A Clutter

You know what I hate the most about the internet?  It’s that it makes it difficult to kill time.

Oh, I know that comment may confuse folks.  But, see, the American office environment has embraced the internet.  What’s not aggressively blocked, is now overlooked as, increasingly, our jobs become online as well.  We’re not wasting the company’s time.  In fact, we’re saving the company money.  We’re making fewer rubber band balls, paperclip chains, and paper airplanes.  We’ve stopped making little catapults, and we’ve stopped shooting rubber bands at each other.  The age of horsing around is gone.  Today’s rubber band ball is Wikipedia.  Our paperchip chain is Gmail chat.  Or, if that’s blocked, one of the infinite chat clones that fools our always beleaguered and frequently simple-minded MIS departments.

I resent the internet for stealing my ability to be properly bored.  A good kind of bored… Not bored by news, or information, or porn.  For example — I wanted to know, this morning, what the collective noun was for spiders.

Now, in the olden days, that would been a good project for a day or so.  Ask friends about it, see what resources I have on my own shelves, maybe an amusing excuse to call a friend long distance.  Maybe even worth spinning by the library, if all else failed, and also cruising around the shelves and picking a few books up just for the hell of it.

God… I haven’t stepped foot in a library in nearly a decade.  Because, really, why?  Everything I can possibly imagine or desire is available free online, or for purchase, or to steal.  Everything from the entire volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica to a video of midgets in mixed Roman and Nazi uniforms raping a dog.

And here’s the measurement of just how bored we all really are — of those two options above, which one makes you more curious?  Answer honestly.

We’ve seen it all.  We’ve heard it all.  Even just, simply, being aware that we can see and hear it all is polluting our souls.  It’s drawing us away from each other, it’s destroying sex, love, humanity.  It’s taught us to enjoy the world’s craziest criminals and the most spectacular co-ed college beach parties.  Somehow, the internet has even managed to reinforce racism and prejudice.  Perhaps merely by giving those elements a voice.  Thus is freedom, yes, but where a rally of 12 neo-Nazi’s on the street could be avoided, it now becomes the office’s pet hilarious video for the day or week, and forever sits on the mind like a cancer.  As our souls quietly break down, as our relationships become fewer, as we stop reading, as we stop learning, as we begin to take in the endless, screaming chant of sound-bytes and misinformation from our own out of control media, those humorous videos of white trash fuckholes, racist monsters, children falling, criminals fucking up, police fucking up, and everyone fucking up, just serve to further divide us from reality.  From our human responsibility to ourselves and to others.

How can I be bored by porn?  I ask myself this because, once, all it took was a pair of tits in a glossy mag.  Now I need it to be a bit harder.  But that’s the lifecycle of a man, that’s how we all develop.  Except, now, we have so much of it that it’s sort of like having too many hormones and antibiotics in our meat.  My generation is the first with that demand — and porn’s face begins to change as well.  The girls are different from those 80’s girls, and even the early 90’s bunch.  And anal, though always present, is now almost demanded.  The rough stuff, as well, has multiplied.  Sometimes I bust out my old downloads from the 90’s, and the videos I bought, and I’m shocked that what I dug out of the bizarre and fringe pile of a New York porn shop in 95 is tame compared to some of the mainstream stuff today. It’s the ease of access.  I’ve downloaded, for free, 400 gigs of quality porn so far this year.  And I’m not alone.

I do not object to porn, by the way, and do thank the internet for small favors.  But even if the individual moderates his or her intake, the simple essence of demand means that all these little vices will get wilder and wilder.

I miss writing letters.  I miss zines and alternative rags at the record store counter.  I miss independent bookstores.  I miss hanging out with friends and not ending up around a computer to see the latest game/video/youtube/gadget.  I miss being able to shut out the world in the evenings.  I miss a thriving book industry that isn’t glutted with self-published bullshit. I miss the downtime that, really, was just a lack of information or access to it.

Yeah, it’s all choice.  You can turn off the computer, or not own one.  But, really, why would you do that?  Because we’ve been given a drug that costs little or nothing and has no true side effects and caters to our every social and personal need. To shun it is just to be a foolish Luddite.  You might as well catch up with the times and make use of all the resources.  It is the way of the future, and there is no turning back.

The only real problem, I suppose, is an American one.  We’re all so rich and so idle that we can afford to be absorbed by the internet.  To live it fully as any ancient, spoiled, god-king would do.  We are the god-kings of the world.  The last of the great tyrants — a single voice, 300 million strong.  Not the voice of the President, but the voice of the American way. That old pursuit of happiness thing:  Acquisition, fulfillment of our desires.  Or fulfillment of the need to deaden the pain when we don’t get what we desire.  If you can’t afford it, you charge it.  And you keep charging.  Even our poor, our most miserable, live like kings.  How many bums do I walk past each day who are counting rolls of money?  Who are wearing better shoes than I am?  Whose wardrobe appears to be more diverse than mine?  These are Capitol Hill bums, granted, but the poor nonetheless.  They live in a shelter, they do not have my opportunities.  Yet, strangely, they seem better off.

I never give a penny because of that.  There are those out there far more deserving than the American street people.  But we don’t really help them.  We trust our oligarchy to deliver food and aide but, like every oligarchy, those old white fools skim from the top or just end up delivering supplies to warlords and madmen.  That’s nothing new.  We’ve been doing that since the Roman Republic.  Even those in America who are more in need are slighted — the rural poor.  There are illiterate children living in huts with dirt floors from Appalachia to the Sierra Nevada’s.  So while our city bums count up their rolls of bills and coins at the end of the day, those kids are starving and continuing the cycle of…well, everything you’re supposed to stand against as modern people.

The average beggar in an American city walks home with $100 a day, as several university studies have shown.  Most famous are the kids from Georgetown who spent a weekend begging on the streets a few years ago and each scored about $200.  That was just lying outside a subway station or standing on a corner Friday night, and all day Saturday.

Hard labor, really.  Lot of standing.  But, still, $100 a day.  That’s untaxed, under the counter income.  And, wow, if you have a shtick…Just imagine what those guys are raking in.

An old beggar once sat outside my office in DC.  We called him the pigeon man, because he’d feed those bastards all day and run his charming, happy old man routine.  On the weekends, he did the same in Rockville.  Everyone I worked with gave him money each day.  He was well loved, people knew his name, he knew their names.  He died of a heart attack and there was a little shrine built for him, his passing was noted in our monthly memo, it was talked about as if one of our own had died.

Except for a few stories from the late night people.  The cleaners, the maintenance folks, the all-seeing, all-knowing Hispanic underclass that cleans our shit and stands by the sidelines, watching everything.  They’d talk about how pigeon man, at the end of the day, would go climb into his Lexus and head off to proper living.  They’d talk about how he’d joke with them about all of us, the people throwing coins his way in pity.  The picture soon become clear — pigeon man never worked a day in his life, and never had to.  He was making hundreds of dollars a day, eating handouts, and didn’t have a care in the world.  Invisible to the government, without any creditors.

The generosity of fools.  We’ve become so weird and detached that we think we can regain humanity by helping those who do not need help.  Another local bum — Clayton — once told me that he makes $300 on a good day.  Though he has bad days.  “About $70 has been the worst.”  He sits on milk crates, under an umbrella, by the First Street Union Station Metro exit.  He gets free doughnuts.  People bring him breakfast, lunch and dinner.  People bring him gifts — a CD boombox, a pre-paid cell phone.  He has a pair of shoes for each day of the week, and I’ve never seen him in the same clothes twice.  His cup is always full of money.  He told me once that, when he had to have surgery on his eye, he went to GW and paid cash for the surgery, and for a single room during the recovery.

If you stay late enough, you’ll see the real Clayton.  Let’s say you go get a drink at Union Station, then head home.  Maybe 9pm, 10pm.  Clayton takes his money in to a local business and changes it all for larger bills — 20’s and 10’s and so on.  You’ll often catch him, on the way out of the station and towards the shelter, counting a wad of 20’s that would make a drug dealer jealous.

Work in or around Union Station long enough, and you’ll eventually see all the bums doing this.  When the day is over and the workers and commuters and tourists are gone, they get in their luxury cars, they pull out their gold money clips, they pack everything away.  Business as usual.

Yes, there are the truly unfortunate.  The people living under bridges.  But they don’t last long lingering outside your office or the station.  You might see the crazy beggar for an hour or two, but they get cleaned up pretty quick.  They’re the truly disturbed, the sick.  Sometimes they become a fixture but, more often than not, the cops, the local security, or their more savvy brethren take over the corner.  If it’s profitable.

We’ve lost our way from the top to the bottom, and we will be punished for it.