You know what I hate the most about the internet?\u00a0 It’s that it makes it difficult to kill time.<\/p>\n
\nOh, I know that comment may confuse folks.\u00a0 But, see, the American office environment has embraced the internet.\u00a0 What’s not aggressively blocked, is now overlooked as, increasingly, our jobs become online as well.\u00a0 We’re not wasting the company’s time.\u00a0 In fact, we’re saving the company money.\u00a0 We’re making fewer rubber band balls, paperclip chains, and paper airplanes.\u00a0 We’ve stopped making little catapults, and we’ve stopped shooting rubber bands at each other.\u00a0 The age of horsing around is gone.\u00a0 Today’s rubber band ball is Wikipedia.\u00a0 Our paperchip chain is Gmail chat.\u00a0 Or, if that’s blocked, one of the infinite chat clones that fools our always beleaguered and frequently simple-minded MIS departments.<\/p>\n
I resent the internet for stealing my ability to be properly bored.\u00a0 A good kind of bored… Not bored by news, or information, or porn.\u00a0 For example — I wanted to know, this morning, what the collective noun was for spiders.<\/p>\n
Now, in the olden days, that would been a good project for a day or so.\u00a0 Ask friends about it, see what resources I have on my own shelves, maybe an amusing excuse to call a friend long distance.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
God… I haven’t stepped foot in a library in nearly a decade.\u00a0 Because, really, why?\u00a0 Everything I can possibly imagine or desire is available free online, or for purchase, or to steal.\u00a0 Everything from the entire volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica to a video of midgets in mixed Roman and Nazi uniforms raping a dog.<\/p>\n
And here’s the measurement of just how bored we all really are — of those two options above, which one makes you more curious?\u00a0 Answer honestly.<\/p>\n
We’ve seen it all.\u00a0 We’ve heard it all.\u00a0 Even just, simply, being aware that we can see and hear it all is polluting our souls.\u00a0 It’s drawing us away from each other, it’s destroying sex, love, humanity.\u00a0 It’s taught us to enjoy the world’s craziest criminals and the most spectacular co-ed college beach parties.\u00a0 Somehow, the internet has even managed to reinforce racism and prejudice.\u00a0 Perhaps merely by giving those elements a voice.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 From our human responsibility to ourselves and to others.<\/p>\n
How can I be bored by porn?\u00a0 I ask myself this because, once, all it took was a pair of tits in a glossy mag.\u00a0 Now I need it to be a bit harder.\u00a0 But that’s the lifecycle of a man, that’s how we all develop.\u00a0 Except, now, we have so much of it that it’s sort of like having too many hormones and antibiotics in our meat.\u00a0 My generation is the first with that demand — and porn’s face begins to change as well.\u00a0 The girls are different from those 80’s girls, and even the early 90’s bunch.\u00a0 And anal, though always present, is now almost demanded.\u00a0 The rough stuff, as well, has multiplied.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I’ve downloaded, for free, 400 gigs of quality porn so far this year.\u00a0 And I\u2019m not alone.<\/p>\n
I do not object to porn, by the way, and do thank the internet for small favors.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
I miss writing letters.\u00a0 I miss zines and alternative rags at the record store counter.\u00a0 I miss independent bookstores.\u00a0 I miss hanging out with friends and not ending up around a computer to see the latest game\/video\/youtube\/gadget.\u00a0 I miss being able to shut out the world in the evenings.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Yeah, it’s all choice.\u00a0 You can turn off the computer, or not own one.\u00a0 But, really, why would you do that?\u00a0 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.\u00a0 You might as well catch up with the times and make use of all the resources.\u00a0 It is the way of the future, and there is no turning back.<\/p>\n
The only real problem, I suppose, is an American one.\u00a0 We’re all so rich and so idle that we can afford to be absorbed by the internet.\u00a0 To live it fully as any ancient, spoiled, god-king would do.\u00a0 We are the god-kings of the world.\u00a0 The last of the great tyrants — a single voice, 300 million strong.\u00a0 Not the voice of the President, but the voice of the American way. That old pursuit of happiness thing:\u00a0 Acquisition, fulfillment of our desires.\u00a0 Or fulfillment of the need to deaden the pain when we don’t get what we desire.\u00a0 If you can’t afford it, you charge it.\u00a0 And you keep charging.\u00a0 Even our poor, our most miserable, live like kings.\u00a0 How many bums do I walk past each day who are counting rolls of money?\u00a0 Who are wearing better shoes than I am?\u00a0 Whose wardrobe appears to be more diverse than mine?\u00a0 These are Capitol Hill bums, granted, but the poor nonetheless.\u00a0 They live in a shelter, they do not have my opportunities.\u00a0 Yet, strangely, they seem better off.<\/p>\n
I never give a penny because of that.\u00a0 There are those out there far more deserving than the American street people.\u00a0 But we don’t really help them.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 That’s nothing new.\u00a0 We’ve been doing that since the Roman Republic.\u00a0 Even those in America who are more in need are slighted — the rural poor.\u00a0 There are illiterate children living in huts with dirt floors from Appalachia to the Sierra Nevada\u2019s.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
The average beggar in an American city walks home with $100 a day, as several university studies have shown.\u00a0 Most famous are the kids from Georgetown who spent a weekend begging on the streets a few years ago and each scored about $200.\u00a0 That was just lying outside a subway station or standing on a corner Friday night, and all day Saturday.<\/p>\n
Hard labor, really.\u00a0 Lot of standing.\u00a0 But, still, $100 a day.\u00a0 That’s untaxed, under the counter income.\u00a0 And, wow, if you have a shtick…Just imagine what those guys are raking in.<\/p>\n
An old beggar once sat outside my office in DC.\u00a0 We called him the pigeon man, because he’d feed those bastards all day and run his charming, happy old man routine.\u00a0 On the weekends, he did the same in Rockville.\u00a0 Everyone I worked with gave him money each day.\u00a0 He was well loved, people knew his name, he knew their names.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Except for a few stories from the late night people.\u00a0 The cleaners, the maintenance folks, the all-seeing, all-knowing Hispanic underclass that cleans our shit and stands by the sidelines, watching everything.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 They’d talk about how he’d joke with them about all of us, the people throwing coins his way in pity.\u00a0 The picture soon become clear — pigeon man never worked a day in his life, and never had to.\u00a0 He was making hundreds of dollars a day, eating handouts, and didn’t have a care in the world.\u00a0 Invisible to the government, without any creditors.<\/p>\n
The generosity of fools.\u00a0 We’ve become so weird and detached that we think we can regain humanity by helping those who do not need help.\u00a0 Another local bum — Clayton — once told me that he makes $300 on a good day.\u00a0 Though he has bad days.\u00a0 “About $70 has been the worst.”\u00a0 He sits on milk crates, under an umbrella, by the First Street Union Station Metro exit.\u00a0 He gets free doughnuts.\u00a0 People bring him breakfast, lunch and dinner.\u00a0 People bring him gifts — a CD boombox, a pre-paid cell phone.\u00a0 He has a pair of shoes for each day of the week, and I’ve never seen him in the same clothes twice.\u00a0 His cup is always full of money.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
If you stay late enough, you’ll see the real Clayton.\u00a0 Let’s say you go get a drink at Union Station, then head home.\u00a0 Maybe 9pm, 10pm.\u00a0 Clayton takes his money in to a local business and changes it all for larger bills — 20’s and 10’s and so on.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Work in or around Union Station long enough, and you’ll eventually see all the bums doing this.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Business as usual.<\/p>\n
Yes, there are the truly unfortunate.\u00a0 The people living under bridges.\u00a0 But they don’t last long lingering outside your office or the station.\u00a0 You might see the crazy beggar for an hour or two, but they get cleaned up pretty quick.\u00a0 They’re the truly disturbed, the sick.\u00a0 Sometimes they become a fixture but, more often than not, the cops, the local security, or their more savvy brethren take over the corner.\u00a0 If it’s profitable.<\/p>\n
We’ve lost our way from the top to the bottom, and we will be punished for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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