"Ex-cheerleader pleads guilty in bathroom brawl"
That was one of the headlines on Yahoo news today, apparently the seventh most important thing you needed to know on this January day, behind the usual political babble and a change in i-Tunes.
My immediate reaction, of course, is to hope a comet comes and wipes us all off the face of the planet once and for all. Clearly, if there are actually people out there who care about ex-cheerleaders fighting in bathrooms, our civilization passed the point of collapse long ago.
Remember when news was actually news? O.J. might have been the final nail in that coffin, one great orgy of pathetic voyeurism.
This brings up the question, then, of what does matter. Not the latest lies of politicians (which I equate to something my friend Dees said about TV: "There are clouds passing by in the sky all the time, too, but I don't feel a need to watch them"), nor the promise that running out and buying something will fill that emptiness you feel late at night.
For a couple reasons, I've been thinking about the space program lately. Okay, in the next ten years or so, space tourism will be a big thing, and I'm a travel writer, so I should want to go into space. I don't really, though, at least not until they get it so you're actually in space. High altitude doesn't excite me all that much. I want weightlessness and dark.
But I was thinking about my parents waking me up to watch Neil Armstrong make a grammatical mistake on the moon. The entire world was watching at that moment, everybody cared. I was six years old at the time. How many TV moments can you remember from age six?
In an amazing article by Jeff Greenwald that I was reading last night, in which he interviewed Buzz Aldrin (number two on the moon), it was pointed out that before the moon landing, people thought there were limits. This far, and no further. Then, putting people on the moon--go out and buy a GameBoy, it has far more computing power than NASA did in 1969--showed that pretty much anything is possible, no matter how loopy it may seem.
Much can be accomplished with patience and enthusiasm. Or, as a beachcomber once told Paul Theroux, you can go anywhere, if you're not in a hurry.
That's important. The elevation of human spirit--look what we did--is important, more important than a million cheerleaders bitch slapping each other in a million bathrooms.
And, for me, sitting here today looking around at the ruin of several parts of my life, nothing matters more than the trying. Patience and enthusiasm. Maybe, maybe, doomed to failure isn't quite doomed.
Now if we could just bitch slap Yahoo for its part in making the world an even stupider place, we could all sleep better at night.
We're better than this.
My immediate reaction, of course, is to hope a comet comes and wipes us all off the face of the planet once and for all. Clearly, if there are actually people out there who care about ex-cheerleaders fighting in bathrooms, our civilization passed the point of collapse long ago.
Remember when news was actually news? O.J. might have been the final nail in that coffin, one great orgy of pathetic voyeurism.
This brings up the question, then, of what does matter. Not the latest lies of politicians (which I equate to something my friend Dees said about TV: "There are clouds passing by in the sky all the time, too, but I don't feel a need to watch them"), nor the promise that running out and buying something will fill that emptiness you feel late at night.
For a couple reasons, I've been thinking about the space program lately. Okay, in the next ten years or so, space tourism will be a big thing, and I'm a travel writer, so I should want to go into space. I don't really, though, at least not until they get it so you're actually in space. High altitude doesn't excite me all that much. I want weightlessness and dark.
But I was thinking about my parents waking me up to watch Neil Armstrong make a grammatical mistake on the moon. The entire world was watching at that moment, everybody cared. I was six years old at the time. How many TV moments can you remember from age six?
In an amazing article by Jeff Greenwald that I was reading last night, in which he interviewed Buzz Aldrin (number two on the moon), it was pointed out that before the moon landing, people thought there were limits. This far, and no further. Then, putting people on the moon--go out and buy a GameBoy, it has far more computing power than NASA did in 1969--showed that pretty much anything is possible, no matter how loopy it may seem.
Much can be accomplished with patience and enthusiasm. Or, as a beachcomber once told Paul Theroux, you can go anywhere, if you're not in a hurry.
That's important. The elevation of human spirit--look what we did--is important, more important than a million cheerleaders bitch slapping each other in a million bathrooms.
And, for me, sitting here today looking around at the ruin of several parts of my life, nothing matters more than the trying. Patience and enthusiasm. Maybe, maybe, doomed to failure isn't quite doomed.
Now if we could just bitch slap Yahoo for its part in making the world an even stupider place, we could all sleep better at night.
We're better than this.
posted by e. Readicker-Henderson at 6:23 PM
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