Every band has a natural habitat.  Where did they evolve to be heard?  It seems important to me, a person who has learned firsthand that children in rural Mexico are un-moved by Operation Ivy despite the fact that I once felt it essential to get a permanent tattoo of them on my corn-shucking arm.

In this vein I would like to write a few (mercifully brief!  less wingnutty?) blog posts about bands and their ecosystems.  Beginning with the Pixies.

Music made sense, in a basic way, before puberty, no?  A parent sang traditional childrens songs till you fell asleep; a cartoon taught you a primitive 26-character language via melody after you awoke.  Then, years after one’s teens and twenties, music began to make ‘sense’ again: a cultural repository of wisdom or distraction, an excuse for donning nice clothes at night and socializing.  But, my fellow late-twenties goobers: do you remember what music was in between?

Between the ages of 12 and 26, the primary question for most humans in industrialized societies is not “why?” (children) or “what do I do?” (adults).  It is, instead, that awful non-sequitor: “who am I?”  During this extended emotional heart-attack, the lesser arts of musical sound become primary.  And in your early teens, what did you think of your precious music?

That’s right, you were scared of it.

Sure, you may have loved it too, but I firmly believe that any kid in their early teens who first experiences the destabilizing effects of non-parental approved rhythm feels unremitting terror at first.  Music presents itself to the teenager as something weird, new, impenetrable and impermissible— a violation of authority before violations of authority have become commonplace.  It doesn’t help that all teenagers throughout history listen to music which is terrifyingly discordant, usually sounding like sick cats being beaten to death by beat-poets flailing electric guitars.

That’s where the Pixies come in.  You (me) walk out of school at the end of day in the 8th grade.  You are planning to walk home and watch television until it is time for sleep, like any other day, but something intervenes.  A friend you recently made in art class— oh, how art class changes from finger-painting to casual drug-use innovation in a matter of weeks in one’s childhood— is seen in a car (a car!  piloted by other! young! people!) that screeches up to you.  It quickly becomes apparent that these are highschoolers, dangerous visitors from the future, who have their own car and thus their own source of mobility, death and loud portable music.

They pull up and your art-class friend vouches for you, so you are invited into a backseat that reeks of a personal future where tobacco plays a greater role than sunday morning cartoons.  Maybe you are attracted to this cars backseat (sometimes there are girls involved).  Probably also you are terrified of it (sometimes there are girls involved).  The moment symbolizes everything about the transition from childhood to… the stupider, late-term childhood industrial societies can present to their potato-faced young people.  So of course it seems to be a mixture of frightening, alluring, weird, discordant, dynamic strangeness beyond your current understanding of life.

So is the music playing on the cars’ tinny sound system.  Which is of course the Pixies.  You get in and teenage life, in all its odd-sounding chords and incomprehensible lyrical content, starts to happen.  You want to sing along, but the words are fucking weird as shit.  You tell yourself you will like that someday, and by 17, you do.

• “I live cement, I hate this street” from Caribou
• “Let’s me knife, knife me lets, I will get, what I want” from Caribou
• “She’s just rotting in stupid bliss, with music on her bars” from Ed Is Dead
• “Well, sit right down, my wicked son and let me tell you a story” from Holiday Song
• “You are the son of a motherfucker.” from Nimrod’s Son
• “”And while we’re at it baby, why don’t you tell me one of your biggest fears?” I said, “Losing my penis to a whore with disease…”" from I’ve Been Tired
• “Come on pilgrim, you know he loves you!” from Levitate Me

• “Here I am/with my hand” from Holiday Song

• “Bought me a soda and tried to molest me in the parking lot” from Bone Machine
• “You’re so pretty when you’re unfaithful to me” from Bone Machine
• “Your blistered lips have got a kiss… that tastes a bit like everyone” from Bone Machine
• “Break my body, hold my bones” from Break My Body
• “I got no lips, I got no tongue, where there were eyes there is only space” from Broken Face
• “And this I know, his teeth as white as snow” from Gigantic
• “With your feet in the air, and your head on the ground, try this trick, and spin it. Your head will collapse, and there’s nothing in it, and you’ll ask yourself…” from Where is My Mind?
• “I miss your soup, and I miss your bread, and a letter in your writing doesn’t mean you’re not dead” from Cactus
• “We’ll keep well bred, we’ll stay well fed, we’ll have all sons, they will be all well hung.” from Vamos
• “All I know is…there were rumors he was into field hockey players” from I’m Amazed

• “I am un chien andalusia” from Debaser
• “Got hips like cinderella, must’ve been having a good shame, talkin’ sweet about nothin’, cookie, I think you’re TAME!” from Tame
• “You think I’m dead, but I sail away, on a wave of mutilation”‘ from Wave of Mutilation
• “As loud as hell, a ringing bell, behind my smile, it shakes my teeth” from I Bleed
• “I know the nervous walking, I know the dirty beard hangs, out by the boxcar waiting, take me away to nowhere plains” from Here Comes Your Man
• “If man is 5, then the devil is 6, and if the devil is 6, then God is 7″ from Monkey Gone to Heaven
• “What’s that floating in the water? Ol’ Neptuna’s only daughter” from Mr. Grieves
• “I’m moving out of this hospedaje, I’m afraid you’ll cut me, boy!” from Crackity Jones
• “You’re apin’ rapin’ tapin’ catharsis, you get tore down and I get erected, my blood is working but my heart is dead!” from Dead
• “Shake your butt! (But not too hard!)” from La La Love You
• “Got hair in a girl that flows to her bones, and a comb in her pocket if the wind get blown” from No. 13 Baby
• “Hey, been trying to meet you. Mmmmm. Hey, must be a devil between us, or whores in my head. Whores at the door. Whore in my bed, but hey.” from Hey
• “Chained to the pillars, a 3-day party, I break the walls and kill us all with holy fingers” from Gouge Away

• “Every night and every day I bossanova wit’ you.” From Hang wire
• “Your mouth! Your mouth! A mile away” from Rock Music
• “Where have you been? Finally through the roof, and how does lemur skin reflect the sea?” from Velouria
• “And when the planets hit the sun, I saw the face of Allison” from Allison
• “There is this old man, that has spent so much time sleeping, that he is able to keep awake for the rest of his years” from Dig for Fire
• “She’s my fave, undressing in the sun.” from Ana
• “One side is hot, the other side of the moon is not. from All Over The World

• “Why do cupids and angels continually haunt her dreams like memories?” from Trompe Le Monde
• “Rhythmically to resound, this ain’t the planet of sound.” from Planet of Sound
• “Oh Alexander, I see you beneath the archway of aerodynamics” from Alec Eiffel
• “And evolving from the sea, would not be too much time for me, to walk beside you in the sun.” from The Sad Punk
• “I smell smoke that comes from a gun named Extinction.” from The Sad Punk
• “Oh kiss me cunt, oh kiss me cock, oh kiss the world, oh kiss the sky, oh kiss my ass, oh let it rock!” from UMASS
• “A life that’s so sublime, palace of the brine” from Palace of the Brine
• “Everything I needed, and I wanted, used to be that my head was haunted” from Letter From Memphis
• “Sun shines in the rusty morning, skyline of the Olympus Mons” from Bird Dream of the Olympus Mons
• “Her warm, white belly in the life I’d lived had seen nothing finer, she shakes and she moves me or something, she’s like jellyroll, like sculpture.” from Subbacultcha

• “There is a way, my manta ray.” from Manta Ray
• “In heaven everything is fine, you’ve got your good thing and you’ve got mine.” from In Heaven
• “Do the manta ray, DO the manta ray!” from Dancing The Manta Ray
• “The method of stop, tap, spin/No talking bailey’s walk.” from Dancing The Manta Ray

1,247 days to go until the End of Days, people.  As long as you can defer your payments for three more years, Americans need not worry about paying off student loans or credit card debt.  Come Christmas vacation in 2012, the planets shall align, great volcanoes will swallow the earth, and New Age misinterpretation of Mayan prophesy will finally come to pass.

The prediction that the world will end on Dec 21, 2012 (conveniently located right at the end of one last Holiday shopping season— put everything on the visa card!  Bill collectors can’t find you where we’re going!) is gaining increasing scientific credibility (in the sense that a Hollywood CGI blockbuster depicting these events is scheduled for release in theaters this fall).  To prepare for the End of Days, Many Little Things will be periodically taking trips around the world wide interweb to review the many signs, omens and misunderstood natural phenomena eerie portents pointing the way towards Armageddon/End of Debt Records.

This week: WARNINGS FROM THE JOVIAN DEPTHS!!

People who drink on my porch have already heard all they can possibly tolerate on this subject, but for the rest of you: the whales are trying to warn us of something.  The repeated attempts by grey whales off the Pacific coast of Baja California to engage in friendly, inter-species communication raise many provocative philosophical question, and have only two possible explanations: either the NYT Magazine writer didn’t have a topic idea until he got high and watched that one Star Trek movie, OR hyper-intelligent behemoths from the deep have taken pity on their puny cousins back on land and are attempting to warn us that our time will end soon when the Age of the Sea-Mammal arrives.

Whereas the whales communicate with us, their only natural enemy— the giant flying squid— has taken a more confrontational stance towards humanity, and has been attacking our society’s major population center on the pacific ocean, southern California.  There are fascinating deep-sea coalition politics to be explored here: in the eternal underwater conflict between the Squid and the Whale, is the whale’s attempt to warn humanity of its impending doom seen by the squid community as a ‘sell-out’ of their loyalty to the ocean-dwellers?  Or perhaps, are the whales attempting to establish a relationship with humanity in the twilight of its existence, in hopes of gaining access to some technology of ours to aid in their battle with the squid, who have thus realized in turn they cannot wait for the Mayan apocalypse to end us and are taking history into their own hands to prevent technological transfer to their enemies?

Either way, the joke’s on the squids: they can’t fucking breathe on land, so the majority of the attacking squids have died writhing and suffocating on san diego and Oregon beaches. Altho some successful squid assaults have been staged on human scuba divers and swimmers, the body count has remained well in our favor.  Hey, if I had to put money down on who will win the struggle for supremacy after 2012 covers the globe in oceans and the whales and squids duke it out worldwide, you can probably tell I wouldn’t be betting on these dumb-ass cephalopods to take home the gold.  They may have more natural weaponry than the whales, but in terms of intelligence, it’s no contest.  On the other hand, we all know who Cthulhu would favor…

Speaking of the coming sea-mammal conquest of the earth, America’s China’s Most Trusted News Source published a piece of scientifically peer-reviewed evidence corroborating these predictions.  This news article on Dolphin evolution is not recommended for the easily frightened.

The Arctic Blob— a mysterious and apparently newly-evolved organic mass currently attacking Alaska because the liberal media hates Sarah Palin— is less interested in communicating with us, more into gradually absorbing/swallowing us whole.  Some eskimos are whining about the fact that this bizarre sea-creature has never been spotted before in their people’s entire historical memory and maybe we should stop melting the polar ice caps, but you know how the Inuit are: if they don’t have thirty different words for it, they act like they never heard of it.  No use worrying about the polar ice caps and climate catastrophe after the Mayan apocalypse, folks!  I say, get a nice big SUV to spend these last few years in comfort.  Buy it on credit, ha!

Sticking with the theme of monsters washing up on our shores, those of you who spend too much time on the internet will remember the Montauk Monster— a bizarre, alien creature that washed up on Martha’s Vinyard earlier this year, was photographed by horrified onlookers, and then mysteriously disappeared before scientists could examine it and confirm the terrifying truth.

‘Monty’, as I like to call him, isn’t the only real-life photograph-evidence example of our world being invaded by hideous sci-fi creatures.  In fact, while there are still several theories being debated about the possible animal origins of the Montauk Monster, all observers agree on the nature of the North Carolina Sewer Monster: basically, that it is real as shit, and the people of North Carolina will soon fall victim to its seething, terrifying malevolence.

Let’s see, let’s see, what else is out there, need to wrap this up…. ah, yes.  JAPAN BRACES FOR GIANT JELLYFISH INVASION.  Actual headline!  Think that link kind of speaks for itself.

I guess we’ll close with a few links to that bizarre natural portent of humanity’s coming extinction, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Located in the North Pacific Gyre, this mass of non bio-degradable waste is twice the size of Texas, and projected to grow at an alarming rate as human production of plastics continues to increase in the last years of our existence.  Since the coming Mayan Apocalypse will result in the seas covering the earth (not to mention swallowing the sky, whatever the hell that means, hippies), it appear that this vast agglomeration of floating trash will be Humanity’s final monument to it’s failed creed.  Kind of a corny version of Ozymandias, if you ask me.

Wild claims and rain dances will be the order of the day, based on a trippy genre of science fiction literature known as ‘economic forecasting’.  Shouting heads on the teevee will make market predictions based on ‘indicators’ like the profit rate of various Nigerian internet con-artist schemes, the number of homeless people Alcoa’s CEO strangled for fun this month, or the credit card debt of the average meth addict in Missouri.  Price volatility of certain deviant erotic services will be scrutinized by MBA’s, and gullible investors and voters will be lured hither and thither on the basis of information as relevant to reality as fluctuations in public moustache-popularity.  I plan to make my own speculative, uninformed (nay, misinformed!) claims about macroeconomic indicators on this blog, and allow me to start with the one I know best: me and my friends.

You see, my housemates and I are what you would call a ‘negative economic indicator’.  When america is booming, we are typically broke & struggling, at best aspiring to the status of ‘hobo’ or ‘criminal’.  But when the country is in the shitter, well that is our time to thrive.  Among the circle of people living in my house (and, uh, tents in our backyard), there is currently a surge in living standards that would make the average formerly middle-class american seethe with envy and disgust.

There is me and CB: despite both being unemployed, we are able to take girlfriends on international vacations and spend our free time in overall comfort due to a hodgepodge of savings, under the table income and in his case roughly a years worth of unemployment benefits.  Then there are our under-employed friends like NC, BD and RA: working part-time, but living frugally enough to be able to compete at who can acquire the wackiest hobby or form of transportation.  Then there are our full-time worker-bees DR, BW and MV.  These industrious friends not only have jobs, but seem to have somehow taken over the management of a used textbook-importing warehouse, that despite ostensibly being a legitimate business sounds to me for all the world like it has got to be some sort of criminal operation at root.  Finally, there’s BL, the last employed journalist in western civilization, whose job at a micro-community weekly makes him “the most powerful man in Westerville, Ohio” despite his predilection for fistfights and getting blackout drunk, and the suspicion of some of us that he is in fact ethnically a ‘horse’, more beast than man.

Add some activity in various extra-legal markets from the misdemeanor grey to the arguably-felonious black, subtract our low fixed costs, pool resources for bulk purchasing and a diverse portfolio of income with low exposure to risk, and you have some very comfortable scumbags preying off the poor debt-addled suckers selling their shit on the internet.  Sailboats, fancy motorcycles, high-tech electronics, old (but still usable!) Russian rifles and so on: consumer credit giveth and craigslist taketh away, to be deposited into the lives of parasitical raconteurs such as we.  Ha ha, you rich fuckers, it turns out sailing is pretty damn fun, especially when it only costs you a fraction of what the upper-middle class paid to do it last year!

To tell the truth, we are probably not much richer or poorer than we were a couple years ago, but in relative comparison to the upper- and middle-class wealth destroyed in the housing bubble and  securities pyramid scheme, our position on the margins of the economy looks more and more enviable as time goes on.  As downwardly-mobile consumers shed the trappings of their gluttonous, dissolute lifestyles, we are waiting by the dumpsters and the bulletin boards to gobble up discount luxury.  Do you have any idea how cheap budget vacation travel in the third world has become since the collapse of multiple currencies and the tourist market?  Even 1000 cc BMW motorcycles are available for pennies on the dollar on craigslist— German engineering at Chinese-manufacture prices.  The only prices going up today are those of bullets and canned food, and we already stocked up on those some time ago.

We are parasites, not symbiotes: lice in the hair of the country.  But you have to admit, we’re vastly better parasites to have around than the finance industry: they enrich themselves on a world-shaking scale and kill the entire host in the manner of bloodthirsty vampires, while we mosquitoes merely flit about filling our bellies when we’re not getting killed by bug zappers.  Sure, if America continues to decline, we will descend into the same anarchic misery as the rest of you.  But we’ll have a leg up (besides the guns and sailboats)— our expectations of living standards are already so low, almost anything can seem like conspicuous consumption to us.  Whether america’s eventual collapse comes about because of peak oil, debt and inflation explosion, zombie uprising or Mayan apocalypse, we’ll continue on at a relative advantage.  I can just imagine us, during catastrophic meltdown of industrial civilization: holed up on the mid-Ohio farm of our survivalist ex-Teamster buddies.  Using our stores of buried oil to run the generator to play a little xbox or go dirt-bike racing, in between shifts using antique sniper rifles to patrol the fenced perimeter that keeps the hysterical refugees of a failed state away from our organic veggie garden and moonshine stills.

Hopefully the day never comes, but if it does, I predict we’ll survive longer than most.  But what we really dread is a return to flush times for america. It seems unlikely, given our country’s quite serious long-term problems with debt, financialization, oil dependence, religious fundamentalism and political dysfunction.  The motto in my house is “buy guns or learn Chinese”, and we prefer to do both, because isn’t it about time for a different society to rule for awhile?  But still, I fear our country may somehow pull off another boom cycle, which would surely leave us behind and lead to growing prices on used goods and annoying, happy crowds getting in our way at the movie theatre again.  So I troll the internet, reading the economic tea leaves, making bets on the indicators.  Whoa, did you see the Ebay trade in fascist WW2 relics is way up this month?  And art-school tuition is climbing while art prices plummet.  The futures market has prices of amphetamines steady while grains, citrus fruits and sedatives fell precipitously two weeks ago.  What does it all mean?  Let me make some predictions.

The hegemony of corporate media is still a troubling issue, but I think we can all agree the interwebs have shaken that dynamic up a good deal.  The share of entertainment and information the average person gets from NBC/GE/etc is steadily being eroded, and in the media monopoly’s place we now have a Hobbesian anarchy of all against all.  Cable news, blogs, AM radio, youtube, twitter and bathroom graffiti have muscled in on the domain of Walter Cronkite and the NYT, and the result hasn’t been a democratization of information as much as its been a proliferation of niche markets.  You have Daily Show viewers and then you have Glen Beck viewers, Rush Limbaugh dittoheads and NPR nerds, and of course worst of all the Ron-Paultards.  Then there are the aging, cynical socialists whose web browser default page is set to the Economist and who check fivethirtyeight and wonkette on their iphone ten times a day (got to give a shout-out to my own sub-demographic).

And then beyond the politically-engaged population, there is the larger reality that most people don’t even use the information superhighway to get information per se— something like 80% of all web traffic is dedicated to file sharing of Beyonce songs, disturbingly insane porn, funny pictures of cats and people googling themselves and their ex’s at 3 AM.  Back in 1995, me and my radicals assumed that if all information was actually freely available to the masses, then everyone would be reading Noam Chomsky and burning down McDonalds.  But it’s 2009, I consume more news information than I can possibly process, and I eat at McDonalds almost every week, and the last time I used Noam Chomsky was as a form of generic Ambien during a bad bout of insomnia some years ago.

Which is all well and fine, really.  Who doesn’t like Beyonce, pictures of cats, and John Stewart?  The only real losers in the new age of digital niche media are those in the profession formerly known as journalism.  I mean, we’re all out of work right now, but those folks were getting laid-off before Goldman Sachs killed the economy and will be getting the axe well after Goldman Sachs gives us some economy back.  Living in the rust belt I’ve had many opportunities to learn about the human costs of economic shifts that displace workers in a society with almost no social safety net.  But because I have a lot of friends who were reporters and only a few who were autoworkers, this is the first time I’ve seen the results up close.  It’s not pretty.

I mean, of all the workers to get screwed, why them?  Improv comedy teachers are doing fine, neoconservative jackals aren’t missing any meals, prison guards have more job security than they can shake a taser at, but the journalists get fucked.  We all know life’s not fair, but boy- life is really not fair!

I know, I know, the scribes of the evil MSM have been the lackeys of The System all along, etc, etc.  Journalism was a funny thing.  They’re kind of like judges— a group of intelligent people who (supposedly) seek to not advance their own opinions and instead live by a code of objective, disinterested professional conduct to enforce society’s mutually agreed-upon ethics guidelines.  It doesn’t work that way in practice of course, and just winds up buttressing the status quo.  But whereas the judiciary has been the most conservative of america’s three branches of government, the fourth estate has often been a critical and subversive force for truth and fairness (if not justice).  For every Judith Miller helping Lewis Libby sell an insane war to the public there’s a Sy Hersh exposing the same; for every Bob Woodward glorifying Bush At War, there’s a… uh, Bob Woodward condemning Bush At War, or helping America overthrow Nixon.

Add to this the fact that many journalists have long seen themselves as knowledge workers with the emphasis on worker— the once-heavily unionized profession had a degree of organized blue-collar orientation and personal experience in class conflict we are unlikely to find repeated in the unprincipled, nonunion and mostly middle-class precincts of, ahem, wordpress blogs.  After all, my favorite tv show the Wire was only created because a Baltimore beat reporter named David Simon was on his local union’s bargaining committee, and after one particularly bad contract negotiation and strike cycle got disillusioned and took a sabattical to start writing for television.  The Huffington Post hardly has the same underlying grit and rigor.

They won’t all lose their jobs.  It’s just like with the autoworkers: there will still be some people working in that industry in ten years, but it will be a fraction of the former amount, with lower pay and no job security.  You wouldn’t want to consciously go into this field any more than you’d want to study eight-track design or phrenology.  I have a friend named Mickey who is majoring in journalism in college right now— a hilarously bad waste of the LIUNA union scholarship that’s sending her to school and surely one of the more cynical con games being run by the university system.

But to tell the truth, I’d be more worried about the autoworkers than the journalists.  Because even though  both are going through an economic dislocation that will put the vast majority out of work, the journalists have the tools to continue to compete in the harsher immaterial economy america is being forced into.  Lots of that claptrap about the ‘information economy’ and ‘knowledge workers’ is crap, but it isn’t all crap.  Certainly corporate america is pushing down wages and job security even for people who work with ideas and information (I know even more adjunct professors than laid-off journalists), but at the end of the day, for the highly articulate, intelligent, literate and system-savvy reporters, there will always be options.

The non-profit sector, teaching, social services, politics, etc— I predict these industries and more are going to see a rapid influx of lean and hungry former journos.  In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if ex-reporters increasingly become the people who make the news.  If I was recruiting newcomers for an organizing team or a political campaign, the skills I would most want would be those journalists have.  Smart workaholics who understand how politics works on the inside, who were once paid to navigate systems of power and discern fact from fairytale, these people are far better suited to win elections and shape policy than the jokers I’ve met in the mid-to-upper reaches of the Democratic machine.

The past presidential election was the swan song of journalism, the last great moment when the traditional news media did a reasonably adequate job covering an unpredictable, exciting and ultimately satisfying historic process.  We probably won’t see it again.  But the election might also have signaled the beginning of the age in which former journalists are the prime movers of events small and large.  Remember the end of the Democratic primary, the balls-to-the-wall shootout between the Clinton and Obama campaigns?  It just so happens that both were run by former journalists.  I guess it doesn’t necessarily speak highly of ex-reporters’ competence to point out that Howard Wolfson, a youngish indie rocker who was once an even younger Virginia journalist, was in Hillary’s senior triumvirate (today Howard’s confirmed the signature integrity of the Clinton team by going to work for Republican billionaire Mayor Bloomberg’s re-election campaign in New York).  But on the other team, there was a fellow whose strategic long-term planning ability is now recognized as unquestionably greater than that of Karl Rove, that dark-side Jedi we progressives used to love to fear.  He is the Bismark to Obama’s Frederick III, the Mark Hanna of the current center-left zeitgeist.  Perhaps you’ve heard of him?  An old Chicago newspaper guy named David Axelrod.

-Rupert Murdoch

Like the old media conglomerates, my life has been impacted in both positive and negative ways by the rise of the thing we used to call the ‘Information Superhighway’.  When I was a kid the only job I could imagine myself doing as an adult was being a writer of some kind, and seeing my name on the spine of a book on a shelf has remained my fondest daydream ever since.  Buying, selling, stealing and vandalising in the marketplace of ideas— now that’s the life!

But while arranging letters into words has never been an easy way for anyone to make a living, the internet has changed the game considerably.  It has never been easier to participate in society’s discourse— and it has never been harder to make a living off it.  Just ask the journalists, in line to meet with their caseworkers down at the welfare offices, waiting to get their next ration of foodstamps.

Luckily life had other plans in mind for me, and so I feed myself via a mixture of manual labor and with the professional advocacy of fringe ideas like labor unionism.  I still occasionally write articles for one magazine or another, and I am theoretically ‘working on a book’, but I would no more try to survive on sentence construction than I would try to pay my electric bill with yo-yo tricks or a stamp collection.

The math of it just doesn’t add up anymore.  And perhaps that’s for the best.  Maintaining some separation between your economic balance sheet and your creative passions is an under-rated fact of life for most people.  If you want to contribute to the world by painting art, does it really make sense to get a day job painting houses?  I see friends try to make New York City rent by turning intellectual tricks: some temp copy-editing here, a freelance assignment there, hoping at first for a big break of some kind and eventually just dreaming about having healthcare.  And then at night they work on their book, or whatever.  To me, that’s like working in a paint factory all day for pennies on the hour, and then coming home afterwards and drinking a big bowl of paint for dinner.  Just too much fucking paint.

Email, social networking, user-generated content, file sharing, twitter, and comments sections of websites that reveal humanity’s apparently universal need to shout poorly spelled, randomly capitalized insults and conspiracy theories at one another.  Itunes, amazon, cable news and the rss reader competing to push more and more media into our eye sockets and ear canals every month that passes.  The inmates have taken over the asylum, and we are filling it with youtube videos of our pets and myspace pictures of ourselves doing things that would only have been done in ashamed secrecy just two decades ago.  Who could have predicted this is what the future would be?  I thought it’d be heavier on the flying cars personally, but electronic screens flashing images of words, celebrities, cats and our own lame selves is what we got.  Narcissus— not Hercules or Athena— is the myth of our age.

Atop this towering, festering mountain of content sits the blog.  Everyone has one today, it seems.  Well, not everyone; more like every computer literate person between the ages of 18 and 45.  I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty much everyone I know!  The personal web-log hasn’t yet achieved quite as much market penetration among Chinese factory workers, subsistence farmers in south asia or the diabetic shut-in debtors that seem to make up half of america’s population, but I’m sure web 3.0 will eventually find a way to change that.  Maybe in the future after google and the UN merge to become Skynet and the machines make it official that they’re running the show, every human will be required to maintain a daily blog.  To entertain ourselves, and to keep God (by then understood to be a hyper-intelligent search algorithm with omniscient indexing of all the world’s information) up to date on our activities.

So I guess I might as well get in on the ground floor now, while there’s still some good domain names left, right?