SO – there’s a special brand of helplessness that comes to us as modern-day humans. It’s the awareness of how small you really are in the world. Honestly, I know it’s not something specific to us – I mean thousands of years ago we were coming up with gods to help us humanize implacable natural realities like weather and famine, and hundreds of years ago we started fighting wars of such a vast scale that they were incomprehensible, killing millions for land or religion or wealth or kingdom and country.
We keep stacking them though – and so now we can be ground down by the facelessness of the weather OR the vastness of disease and then forgotten by our government. We can become lost in the distance of space and time AND the inventive denigration of corporate structure. There are political parties and social media structures to stack on top of our tribes and families, and teen angst is magnified a hundred fold, adult ennui a thousand fold… only mitigated by the fact that distractions and diversions have multiplied and diversified, allowing us to fritter away our short lifespans in a myriad of ways with any number of immediate stimulations.
Why oh so philosophical this day, rob? Well – because the source of so many immediate distractions, diversions and stimulations has been eliminated from my Life.
i.e. The cable’s out. (rimshot)
And it’s kind of funny. But it’s not funny. Kristen was fighting the good fight against Hyundai recently. The House of Musical Traditions is fighting a corporate music merchandise monolith, ilyAIMY’s in limbo with tracking our radio plays, AT&T changed our contract, Verizon has an automated “scrubber” that keeps canceling our support visits, Amazon’s two-day shipping is rarely two day, BG&E has been ripping apart our streets for months and there’s no end in sight… Teavolve’s parking has been ripped apart for years, battering Teavolve’s business while building Teavolve’s competition.
We Live in a world of new gods (reminds me, when we get our internet back I need to catch up with American GodsTM on StarzTM provided through AmazonTM which is accessible to me via VerizonTM which I pay for with my VISA TM) and they don’t care about us any more than the old ones did. Much like the old ones we try to appease them with sweat and coin and sacrifice – and like the old ones sometimes we miss a payment and nothing happens, we slip through the cracks – and just like the old ones sometimes we’re on top of it and we never miss sending our firstlings and goat parts and tithes up the line and we fall through different cracks, mathematically improbably paths that lead to “automated scrubbers”, lawsuits, bad credit ratings, unrecorded payments and apologetic customer relations chats for whom it’s NEVER quite the right department.
And so we’re transferred and we age. And all in all Life goes on and it doesn’t REALLY matter because by percentages things get better every year – but a 99% approval rating doesn’t matter to that last 1% because the math just comes piling down.
I’ve got it pretty good. I may Live below the poverty line but I do as I please, do what I like, I’m getting married to a woman I Love and I have a neighbour’s cat that Loves ME but shits somewhere else…. But I know that when I need help, it doesn’t matter how long I’ve been paying health insurance or car insurance or Verizon or AT&T. It won’t matter how long I’ve subscribed or been a member. It might not even be intentional. I’m just far, far, far too small to matter.
