"We accept her! We accept her! One of us! One of us! Gooble gobble, gooble gobble! One of us! One of us!" - Tod Browning, Freaks
It's 2 A.M. and there you are shivering in a pair of brown stained BVDs, your 3rd Red Bull away from a full-scale, hypoglycemic attack of petit mal. Your iPhone has been effectively blocked from contacting your favorite phone sex numbers and your parent's trust fund has magically gone belly up in order to fund some Citibank D.M.'s MDMA-fueled weekend in Bangkok. You've already defaulted on this month's student loan payments just so you could purchase a new X-Box and even your drug dealer knows better than to call your debts into account. Whatever slight modicum of functioning brain cells you once maintained now reflect the interior contents of your refrigerator; a congealed bowl of ramen noodles and a half empty tall boy of Pabst Blue Ribbon. But you, young man; you know better than to ride down the Elliot Smith Highway into the sensible justification for your inherent lack of standards. Because no matter how daunting those spectres of the outside world may seem lurking about your clumsily deadlocked firetrap, oozing with domestically financed genocides, economic manifest destinies alive and well in the 21st century and Miley Ray Cyrus' career, you are cozy and inviolate, safely sequestered behind the digital window on the world that is your blog. With your blog, you have both everything and nothing. The sun rises and sets in its flawless, silicon asshole, and you couldn't imagine – or want – it any other way. So raise up those sweaty, blistered palms in a paean of supplication to Saint Albertus Gore and a WiFi connection in every city fire hydrant; toss those designer coke bottle frames high in the air, emaciated and overpampered hipster feeb! The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand in lurid, high-definition access! Thy voice hath mumbled in the wilderness and the earth resounds that it is thine to inherit!
Given that the underlying trinity of voyeurism, exhibitionism and sheer, unabashed egomania now claim an overwhelming monopoly on America's rapidly dwindling expendable income, it is only natural that the blogosphere represents the realm of myth called into being, carved not of flesh, blood or even stone but pixels, USB ports and a paucity of wasted time. It's the logical respite for the dispossessed sweatpants and trench coat sect now that the conglomerate Leviathan of VH1 and Disney have virtually dismantled the peep show industry. Because when you finally get down to brass tacks and quit relying on a handful of your fellow anonymous disenfranchisees bloated on their own logorrhea and microwave burritos to validate your lack of identity and substance, the act of blogging is little more than the frenzied and masturbatory caterwauling of a neglected child's cries for attention in the face of a hostile medium populated by hereditary money and Rupert Murdoch's illiterate snuff fantasies. Put 500 Boston University grad students in front of 500 lap-tops with WiFi access, and you're not likely to get “War and Peace”, but 500 variations on the theme of “life sucks”. Because the blogosphere is the great equalizer, a past time as distinctly American as professional victimization and egregious steroid abuse. It warms the cockles of your trans-fat encrusted heart valves and enrages your perilously anemic blood. It puts a spring in your step and a sticky little stain at the seat of your trousers. You know you're never alone with a handful of marginal discontents hanging on to your every word about the latest Judd Apatow tard-a-palooza to distract you from the nagging reminder of just why you've managed to fuck up every single opportunity to forge a lasting relationship with a fellow organism of your species that may dwell in that vast and terrifying maelstrom that is flesh and blood, etic reality. In an era in which the threat of Hepatitis C, Ebola, and the wholesale distribution of anthrax have been so firmly entrenched in the psyche to render any sense of physical contact all but illegal, it is a fitting testimony to the inexorable pull of paranoia that your clinging need for redemption is forced to manifest itself – yea, out of necessity – in a virtual group hug administered by a gaggle of unemployed systems admins with far too much time on their hands than a more appropriate utlest for your emotional siphoning – say, your local Scientology center or an AA meeting.
“I worked my way to the heart of the crowd
I was shocked to find what was allowed
Now I'm losing myself – in the crowd...”
Magazine, Shot from Both Sides
Now that the inevitable brouhaha has finally subsided from this past November's electoral circus, it's not a far stretch of the imagination to state that despite her inestimable flaws, sterility inducing eloquation and absolute lack of foresight, comprehension or good taste, Sarah Palin just may have been the most singularly qualified contender that best represented the underlying standards of the glutenous hock of sputum that is the blogosphere. In an era in which pundits, spokesmen and demagogues are selected not on the criteria of credentials, competence or internally sound rationale, but seemingly at random based on their capacity to reflect – no matter how erroneous or naively – those quintessentially American ideals of democracy, self righteous indignation, appeals to the lowest common denominator and the ability to speak loudly and presumptively in public without due cause, Palin was the everywoman cum Behemoth; the Attack of the 50 foot Hockey Mom, replete with with lugubriously manufactured charm, a repossessed Saks 5th Avenue wardrobe purchased at full mark-up and an uncanny knack to express in plain English what was on the hearts and minds of America's unbridled heartland (assuming that they still had 2 functional teeth with which to express it with) without directly mentioning their deepest and most inexpressible fear about their bitter rival (call it the “ 'N' Word” factor). She was the perfectly suited Galatea made flesh for the gluttonous blood lust of the Collective Media Vampire Cabal (TM); tailor made to be exploited, martyred and forgotten on the same tangled heap of charred flesh wherein dwell the ghosts of H. Ross Perot, Rev. Al Sharpton, and the dude who played “Gopher” on The Love Boat. She was tailor made - for the blogosphere.
“I worked my way to the heart of the crowd
I was shocked to find what was allowed
Now I'm losing myself – in the crowd...”
Magazine, Shot from Both Sides
Now that the inevitable brouhaha has finally subsided from this past November's electoral circus, it's not a far stretch of the imagination to state that despite her inestimable flaws, sterility inducing eloquation and absolute lack of foresight, comprehension or good taste, Sarah Palin just may have been the most singularly qualified contender that best represented the underlying standards of the glutenous hock of sputum that is the blogosphere. In an era in which pundits, spokesmen and demagogues are selected not on the criteria of credentials, competence or internally sound rationale, but seemingly at random based on their capacity to reflect – no matter how erroneous or naively – those quintessentially American ideals of democracy, self righteous indignation, appeals to the lowest common denominator and the ability to speak loudly and presumptively in public without due cause, Palin was the everywoman cum Behemoth; the Attack of the 50 foot Hockey Mom, replete with with lugubriously manufactured charm, a repossessed Saks 5th Avenue wardrobe purchased at full mark-up and an uncanny knack to express in plain English what was on the hearts and minds of America's unbridled heartland (assuming that they still had 2 functional teeth with which to express it with) without directly mentioning their deepest and most inexpressible fear about their bitter rival (call it the “ 'N' Word” factor). She was the perfectly suited Galatea made flesh for the gluttonous blood lust of the Collective Media Vampire Cabal (TM); tailor made to be exploited, martyred and forgotten on the same tangled heap of charred flesh wherein dwell the ghosts of H. Ross Perot, Rev. Al Sharpton, and the dude who played “Gopher” on The Love Boat. She was tailor made - for the blogosphere.
As it has become as blatantly obvious as a botched nose job that America has essentially transformed itself from a republic based on the values of merit and open discourse (a gullible assumption of free exchange and amber waves of skilled labor that has as much basis in history and fact as Tom Brokaw's synthetic hair weave, admittedly) into a Three Cock Ring Sideshow with as much appeal and moral charisma as a washed up drag queen's S.T.D, it reasons to state that when confronted with the incontrovertible dark side of the Warholian prophecy that is middle class cultural iconography, the only logical choices of comprehending the horror and dread are to keep your head down, shut the fuck up, and swallow its figurative load, or to shamefacedly pay a paltry entrance fee to revel in stoic glee and unrepentant schadenfreude at your neighbor's comically grotesque attempts at metaphoric fellatio (actually, in all likelihood there is a third option; but as the young folk be inordinately fond of saying, “he who know how to cheats the play, don't always gots to pay”. There's a moral in there, somewhere).
And while I feel that's its not exactly a categorical imperative to distinguish whatever minimal sense of identity you may have by the manner in which you choose to occupy your limited time frame, at my age I probably have too much invested to impart that designation with anything less than a grave import – despite the fact that there were probably much more fruitful diversions that I should have channeled my energies into (such as Vietnamese hookers, fraudulent charities or telemarketing scams). It's a tough road to hoe, but that's the price of living and learning; and Fuck You, Ghandi, for suggesting otherwise.
It's taken me over 32 years to become convinced of very little, and whatever meager strands of faith and cohesion I may have once maintained tend to become discarded with each passing second in the perilous vacuum that is human interaction. Convictions cause convicts, as one famously dead hippie once quipped; and that's one of the few truisms I still take to heart. But I firmly believe that whether by accident or design, whether you view it as a blessing or a curse, sentience is one of the few innate qualities that we can hope to possess. In fact, strip away your carefully manicured tree shrubs, your two hybrid-car garages, and your murky funk of sexual property divisions, and it's pretty much all we have left. And it's gone just as quick as the rotting bags of offal we call our bodies meet the dust. Which isn't the most pleasant sentiment to wake up to on a Wednesday morning, but neither is the hacking and tubercular cough of your unemployed neighbor's ambiguously gendered booty call at 2 in the morning.
Which brings me to the obvious hypocrisy of my own complicity in this unjustifiable, pointlessly narcissistic and ignoble endeavor which demands about the same level of attention you would pay to a schizophrenic crack-head's fatal screeds against Napoleon, the CIA and John Silber's poisonous, dwarf-armed soul. It didn't take me long to come to the painful realization that, despite my pretenses, my neuroses, and my ego-driven insistence otherwise, in many ways I'm probably no different than the next motherfucker standing in line with me at Starbucks. Just like him, I'm probably as terrified of the notion of militant Iranian Socialists petitioning for gay marriage as I am of women's volleyball, Domino's Pizza or the Jonas Brothers, and furthermore, I have the bar tab to prove it. And like that next proverbial motherfucker, I am just as entitled to the rights of self affirmation and hubris promised to me by Arianna Huffington and CNN as anyone else, whether or not I choose to express it through the marginal and ephemeral shrieking of the blogosphere or through the whiskey-fueled pique of a slurred rendition of “I Am, I Said” in the nearby strip club (regardless of whether or not such avenues are warranted). But to make a cult out of it, endowing it with all the sturm and drang theatrics of mountainside epiphanies and divine mandates issued from the honey-laquered fingertips of the instantly accessible high priests of terabytocracy? There's only one phrase for it:
“I can haz to not takes yours bullshit seriusly?”
Or better yet:
“I'd like the last 10 minutes of my life back NOW, bitch.”
