opinion doesn’t comfort anyone and I woke up too late to get a lower stratum on the crap pile. I have a pretty inflated opinion of my opinions and I often don’t find it necessary to share.

Several years ago, I did something I can’t recall having done before or since. It was during the Gulf war. I asked my daughter not to wear a pin that said No Blood for oil on it to school. We talked about it, I let her decide whether to take it off or not. Not saying I never told my kids “Because I said so, that’s why!” She asked why and I asked her if any of her classmates had parents in the service (we both knew she did, if she had said no, I would might have broken out with Because I said So). I said they were probably frightened for their parents lives, that to them the blood part was personal, they had skin in the game. I told her I would never censor her politically opinion but ask her to use it judiciously, when you use it to hurt your peers, knowing that it will, you are no longer the good guy. She took it off. The next day I got an angry call from her mother.

Facebook is not only exactly like my ex-wife, but she’s on there too. Sometimes I say horribly non-PC shit just to fuck with Facebook. Um, my Facebook, I realize there’s another Facebook too of very conservative opinions. Facebook, for the most part, remains civil, because you can just kick a dissenting opinion off your feed. How’s that for social? I’ve yet to do that, though I have made a few folks posts invisible to me. Not because of what they say, but because of how often a day they say shit. Makes my head hurt.

I find myself disagreeing with modern liberalism, and modern conservatism is lunatic fringe shit from 12 years ago. And who the fuck cares? It’s not like I’m the first person to have that opinion and post it. If I were trying really hard to write a persuasive piece … I would have failed. Obviously, I wrote this shit instead. I believe I could write a persuasive piece, I have a high opinion of my abilities. It’s the choosing a stand long enough to get readers of every bent hooked that I’d have trouble finding.

And what gets me the most today is that our national M.O. is to make individual tragedy into a news cycle of opposition. Here in the Opinion age people believe they are the information, that the lives of seventeen people make them obligated to comment.