a little caffeine and chocolate and some medicine and i think i'm up for a blog entry, in theory. that is, i'm not feeling too great today, but after an extended weekend, i really want to be productive today anyway

thing is, just like last january, oddly enough, the world is boring. war goes on, no significant changes, no chance of a real ending anytime soon. bush gets reinnaugurated this week, and despite the talk of how way too much money is being spent on the celebration and the protestors look to suck, i'm not sure i fell like being bothered by any of it. no one is about to do anything drastic or even entertaining. it is in our cultural makeup that we will sit idly by and let the government do whatever it wants, an odd cultural twist considering this nation was built on the backs of revolutionaries and folks running from religious persecution...

we white folks need to take a cue from the blacks or the jews. if once we were persecuted, we should keep playing the victim and live our lives as if those in power are the enemy... except, the ones who were peresecuted before are now in power and the slaves and concentration camp folks still aren't getting much of it (the power, i mean)

but, it is in our cultural makeup to play ourselves as victims, isn't it, even as we contend that we are on top of the world, omnipotent and arrogant and american. we're the greatest country on the planet. but, terrorists want us dead so let's all cower...

*sigh*

not like i don't jump on that bandwagon each time i sit down to write something here. oh, woe is me, poor persecuted middle class white guy with every opportunity in the world. i got to go to a great college, so i dropped out. i had a great office job thing going, with opportunity to take on more responsibility and more hours and make a career (if you will) of it, but i quit and went back to some temp work and then nothing, trading the selling of my time for a happier existence with my wife and kids

except the world went on as it had before, indifferent to whether or not my life was better when i wasn't selling it hour by hour, doing work that served no obvious purpose. the world went on before, no matter how much i made a go at being a writer (whether in novel form, comic form or here in these political/social/cultural essays/blog entries). the war on terror followed closely on network television's war on originality and hollywood's war on depth and all that seems to be coming of any of it (the wars and rumors of wars, that is) is more of the same, one child of mother culture ruling the rest at the expense of a soul (not that i believe in that sort of thing)

i can be happy in this place, this apartment, with my kids and my wife and my books and my cds and my movies and tv and drawings and writings and i can separate my life from the world... but, what happens when the world decides i'm too loud (too outspoken, anyway)? or will it even hear me? it's not like my blog had a huge audience. it's not like my revolution is coming and everyone is just dying to get in line beside and behind me. we don't want a revolution. we just want more of the same, our country getting richer as the world gets poorer, our entertainment getting shallower as the shark infested waters of the third world get deeper, explosions on the evening news and in our saturday morning cartoons, the destruction of the world just another commodity to be bought and sold and watched between espisodes of the apprentice and without a trace and trading spouses, trading spaces, law & order and csi and... we can turn to the matrix or lost for philosophical commentary. we don't have to think about the real world as long as we can boil it down into hour long fictional blocks or even just edited down segments for reality television

there is no reality anymore. that's the way of it. as long as we can make a show about it, it isn't real enough for it to really take up our time. as long as we can put embedded reporters into the thick of things and the digital footage looks hardly more real than the latest first person shooter, why should any of us take any of it seriously? why should we care except if it doesn't bother to entertain us? then, we can change the channel to something that will and maybe send a letter to the fcc