Hello from the ghetto of my soul, a ghetto of my own making and one so aptly reflected on these empty pages that are mere signposts pointing people to greater destinations on the internet highway. Or more appropriately lost travelers who have wandered into a bad neighborhood and are looking for a sign pointing to somewhere more interesting. A better neighborhood. Someplace where kids come to play and grown ups feel a sense of shared kinship in occupying.
That’s right, this isn’t that place weary traveler but don’t get too judgmental. Don’t throw your hands up in soul heavy weariness looking for the way out of being lost. For I’m more tired and lost than you and at least you get to leave. I’ll stay here in this ghetto hoping at least one person actually stays a while and wants to change the scenery, sees something worthy of their time, or maybe even settles down. I’ll stay through the day anyway. Maybe the week, possibly the month and year. But a guy has to move on sometime and I don’t like it here anymore than you do. But I was born with the human need to be heard, to vent, even that desire to make a difference. Now I know that last thing isn’t going to happen around here. Outside of work it’s not happening anywhere and work’s consolations are always shortlived and underappreciated. Anyway I hate people who need applause or appreciation so I shouldn’t care right?
Fuck you.
Right.
But ends draw nigh and knots may form so I’m taking it shortwave. Doing the lone voice in the night lashing out at what maybe some of you want to lash out at and pretending for the moment that it can cure many ills and upset the right people while uniting the wrong.
Pirate style.
Talking hard like Hard Harry trying to shake this mother up while cursing fate that that moment of time in which a movie like Pump Up The volume could happen is long past. It was a different time and place where one voice over local radio could stand out. We’re not in that place anymore. We are all still one. Ultimately. I mean in the end. The end above our shoulders anyway. But we want connection to the mass collective. Other “ones.” And the fact that Hard HArry wouldn’t happen here and now brings some of us unhappiness even if we don’t know who Hard Harry was.
Happiness studies show a clear connection between the stress and disatisfaction in our lives partly due to having so many choices. This is part of the problem but not the only part. But choices can put us in prisons just as much as not having choices can. Well let me change that to a different kind of prison. But a prison nevertheless. One with curtains and rugs and a lot of other accessories from Ikea and Bed, Bath, And Beyond. But a place of suffocation and repression with little room for movement or thoguht no less than prison.
What some in the psychiatric field term the hedonistic treadmill has us all to some extent. All this choice makes it harder to keep up with the Jonesess and this pervasive media culture makes it clear how much we aren’t keeping up. Choice is not always good and conversely too much freedom may lead to too much stress. When I was a kid 13 channels were a frackin’ cornocopia of wonder and delight. Getting a game on the radio was almost as sweet as watching it. If you had an Atari you were set for life. Being able to watch a sitcom rerun late at night during the Summer semed an extravagance and special gift. But now all that seems petty. There’s so much more and the idea of those limited options of the past seem quaint.
But we can’t have it all. Most of us anyway. And there are reminders everywhere of what we don’t have and those that have it. And most of us always think the grass is greener, that the other choice would have been better and that the other guy has the better life. This creates stress and unhappiness.
But the other side of all the choice is not feeling a connection to anything. There are less shared experiences because the culture is so fragmented. When there’s less there’s more. In some ways. It’s like Aristotle saying he who has many friends has no friends. It’s more than that though. It’s about not connecting sure. But it’s because of that loss of even the illusion of shared experience. The culture is so fragmented that unless you find your cult group to share things with you’re experiencing life alone. You could never have a Beatles happen now. THere are just too many choices gearing themselves to narrow audiences. I grew up during the fading of that last era when people shared an experience. Everyone listened to the Beatles. Everyone watched Johny Carson. Everyone watched the 3 networks. Everyone who read, read Stephen King. A movie was big because the culture experienced it together not because the population is out of control and people need a fairly cheap date site where they don’t have to talk to each other.
I still can get a rush from hearing a song on the radio but not like it used to be. Even if the CD is sitting there I’ll listen on the radio because I’m sharing it with other listeners out there somewhere. Forming some vague but real bond for those few minutes meant something and still does. But of course now radio is also fragmented and specialized so I, like many people today, tend to just pop my CD’s in. And everyone has a CD player. Even in their car. When I was a kid an 8 track tape deck was big. Cassettes were huge and having a tape player in the car not something that was guaranteed. Up until the past decade or so you had to actually ask if a car had a radio/cassette player in it when you were buying one. AND IT WAS A SOURCE OF REAL JOY WHEN I HOOKED ONE UP! NOw a CD player is taken for granted in anything new, and probable in most used cars.
SO WHY THE FUCK AM I NOT HAPPY!
Well there’s a lot of reasons. I work my ass off, some of it for free and yet have no privacy, no courtesy, no respite or place to let loose. Most of my adult life has been and figures to be withered away these last few years of it before old age kicks in watching my father die. Loudly and without subtety. Then I guess it’s my turn to die presumably. Whether that takes a month or 30 years. I chose to do this out of duty and respect. Unfortunately he doesn’t feel that respect back and yet I continue doing this with nothing that feels my own to show as a byproduct of all that working. Including the palce I work to pay rent to not really live in. It’s super not fun! THere are other reasons of a more personal nature but back to choices. Well not choices per se but also the information glut that makes it clear what I don’t have. That and the lack of connection to anything but myself and my particular slice of woe and desolation. Actually it seems like the only thing that brings us together in that old sense of shared experiences are horrific events like 9-11, Iraq, and the past year of Heroes.
Let’s not forget the Mets September.
I suppose there are some glimpses of the collective bond that sports makes me remember. The Giants recent Super Bowl miracle was up there. But usually it takes something bad, though I guess it was prety bad for Patriot supporters.
Suck it.
And so many including myself take to the internet to find that artificial community that shares are specialized and focused interest. I go to Mets sites, Lost sites, liberal news sites, and commiserate. I suppose this is one good thing about the information glut and the choices at our disposal. But it’s satisfactions are few and hollow. Maybe after thousands of years of evolution in which blogging has been naturally selected for and those traits passed far down the road there will be true satisfaction. Now it’s a consolation to a real life and real connections.
I’d rather rail against my high school and it’s cliques, phoniness, and adminstrative misdeeds like Hard Harry. Even if he was, in retrospect, a somewhat misguided teen blowing normal teen issues out of proportion, his voice found an audience that needed him and could have been real. Maybe somewhere in that era it was a refelction of some real events. Certainly I remember a time when pirate radio has some sway and interest. When a voice reaching out from the darkness seemed a lifeline to save me from drowning in an ocean of conformity and corruption. Maybe there’s a contradiction there in wanting shared minds to rage against the majority with and wishing for a time when we all shared common experiences and references. Very well. I contradict myself. I am fucking vast. I contain multitudes. And I’m also just as pitifully empty and full of nothing but a multitude of bile formed of my own long dead choices humming in the night air like the dead air of those long lost small radio stations.
Even within the cult there is nothing shared really. not anymore. At one time there was. Take Lost. DVR is the greatest invention since Jennifer Connely but it also separates us. I’m not experiencing the show as others do. I’m watching later. Many people are watching at different times. Even different days. Lost is actually the most time shifted show. No sharing even of that already limited kind that united peopple settling down to sleep watching Johny Carson back in a time when for better or worse he was it and it gave people some comfort.
But I can beat my head against my flat screen laptop monitor all I want. It’s not going to change anything. ultimately all I accomplished here was killing a bit more of the time I have left. You don’t care just as I wouldn’t care about you whining on your blog if you had one. Actually I don’t even have one. I’m stealing bandwidth. This is Mondo’s. At one time it was mine too. But I was too cheap to pay in and too dead inside to care to write about political corruption, Mets misery, tv puzzles, film analysis, or anything else. I’m no less dead now but stealing is fun. Makes the pirate in me feel good. Mondo should shut me down before I steal anymore of his cyber space. He’s the Man. And you’re the Man. I might even be the Man in some places. Deep down we all want to be the Man because we all want to be respected and liked and it makes us larger than these petty little things so many of us are. Eating and shitting, and sleeping, and catering to every biological need and genetic imperative and pretending it’s personal expression and that we are unique even though almost everything we do can be predicted sociologically because we are machines. We may even want everyone else to be the Man because at least we’d have something in common besides our headlong race into oblivion. Some guy in 1682 was full of his life and sure it and it’s setting in Baroque europe or colonial America was the summit of existence. His sudden death to Plague or beheading by a King, or just being run over by a horse drawn carriage would have seemed epic to him and those closest to him. Now it’s meaningless. He’d be dead anyway. Just as you and I will be someday. Ourselves and our era just as destined to death and distant memory. Being the Man is our short term way of escaping that reality and trying to elevate ourselves beyond that short term reality of our obsolescence. The way kings once did. Even the middling among us live as some royalty did at one time but in comparison it offers no consolation because we can;t lord it over everyone. Maybe it still helps up feel immortal. But we’ll be just as dead as the Sun King someday. And it’s actually pretty well proved that we wallow in many of our material goods, buying more and more because it really does give us a feeling of staving of death. Fear of death manifests in buying things. Getting new stuff. Even new people. I forget the psychological term for it. Something like mortality salience.
And you know I want to escape that truth as much as anyone. Maybe that’s what makes me saddest. And angriest. That in relative terms, that is compared to choices I see others having and making, I can’t escape into any of those consolations. Work is my only escape and, well, it’s work. But I want a bigger place, another car, new clothes, more books and electronic stuff, and a nice new girl. But other than the last the others would bring no real long term pleasure and ironically they are the more doable. The bigger place might be somewhat satisfying for providing me some rest and comfort at home after working all day. Also ironically its the hardest to obtain. So I want to get what I can and delay salience as long as possible in what means I have. Another machine looking for programming to make it run smoother until the next inevitable glitch.
And you know what?
I hate whiners. I prefer keeping my shit to myself. Suck it up and do what you have to do. That’s the deal. I’ve done that forever for the most part. But this is pirate radio now and I want to talk hard until any of you dropping by looking for whatever it is you’re really looking for bleed from the penetration. Bend over and feel my words and feel them like the disease they are. Because diseases are real too. Virus and bacteria are alive and playing many of the same games we play. So chalk it up to the bacteria in me taking over. It’s sucking my face like e coli and it wants to suck yours too. It’s not my mind. It’s my pathogens baby. It can’t be helped. Life is a disease and I want to be inflicted but monkey man don’t want to dance in the circle of primal fire worship because monkey’s ain’t really that cute and I want to infect a nice girl who won’t throw her dung at me because I got enough shit to deal with and it’s laden with the bacteria that consumes me but also makes me want to smell better.
talking shit is all.
Hard Harry saying eat your cereal with a fork and do your homework in the dark.
Goodnight and listen for me on this frequency holding a finger to the midnight breeze anywhere the wind blows doesn’t really matter
to me.
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