Finally, the image uploads. Trying to post with this old Radio software is like trying to start an ancient beater that's been parked in a farmer's car garden for a couple of years. So. Question is, what I am doing here, turning the key, listening to the starter grind? Question is, why return as a bloggergeist to the abandoned grubstake in the virtual ghost town that is Salonblogs? I am the Ghost of Dr. Omed...I am..a slight disorder of the stomach...an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about--me...
WOOOOOOO...OOOOOOO...OOOOOOO...OOOOOOO... (RATTLES CHAIN)
Ahem. Fiona left a question in my comment box, and I answered it. Fiona wrote:
I guess I've abandoned my blog and I'm too scared to start a new one. What's your excuse?
I answered with an email. An email in which I expressed sentiments previously unfolded in response to the worried inquiries of other concerned members of the congregation. It is a more than twice told tale, a theme with variations. To Fiona, I wrote, verbatim, with comments in parentheses:
I haven't quite given up on the idea of blogging, I simply have no idea. No idea how to recreate or reconstitute or simply recharge the Tent Show in such a way as to trick myself into feeling that it's worth the time and effort. I'm not scared, I'm angry, and I can think of no way to make effective my rage at the collective stupidity of my own species, and no way to make it useful, to me or anyone else.
I have not a new thing to say about it. I often think of funny or clever things I could post about, but to engage in the discourse about the trivialities with which we are all so, so concerned about is to aid and abet, to add whatever tiny shred of credibility or interest Dr. Omed might possess, to the very process I despise as bringing us to this pass. And I don't mean the Brittany level of discourse, I mean the elite, the politically active, the nice, good-hearted people who read, and think thoughtful thoughts, and recycle.
Better to enjoy life while it's still worth living, I tell myself. Yet I can't let it go. I was having breakfast with friends Sunday morning, and someone mentioned (Senior NPR correspondent, and ABC hack) Cokie Roberts, who came to speak at TU last week. I regard Cokie Roberts as one of the enemy, part of the problem. For some reason it sent me off (Somehow the quislings and enablers are more maddening the perps themselves.), and I raged in full Pan Troglodytes mode, "Fucking this" and "Fucking that" in every phrase I uttered. I averred as how I would only have attended the lecture if I thought I have could "got fucking close enuf to fucking Cokie Roberts to fucking hit her upside her fucking head with a fucking 3lb. ball peen hammer."
You have to understand that I very rarely use that kind of language, and I don't threaten bodily harm to celebrities in pubic places, or anybody else. For that matter, I don't threaten people when I'm about to do bodily harm to them. (I just do it. Perhaps I should reenforce that disclaimer for all the literalists moles out there in the ether: I am not a violent man. I am not contemplating or planning any act of violence against any person, including Cokie Roberts. Currently.)
To Spike I expressed myself more simply:
You haven't been hearing much from me because I have nothing much to say. If Groucho aka Rufus T. Firefly was President of Freedonia I am the President of Anhedonia.
To Sam (Ms. Candide) I wrote (on one occasion) :
If I can save my crop of belly button lint from the flaming marshmallow storm, I will post again. The world, being what it is, leaves me very little to say, sometimes. Variations on "AAAIIIEEE!!!" while heartfelt, soon become tiresome to the bleater as well as the bleatees. I'm working on getting past "AAAIIIEEE!!!"
To Clarissa, in reference to a troll then beshitting her comment box:
I've been listening to same tired bullshit from people like this guy for decades and it has made me a deeply angry man, among all the other whos whats and I don't knows I am. I am mentally in a state of war, me agin all comers, mea contra omnes, at all the "expense of spirit in a waste of shame" as Shakespeare has in a sonnet, at a time when it is absolutely crystal clear to me at least that if the human race does not pulls its collective head out of its ass and deal with our real problems, that those of our descendants that survive the resultant catastrophe will rightly revile us as the most short-sighted, greedy, stupid, and evil generation that ever lived. A generation of vipers, indeed. We'll be dead, but they'll hate us.
What really makes me angry is that it's already too late. We the People of the United States wasted the last eight years on a vast sideshow of incredible stupidity, and that eight years was almost certainly all the margin we had.
To she who was once Mambrina,
The Tent Show is still there, but I haven't posted to it in a month. I scribble crap in my moleskine almost everyday, but when I sit down at the computer (and when I have a chance to sit down at the computer), I can't summon the mental and emotional energy required to get over whatever bar I've set for myself that day, and crank out a post. I dislike repeating myself and after, what, 4 years of blogging I've used up a lot of stuff. For that matter, it's hard to come up with a subject, and an insight into any given subject, that hasn't already occurred to and been blogged by a million other of my fellow citizen journalists.
My scissor dances, chaos drawings, and poetry are original enough to stand on their own, but my production rate is so slow and intermittent that anyone following my blog could check in two or three times a year and keep up with what I'm doing. The what-I-did-today-whatever-was-floating-around-in-my-head I do often write down in my journal, but I can't quite bring myself to post the daily dump and call it a blog, though many people do that successfully, and even make it interesting sometimes.
On the other hand, I find what's happening in the wider world so appalling it leaves me speechless. I can think of nothing funny or interesting to say about it. Playing Cassandra gets real tired real quick. But a heaping helping of the Apocalypse of the Day makes every thing else seem trivial.
So. Or, So it goes, Ala, ave Vonnegut. I do have more mental and emotional energy available, due to a change in circumstance--Mrs. Dr. Omed and I moved into new digs (Not saying where) and have began to recover from the long and grueling process. Believe me when I say that I am in a much better place than I was when last I blogged. I have very good windows in my new lair, and I can see the stars, on clear nights. I'm willing--willing to fiddle while Rome burns, and bask in the flames, too, if it comes to that. Boggle on the Bloggle. Carpe that diem. Schadenfreude for the few, flying fucks on rolling donut holes for all! If there are no ladders, we'll ride the snakes.
Speaking of windows, I think I just saw a goddam Grebe on the bird feeder!
*Those of you who are familar with the film Amelie will recall that she kidnapped her father's garden gnome, and sent it around the world with a friend working as a stewardess for Air France. On her travels, the friend took polaroid pictures of the gnome posed in front of various world famous landmarks, and mailed them to Amelie's bemused father. I don't have a gnome, so I use (if need be) the ten second shutter delay on my digital camera, and pose as my own gnome.
