Beating a Dead or Dying Horse

Tags

classmates, Humor, life in the foothills, lifestyle

I hear from people now and again that the time of individual blogging has peaked. I don’t know if that’s true, and have no particular desire to investigate it either. I know that people who have  blogged have come and gone but I don’t think that is meaningful. That’s a lot like saying that when the inline skating craze erupted, millions of people joined in only later to discard it when they didn’t find it so fun six months later.

People who might have something to say but don’t care much about being a writer will naturally not stick with blogging.

There may be other reasons. People are, I suspect, rather sure that what they have to say is meaningful to others. Bloggers find out just how fickle this is. I’ve been doing this since 2007 or so, and while I’m okay with those who seem to read me, I never “took off” and certainly only a few find anything to comment upon except in a rare instance. I don’t do it for the public applause surely since there often isn’t any.

People who are not really interested in writing per se find Facebook useful enough to get their point across. I use it quite a lot myself, but it cannot take the place of a substantial piece.

I keep changing the focus of my blog, and no doubt that is not helpful, but little do I care. While politics consumes me, I’m far from the best spokesman around. There are, honestly, hugely better sources than moi.

If I pride myself on anything when it comes to the pen it is my ability to blend in a certain snarkiness that some find amusing. I love to twist and turn a phrase and catch people off guard. I’m not nearly as good as say Driftglass or Uncle Charlie Pierce I must say, but I try. If you have no idea of whom I speak, well, so much the poorer are you.

It seems we are headed for another damn war, one that I seriously don’t support. There is entirely too much drumming going on on the far right and that suggests to me that more is being made of this ISIL danger than is real. Most people figure our men and women will be risking their lives once again, and apparently nearly half seem okay with that.

I find that odd given that our government (whether one includes down to local city councils or not) is chock full of seriously stupid and demented people. I’m not sure what it says that so many are so willing to put their lives in the hands of lunatics who believe the earth was created 6,562 years ago, that Jesus rode dinosaurs, that climate change is just a hoax as reported to them by big oil and gas, that giving more money to the rich will someone make middle class people rich, and that God created a whole segment of people gay just to make them live a life of celibacy as some kind of statement to the Catholic Church that they too can learn to keep it in their pants.

I mean if you are that crazy, well, swamp lands abound that are yours for a few grand. i have the deeds.

What this all suggests to me, wasn’t clear to me until a while back, when again, I wondered why I continue to find a whole lotta people continuously reliving their “high school” days as the “best” times of their lives.

I mean seriously? Those were the best years?

Most people find the teen years tolerable at best, painful at worst. We were unsure of ourselves, unsure of the future, and subject to the incessant drum of peer pressure. I figure perhaps the truth of the matter is, is that those were the kings and queens, the quarterbacks and class presidents, are pretty much the Bricks of the day, relegated to drunken evenings reliving the glory days because life just has turned out as full of mendacity as Big Daddy suggested.

There is both irony in that and poetic justice, for to not live in that world of favored click drove us who lived on the outside to fear that our lives would never amount to anything, and that these pretty faces with their athletic prowess and perky breasts were destined to continue being “better” all our lives.

Perhaps that is why we rejects of the acceptable struck out to far-flung campuses and escaped the confines of the “scene of the crime” of our youth.

And when we returned figuratively or otherwise to “home” we were amazed at how small and provincial it all was, and how small and silly most of those lives lived then were.

While we found some of our old friends had weathered the years well, and were thinking and compassionate, all too many were shriveled and cold-hearted, predictably shallow in their thinking and unable to care about anyone but their own clan. Karma is a bitch as they say.

While all that “talking about the old days” was fun for the moment, soon we find ourselves with little else to say, and we stand around much as we did at those awful sock hops, starring at the floor, wishing we could disappear. When we turn and walk away, and survey the world we now inhabit, we take a deep breath, smile, and chuckle at our good fortune at having escaped. Forever after we watch from the sidelines, bemused as we watch the chitchat continue of “remember when. . . .”

Who says the zoo has to have visible bars? We know who is free and who is not don’t we? The exhibits of “how it could have turned out” are both object lessons and light amusement.

Yes, karma indeed is a bitch.

I ponder when I hit my peak. Mostly I conclude that I haven’t yet, and probably will still be reaching it when I breathe my last. But damn, it does seem to get better and better, and that’s a hell of a lot to be grateful for.