The fellas at the bakery hangin' about,
while I sip some coffee to jump start my brain. They're talking about the State of the Union Address.
Yeah, yeah, rah, rah, yadda, yadda, yadda, same old up-beat political spin job, I pompously assume,
and I bet the same old republican naysayers struck back with the same old complaints. Big government,
baaaad. Fascist morality police goooood.
I'm tired of that worn-out record, I wanna hear about the sex
scandal, about who's gettin' fellatio in the white house and about who says who is coppin' unsolicited
feels from whom. Sucked into the feeding frenzy, I am a boob, my malleable mind is putty in the fingers
of the media misters. I vacillate between thinking there is a huge conspiracy afoot, with Kenneth Starr
leading a lynch mob of crazed zombies, to the thought that maybe the president really is a sleazebag. My
mood swings upon every report. I am comforted only by the knowledge that my attention span is short, and
that soon I will develop antibodies to this little flap, and then I will be able to go peacefully about
my business until the next sensationalist brouhaha. In case you hadn't already noticed, the rest of the
world thinks we're insane. Which, I will in no way attempt to deny. We're junkies for slimy soap opera
drama. This morning the paper is missing something, what is it, Oh yeah, that zippergate thing. I sense
some embarrassment, like the press is surprised it sank that low... again. Thought they had the story of
the century turned out to be mostly fabrications of the minds of people who wished such things were true.
The question arises: who are the real perverts? The fascination is the vicarious existence the media provides,
the escape from the seeming constrictions of day to day physical reality. Truth is irrelevant when synthetic
constructs seem more real than real. Think what you want to, and spend all day arguing about whose belief
system is superior to whose. Meanwhile, with the populace nicely distracted, the status quo goes on doing
its dirty deeds, shoring up the power structure's grip on the globe, widening the gap between the privileged
and the wage-slaves, feeding us phantom freedoms that fill our bellies with a twinkie-like froth of white
sugar and air. I got a whacko uncle of sorts who was on a rant one day about what he calls the 'power of
discernment.' It's what you need to survive the age of the information explosion when substance is no longer
the issue, it's who can out-BS who. Bill Gates is now the richest man in the world ($40Gig). The stuff he
sells you can't taste or smell or feel, in fact it's not even physical, it's a code, a sequence of millions
upon millions of zeroes and ones that mean nothing to anyone except for a certain variety of specially etched
silicon crystals. There he is god,
and the legions of his converts swell by the day. Woe to the company that
names itself after a piece of fruit and mistakes substance (hardware) for the real thing. They can crank that
out in any third-world nation, it's the pattern that's where the magic lies, for this is a new reality where
information is emerging as the most powerful force in the universe. Me, I'm no competitor when it comes to BS.
A five year old can pull the wool over my eyes, and I'll be none the wiser. I think If I were some sort of
cosmic trickster, I'd focus my energy into ordinary places, where you might catch a glimpse in your peripheral
vision of a strange light creeping out around the edges of something you hadn't noticed before. The object,
when you look at it closely, says to you, 'things are not necessarily as they seem, have a nice day,' and you
wander off wondering if what you thought happened really happened. No matter, it's a pretty cool reality, and
by the by who left the door open to that other dimension?
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