words are kind. And so are you.

And, you know, JtC, other than that you're running a blog ; ) , you don't need to be in "news and internet burn out."

The other night I was reading (on the internet) something from Werner Herozg, who therein said:

If you spend too much time on cell phones it’s not healthy, and too much time on a computer doing e-mail, it’s not very healthy. The more technical instruments, the more instruments of communication we have, and we have the cell phones and e-mail and radio and television and whatever, interactive this, and cyberspace that, the more instruments we have, and the more we use them, the more solitary we become.

And I’m speaking solitary in a deep human way. We are not isolated, but we are deeply, deeply solitary.

And the huge explosive evolution of tools of communication, makes us more lonesome, than we have been ever before.

So beware of your BlackBerry. Or whatever it’s called.

Neal Stephenson, one of the very first oracles of the intertubes, recently said this:

The kinds of super-bright, hardworking geeky people who, 50 years ago, would have been building moon rockets or hydrogen bombs or what have you, have ended up working in the computer industry, doing jobs that in many cases seem kind of ignominious by comparison. What I’m kind of hoping is that this is just kind of a pause, while we assimilate this gigantic new thing—ubiquitous computing and the Internet. And that at some point we’ll turn around and say, "Well, that was interesting—we have a whole set of new tools and capabilities that we didn’t have before the whole computer/Internet thing came along. Now let’s get back to work doing interesting and useful things."

What must be understood at all times is that the intertubes is not a real thing. Nothing that happens in a tube is in any way real. Conflating the virtual of the tubes with the real of physical existence is where serious fucking and in the end fatal danger lurks. See, for instance, Dylann Roof. Who all his life was with black people, accepted black people, had no problem with black people—until literally the day he went off, he was buddies with, partied with, black people. In his life. But in the dark foul holes he wallowed in on the intertubes, there, he "learned" black people were the devil. Of satan incarnate. Who must be destroyed. He allowed the virtual to subsume his actual life.

And so, the destroyer, Roof would: he: be.

And so:

the killer awoke before dawn
he put his boots on
he took a face from the ancient gallery
and he walked on down the hall

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHrDiylg9FU]

Nearly, did the tubed-numbed no-brain not "go through with it." Because, in reality, as opposed to the non-reality he had absorbed on the tubes, there, in the reality there in the church, waiting to kill the people he had brought himself among, he experienced, dead-headed Roof, and to his utter wonderment, that these, whom he learned among the sad sick tubes were devils, spawns of satan, these, they, them, in the real, in the flesh, they, why: "everyone was so nice to me."

But, choosing the virtual, over the real, he, in the end, robotically, chose, to "go through with my mission." And blew their brains all over the hall.

Virtual—javol!—uber alles.

Back there in the late 1970s, Scoop Nisker, he was doing radio news over every hill and dale, on KSAN and progeny. But each year he'd abruptly disappear, take 30 days off. During which he'd "unplug from every input," "erase the tapes." For that month, he would expose himself to no "news" whatsoever. He would simply live as a free human being, alive on this earth. Barraged by no bullshit at all. Which would then allow him to then come back, renewed, refreshed, to express such Truths as, in his one and only, immortal, "traffic report": "People are driving to work to earn the money to pay for the cars they're driving to work in. Back to you." I think that now, in the age of the tubes, of the constant ceaseless overhelming tsumani of all and every "news," such breaks are more important than ever. Without periodic willed withdrawal from the septic fetid waters, one will simply foully drown.

Around the same time as ol' Scoop, among one of the times I then interviewed/talked-with Jerry Brown, Brown once said: "what I wonder is—why is there less news on Saturday?" In those days, those days of newspapers and TV, the newspapers were noticeably thinner on Saturdays, and on TV, on Saturdays, it was the scrub anchors, emitting newsbites for but 15 minutes, rather than the usual weekday prime-timed anchors, and their 30. Brown, as I, knew there wasn't really any less news on a Saturday. It was just that, on that day—Saturday—fewer "news" people worked. Therefore, less generated "news."

That's all. News, in the end, is just what you make it. And, if you make of it nothing: there is no news.

In one of the other encounters, I asked Brown what his "position" was on something. I don't remember on just what. But I surely remember his answer. Which was: "I don't have a position on that. It's amazing, the number of things on which I don't have a position. Probably I should put out a paper on what I do have positions on: Positions Of Brown. And then, about everything else, people won't ask me."

The newspapers then, and the intertubes even more now, encourage everyone to instantly have a "position" on everything. And so thus we have this sort of thing: people who have never heard of, say, Ukraine or Greece, in their lives, will suddenly become the instant experts. Based solely on whatever upchuck they've chosen to confirmation bias from the endless stream of vomit flowing through the tubes. Whatever they Believe is Real, because they've sucked it out of a tube . . . and Chose it to be Real. As compared to the upchuck they could have confirmastion-bias sucked out of some other tube.

In Time Out of Joint, Philip K. Dick, shooting speed in both arms to complete to deadline so there could be food in his belly, envisioned a world in which his protaganist sadsack increasingly frantically frenetically moves . . . as he understands all his world is falling apart. For his world is one where once there was a beachside stand that sold soda pop, until one day he finds nothing at all there, except a little card that reads "soda pop stand." This sort of withdrawal into nothingness alarmingly continues. And accelerates. What was once physically there, is now represented but in words. Until he finally leaps aboard a car and drives, fast—driving to find Reality. And finds that They cannot quickly enough keep up constructing the Reality that they wish him to dwell in. And so he plunges into Void. They just can't make it up fast and fine enough for him anymore. There is but Nothingness. Ultimately it is revealed that They have constructed a false entire world in which they wish him to live, because he has a skill, in completing each morn the false crossword in the false daily paper delivered to him in his false world, in, in his answers, correctly targeting the missiles of "his" nation upon his nation's "enemy." He is unknowingly bringing, every day, upon those he doesn't even know, the fire next time.

I try mightily to recall the Reality of this book whenever it is that I think I might think I "know" something. About something. About anything at all.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfET8AaV9W0]

Jerry Brown was interested in and amused by "news"—and, little wonder, since he was the subject of so much of it, while so little of it even remotely reflected who he was, and what he was about.

News, in the print sense, just lines birdcages. It's of no other importance. "News" on the intertubes matters even less. Because it has no physical existence. And thus can line nothing at all. It is, in the end, and at root, perfectly useless.

Visiting yesterday your father was more real and more important than anything you will ever encounter, ever, in any tube.

Time, on this planet, for we in these corporeal containers, it is limited. So, especially, older we get; better, I think, we best use it well.

; )

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sNPorNyME0]

My 92 year old mother wanted this trip with her two daughters. And we all had a wonderful time. It was amazing since the three of us stayed in one room every night during the seven nights of the trip. BTW, I am considered the "prissy one."