Tucked way down in a box of reference books (scientific, financial, sociological) I found a small, 3 book paperback boxed set that I thought I would never see again. It was and is my Webster's New World dictionary boxed set containing The New World Dictionary, The New World Thesaurus and the Instant Spelling Dictionary. Since almost immediately after their reappearance and up to now they have been sitting in their box on my bedside table, a mere 18 inches away. There are a few reasons why these books are so meaningful.
First and foremost, I bought them right around the time I met Ken, back in very early 1991, at a used book store in San Francisco. These were new, but in the bargain bin nonetheless. Their copyright is 1990. Every time that I look at them, I think of Ken and that time in our relationship. We were newly coupled, getting ready to set up house together, madly in lust, and quickly falling in love as well. These books will always have a connection to that feeling, and in part, that is admittedly conscious. I don't ever want to forget how wonderful that time felt. Since then, there are few times that I can compare to it. We were happy, optimistic, looking to the future, all while trying to figuring out how to make a good marriage.
Secondly, the books are all copyright dated 1990. This means that you won't any of the following words or phrases contained in these books: internet, cell phone, bizzitch, emoticon, threat-down, blog, Al Queda, carbon footprint or supersize (yes, that was added in 2009). To a man of my generation, this is about as Norman Rockwell as it gets. This is a reference book that truly does reference a moment in time right before one of the most monumental periods of transition in the history of the human race: the technology explosion was at our doorstep, and ready to knock the door down. This was a world of DOS. I don't think Windows 3.0 was even out yet, or if it was, it was just freshly released. To people from today's younger generations (especially young adults), we may as well have just emerged from caves wearing animal skins; it's that hard for them to relate to it. Did your parents used to regale you with stories of great struggle, sacrifice and difficulty from their early years? My mother grew up during the depression, so I certainly got an earful (and by the way, that wasn't a bad thing). I have to think that what I felt back then when hearing these tales is very much like how we older adults make the current generation of young adults feel when we start to get sentimental.
Another reason I missed these so much was because they had been my bedside mate for many years until I moved out of the Diamond Street house. When I am reading, I can think of little that I find more pleasurable than finding a new word, or one that I'm not 100% sure of its definition. When I had these books and that happened, it would mean that I could reach over to the bedside table, pull my beautiful little dictionary out of it's box and rifle through real paper pages. In the time since these books went MIA, sometimes I'll go to the computer and look up a word, but it's just not as satisfying of an experience. I'm old school; I want to feel the paper, and if it's an older book, I love that musty smell as I leaf through the pages.
Eventually, books printed on paper are going to be virtually obsolete. I am sure there are doubters in my generation and the ones preceding it who are thinking "no way" to what I am saying, but that is what they said about newspapers too. I don't think that there is a single major-market daily that is making money, and if there are any that are managing to make a small profit or break even, I'll bet that they are seeing a profit by cutting the bottom line. The San Francisco Chronicle, for example, has cut 50% of their writing and reporting staff in the last couple of years. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is gone. The Kansas City Star is on it's way down too. Even the behemoths such as The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times are not immune to this trend. If you know any newspaper journalists ask them. I have a good friend who is a section editor for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The PD is actually doing better than a lot of big papers, but my friend says that market research has shown that they have a demographic that comprises a large part of their subscriber base who collectively still refuse to get a computer, or even learn how to do the most basic things on one at a public library. That is probably one generation only, and after they are gone, if not even before, even the PD will probably not be immune to having to change in a big way, or go dinosaur.
I'm sure that digitizing printed media has many advantages, including some important green ones. I am all for conserving natural resources, but printed media is one of the few indulgences I continue to hold on to and rally for. If we're going to talk about wasteful use of wood products, I'm going to say "yes it is a problem", but I would like to know how much paper is consumed annually for book printing, and how much is consumed printing the huge wad of grocery store ads that are in my mailbox every week. Then add in all the junk mail and (my pet peeve) all the paper that is wasted on the obnoxious flyers that are put on my car windshield and put grooves on my wiper blades so the wipers never work well after that, all the excessive packaging so our Hot Pockets stay fresh and pretty, the excessive use of things like paper towels (use a rag and wash it), paper and plastic waste generated by grocery bags and all the unnecessary paperwork that is generated by industry. If we're officially in the digital age, take everything that you possibly can digital. I feel pretty confident in saying that my generation (The Baby Boomers) is the last generation that will have any significant percentage of its members that will bemoan the loss of the printed paper media. Change is inevitable, and as history always shows, the younger generations are always the first to adapt to those changes. That will leave me and my fellow generationals sitting on park benches mumbling to each other, grousing about all the change that is too much happening too quickly. I am on the verge right now of becoming my grandfather, or my crabby old neighbor from when I was very much a young boy (less than 10 years), who would come out screaming and shaking his fist every time my and my friends would step on his lawn or commit what he saw as some other grave infraction upon his property.
As the line goes from a number from the Broadway musical Avenue Q, "The Internet Is Made For Porn". I have no problem whatsoever with that. Since I'm not a huge fan of porn anyway, I would say that I consider porn on paper to be a wasteful use of the resource. Keep it on the internet, so that while I have my John Irving in my hands, you can have your Johnson in yours. Eventually, the rare book dealer of today is going to have all the surviving books that aren't in public libraries, personal libraries, university libraries and collections or museums. Amazon and Wal-Mart are already killing local book stores. Before too long, the Kindle and other e-book readers will be inflicting the final fatal blows on the paper book.
Eventually, all the writing talent will be found via their blogs. Now I'm not saying that is a bad thing. There are some really brilliant talented writers putting out blogs, but I wonder if this probable phenomenon might have a couple of downsides. Is this going to lead to furthering the dumbing down of our society? I have to seriously wonder this. If you read enough blogs (or for that matter, watch enough YouTube or listen to enough popular music) you'll see that more often than not, success and popularity has little to do with the artist or writer having genuine talent. I wonder how many people know who Perez Hilton is compared to the number of people who know who Arianna Huffington is. One has a blog that is amazing. Tons of great writing talent, producing writing that forces you to think, and a clear mission that guides her project. The other one is a bitchy queen gossip monger, who I would venture to guess doesn't get laid much. Sadly, I'll venture a guess that he is far more well-known to the masses, and is also far more widely "read".
As a society, it seems that we have devolved into a gluttonous mass of functionally illiterate no-nothings who want their food supersized and their news dumbed down and condensed into sound and video bites that say what they want to hear (Fox News anyone?). We are more interested in The Octamom than we are in picking up a geometry book and learning about octagons. Millions of people know that a tragically unmedicated bipolar Britney Spears walks into gas station bathrooms barefoot and drives with her children on her lap. How many people know about the forced child labor in third world countries (mostly in southeast Asia and mainland China as well) who make our Nikes for salaries of pennies? Real food is facing virtual extinction. Most of the world's population is undernourished, malnourished or starving. Meanwhile, most of us in America get too many calories from food-like products that are laden with toxic chemicals, a plethora of unhealthy corn products and byproducts and little real whole food in it. Even so, they still tout their health benefits, because they have been fortified with antioxidants, vitamins, minerals, magic mojo and probably eventually, Viagra.
There is a really good movie that has been out for a few years called Idiocracy. If you haven't seen it, it's on the pay movie channels all the time or you can rent it. The premise of the movie is that the army is testing a program where they will take their best and strongest soldiers and cryogenically freeze them for future use. Before they use it on their "good ones", they need to get two test subjects, and they need to have no family or other living relatives and they need to be average in as many ways as possible. The first subject comes from within ranks: there is a slacker soldier (played by Luke Wilson perfectly) who has worked in an Army archives warehouse for years, flying under the radar, and as such, has set it up so that his work days involve doing nothing. His name is Joe (Average Joe). Both of his parents and all the grandparents are dead, no siblings, no wife, no children. Best of all, he tests out as absolutely average in every category (health, intelligence, age, strength). They then go to the civilian population for the second subject and find "working girl" Rita (played by Maya Rudolph, probably one of best recent SNL alums) who is on the run and trying to hide from her pimp, a thug named Rerun. They get frozen, the program gets shut down and they get forgotten.
Fast forward 500 years. Their pods are unearthed in The Great Garbage Avalanche of 2505. They come out of suspended animation outside the apartment of Frito (played brilliantly by Dax Shepard, who is very underrated, and I love him), who is eating some nasty looking glop from a tube and watching his favorite TV show, Ow, My Balls. If I had to give an accurate description of Ow My Balls, I would describe it as the bastard child of America's Funniest Home Videos and Jackass. Joe and Rita step out of their pods to find out that America has basically turned into a giant garbage heap, literally and figuratively. Over the centuries, because the most intelligent in society had borne very few children and the ignorant masses had babies with impunity, within 500 years there were no intelligent people left. The President, Dwayne Elizando Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho, is a professional wrestler. Everything is bought at Costco, and Costcos are about the size of small cities. You walk in the door and the greeter says "Welcome to Costco, I love you". The population lives on fast and junk food. They don't drink water, they drink a Gatorade-esque product called Brawndo. "It has what bodies crave, 'cause it has electrolytes" is what everybody says, even though nobody seems to know what electrolytes are. They are even irrigating their crops with Brawndo, and can't understand why all the crops die ("but Brawndo has what plants crave; it's got electrolytes"). Brawndo Inc. is 2500's equivalent of Kraft or Nestle'.
You can figure it out from here. Joe and Rita are the smartest people in America, they save the country, etc. It's directed by Mike Judge (of Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill fame), and though slapstick and expected to not be not very insightful, it actually ends up being underrated and kind of brilliant (kind of like the humor I described in Scrubs in my last essay). Because I think it's so brilliant and insightful, I love it. It also gives a great play-out of what might happen if society continues on its current path that I've been bitching so vociferously about in this writing.
I can't resist; here is a short video montage of clips from Idiocracy, gleaned off of YouTube. YouTube really is good for something I guess:
As I find myself here now, I'm wondering if it's going to even take 500 years for that much devolution to be realized. I have to think that I can still be hopeful that America will stop glamorizing ignorance, but look at us: our last President was, as Wanda Sykes says, a C student. His grammatical and syntactical offenses were never challenged. Quite the opposite, I think he made a lot of the general population feel comfortable: "he's one of us!" The current President seems to be scaring the crap out of these same gen-pops. A lot of people that I tend to agree with think it has more to do with race than anything else. Partly. Maybe. I think it also has a lot to do with his intelligence, and his incredible unbelievably calm demeanor. They have slung everything, including Hitler and the kitchen sink at him, and the guy doesn't even twitch or bat an eye. When he won, I was not nearly as surprised that a black man got elected President as I was that such a scholarly, intelligent and deliberate-thinking person was. Before Obama, when was the last time that you actually heard a President say that he was going to do his research and get some learned counsel before taking a stand on an issue? The first time that he said that he was going to do it, my jaw hit the ground.
If you still don't think that America glamorizes ignorance, chew on this: one of the most popular game shows on TV is called Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader; I'll fess up and admit that I've watched it a handful of times, though I don't think that I've ever watched a complete episode. That this show is so popular speaks volumes about the character of the American television-watching majority. Inside that little factoid is another even more pitiful factoid: the adult contestants almost never win! I actually did happen to see an episode where the contestant won the big prize ($100,000 perhaps?), and what do you think that contestant's profession was? She was an elementary school principal! Not only is all this a sad enough fact, but that most of the people watching this can relate to the ignorance of the majority of the contestants and see no problem in their lack of knowledge; that is something I find even more pathetic and disheartening.
Before Fifth Grader, there used to be a late-night game show called Street Smarts. The premise for this show was that the producers would go out onto the streets of LA and find the 3 most ignorant people they could possibly find (and I know for certain that was their goal, since I know one of the former staffers on the show that would go out and comb the streets. He told me that he had the easiest job in the world). He could find a week's worth of panelists on any busy LA street at the bat of an eye, or so he told me. The panel of 3 would answer questions on camera on a street corner. They would have 2 contestants in the studio, and the contestants would win points by basically guessing which of the 3 supposedly street-smart people was actually the most stupid. Most of their street panel could not answer one current events question accurately, but if the question was about celebrities, especially celebrity gossip, they could answer correctly nearly every time.
I won't lie, I watch TV. I also consciously shut it off frequently, rather than just letting crappy content play in the background while I'm doing something else. If I need background noise, and I often don't, I'll turn on some music. I've set limits with myself on the number of hours of TV that I will allow myself to waste time on. Once I use up my allotment, as I sometimes do, if I have nothing better to do, I have to either write, read a book or meditate; no TV. Honestly, I'm never disappointed when that happens. I end up getting far more satisfaction out of any of the other 3 activities than I would have gotten from shutting off my brain and turning on the television. I don't think that television is inherently bad. I do, however, think that it has become far too much of a friend to people who don't want to read and babysitters for tired (or lazy) parents. A little goes a long way, that's all I'm saying. If you have to watch it, there is enough quality content on the air at any given hour. Rarely do you HAVE to watch garbage. Every time you power up that box, you stand a good chance of having a better and more enriching choice, than to just sit there watching crap, if you are compelled to keep the TV on.
Maybe, if we're lucky, society won't continue to devolve. Perhaps we'll start eating real food again and put the Hot Pockets in the trash. Maybe people will start reading books that teach them something of value instead of watching Keeping Up With The Kardashians. Maybe we will stop trying to have the greenest lawns while most of the world's population still doesn't have a safe, reliable drinking water supply. Maybe, instead of growing corn on every acre of farm land in Iowa, farmers will start to understand the benefits of crop diversity.
Or possibly after a few hundred years have passed, what, if anything, remains of the human race will be shopping at Costco, coming home and eating pureed junk food through a tube and drinking Brawndo ('cause it's what your body craves, it has electrolytes) while they watch Ow, My Balls on the super mega-giant ultra high-def 400 inch flat screen TV. At least they aren't a bunch of fags or scros.
It's Wednesday night, late. I can't sleep anyway, so I'm sitting up in bed and working on this. I'm trying to finish this essay, go through and do the (hopefully) final editing, publish it and then either fall asleep or read my book. My dictionaries are at my side, mere inches away. As I reach this point, I'm having a moment of clarity, a bit of an epiphany. In Angels in America, Tony Kushner calls it "the threshold of revelation", but perhaps that might wax a bit hyperbolic. What I'm realizing is that in a way, this writing is becoming something that I didn't want: I'm afraid it is turning into a rant fest.
There is so much ranting in the world right now, and the internet has become a major springboard for many ranters, or wanting-to-be ranters. I had some very specific goals when I set out to do this. My first and most important goal was to document this period in my life. For me, this really is a watershed moment, and by moment, I mean since late 2006. I'll even narrow it down a little more: this time, right now, is my watershed moment: the Hepatitis, Interferon and all of its various and sundry unpleasantries, my spiritual path, the isolation (medical, not mental), more than half a life lived with HIV...I think I've said enough; you get the point, yes? I knew that if I didn't commit this experience to writing, I would lose most of it. My memory is not the greatest to begin with, it's gotten worse, and this is a lot to take in all at once. At some point, I'm certain that I'm going to want to look back and see how I felt when I was in the eye of the storm.
My next goal was to get back to writing before any skill that I once had was allowed to completely go to rust. I am a man of words. I like to read them, hear them and write them. Something that both gives me joy and is a constructive endeavor deserves to be given a chance to spread its wings. I wasn't going to set a lot of rules with my self at the outset, but I did want to reassess my goals from time to time. I wanted to see if they were changing, if I was meeting them, or if they were even realistic or valuable goals in the first place.
I also wanted to have a way of keeping my loved ones updated about what was happening with me without having to spend all my waking hours on the phone. I hate the phone in the first place; to spend an inordinate amount of time with it glued to my ear sounds interminable.
Finally, I wanted to give myself a voice in a way that I hadn't tried before. I am opinionated, that is not news to anybody that knows me or has read my writing. That said, I had this in the back of my mind all the time and promised myself to maintain vigilance regarding it. I did not want this to turn from an outlet for sharing my thoughts into a bully pulpit, a bitch fest, an "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" litany of things that bother Parry.
There is a fine line between being observational and/or sharing my opinions and becoming a teabagger. I don't want to be that irrational guy screaming in a town hall meeting, even figuratively. I don't want to shove my opinions down other people's throats, thinking that I'm doing them a favor. I don't want to be angry. I would rather be a part of the solution that part of the problem.
I'm making no decisions right now, but I am concerned and I'm going to be a little extra-vigilant as I write and then edit my writing, at least for the time being. There are more than enough people out on the internet who are telling everyone how and why they are right and the dissenters are not only wrong, they are the bad people. I don't mind sparking debate or getting people to think. What I don't want to do is to feed into the rancor, discord and unhealthy conflict that I think is sabotaging much of our ability to have civil debate and/or treat our neighbors with respect.
I'm done for the night, more to follow soon. I love you all, remember to be good to each other.
Doggydad's Life Now: The Viral Monologues by Parry Tallmadge is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at doggydad.blogspot.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.runnymedesilkys.com.
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