How Did We Get Here?

I just looked over my titles of recent blogs - Cattle Prodded Masses, Islam - An Orgy of Murder, I Am the Last Confused Man - and I realize I have a gift for titles that grab. Too bad no one reads them. The good thing so far is the content hasn't been deemed worthless. Of course, one day that may come to pass. Someone may actually stumble across this writing and respond with, "Oh my god, this blog is crap!"

Writers live with that stigma hanging over their heads. We write and write and write and often it sucks. Then we hit that moment of lucidity where all the planets line up, God Himself gives his blessing, the masses are in a funk and boom! there is a gem to capture everyone's attention - for a moment.

Criticize writers all you want. At least we have the balls to put it out there. At least we have an attention span long enough to contemplate more than our next party, meal, screw, game or whatever distraction is top on everyone's list in THEIR particular moment. Society today lives like it will never die.

I'm not attempting to be morbid, but do you really have nothing better to do than watch 36 hours of football over the weekend? Or how about 100 hours of TV a week? This shit is ROBBING YOU. This shit IS STEALING YOU LIFE!

I'm a football and basketball fan. Hell, even Tiger Woods has made my sports window. But I look back over my life and wonder at all the hours I used to spend watching SOMEONE ELSE DO SOMETHING I WANTED TO DO! Give me a basketball and a hoop over watching the prissy-assed pampered NBA millionaires any day.

I suck at golf, but I love the serenity of the manicured courses. I love the challenge of attempting an excellent drive or a putt of any kind. In football, there is nothing like a perfect spiral settling into someones' outstretched arms or making that one-handed grab in stride.

Screw television. How many times have we been told "TV is the great wasteland". This has been a quiet little voice for decades. Are we going to continue to avoid life by living through electrons presented to us by people who "have our number?"

Do you realize you are programmed by government and corporations? Oh my god, he's on a "big brother conspiracy kick!" Wake up people! I'm not presenting fiction! Step away from your television for three weeks. Turn it off and get a life. See what I'm talking about.

We have a world. We have beauty all around us. There are smells, tastes, concepts, relationships and countless other aspects of LIVING that we deny each time we sit in front of an ever-more technologically enhanced BOX and allow anything resembling life to leach away into fat cells and dulled minds.

So sure, criticize the writer. Make fun of his or her manic ideas of freedom to live and breathe without electrons dominating our life. Criticize the opinions we dare to form and put out there for consumption. At least we're paying attention and are brave enough to express our thoughts.

This is my rant and confusion for the day - How did we get here? How did we get to the point that life is not a short gig and beauty is something to be viewed antiseptically.