Groink

I was looking at my website on the shitter, which I don’t usually do, but the mobile version of the WordPress theme I stole/modified doesn’t look half bad. Except for the site title. It’s hard [for me] to predict how a font will render on different browsers and platforms. Anyway, I’m keeping the look for a while. I’ll to try and fix the title, hopefully not by just make it a JPEG or PNG or something lame. No promises, though. But that’ll have to wait because…

I got a new television! This is my first major audio visual purchase in ten years. I’m oddly excited for having purchased a thing that will enable time-wasting and consumption of the 24 hour news cycle, but here I am. It is one of those fancy-pants “The Frame” televisions from Samsung because I’m a fucking grown up and make like I don’t want a TV so I get a TV that looks like an art frame so people will think I’m grown up and go all “Oooh! Look how sophisticated that man named Groink is who has a poorly written website where he talks about his excretory habits with his cellphone”. The extra fun part is that I have to run new electrical and data cabling. Brand new chances to ruin my house! I’ve already drilled an unintended hole into a joist. Life is amazing.

At first, I wanted something reminiscent of an old monochrome terminal. But I ended up going something vaguely CGA looking. I think some people might think it is some vaporwave aesthetic. My front-end dev skills are…lacking.

AHHH…elections! AHHH…Twitter! AHHH…Powerball! Sorta ahhh…Meta/Facebook!

…that those who are unabashedly fervent in their support of religion and the police are those who believe others and themselves lack a moral compass to do the right thing without threat of punishment from the Heavenly Sky Father or by the muzzle of a weapon.

● Nobody wants your 10 year old, used, ratty, rained on, left out on the edge of your driveway raccoon love nest of a mattress. Even if it is free.

● Thank you for the $10 discount off of the MSRP on the kitchen appliance used only “a handful of times” over the last 7 years.

I am trying to give up swearing. It is proving to be difficult. Even more difficult is attempting to give up being sarcastic — and whatever derivative or similar humor that’s in the same vein.

Sarcasm is too expensive an activity to engage in for me personally, and frankly, the same goes for the United States. The ability to be able to detect the nuance of that kind of humor is absent in most. Certainly part of it due to mere naivete. More alarmingly the line between what is reasonable and what is absurd is all but gone. The mundane is unbelievable, and the norm is irrationality. Satire requires a common reference point, and that reference point is so divergent among everyone, that it renders satire irrelevant. A practical example is The Onion. With an uncomfortable amount of regularity, it is cited as an actual news source. The insidious corollary to that is The Onion also seems to accurately predict cultural shifts towards the absurd. Or it reports actual news in a screamingly satirical tone. Sigh.

Humor is the sugar that helps us cope with having to deal with the drudgery and the terror of life. But the US has a problem with its humor intake much like its actual sugar intake. I’ve written about this before, how gravitas is lacking in many aspects of our life. News reporting in particular has to be sweetened with humor in order to make it palatable to most. Kind of picking on The Daily Show here, but we are well past the point where we can hope that Trevor Noah or John Oliver or Jon Stewart will spark an understanding, through humorous presentation, that the issue they are reporting on are important, serious. I tend to think that it downplays the gravity of it; that those issues can be shelved for another day while we browse for our next entertainment fix. Although I think Jon Stewart has pivoted away from that sort of thing now.

Sorry to be a Gen-X wet blanket, but I think things are going to get a lot more dire if we don’t put on our “Well, we gotta get this done” boots on and stop trying to laugh our problems away. Don’t get me wrong: I absolutely feel that urge to pull inward, to coddle my own helplessness, and embrace the futility. I don’t know if writing about this is a first step or an only step.

It’s easy to be glib about things we feel we cannot affect. Even moreso when social media (and mainstream media, too) encourages you to be the most 15-seconds-famous as you can be. Entertainment is valued above purposefulness.

We are living in history. But we cannot be passive observers that the neverending buffet of media teaches us to be.

Fuel your purpose with love, not hate. Be resolute, but always introspective.

Three years ago my dad died. Guess this was knocking around in my head the last couple of days without coming to the forefront of my mind.

So that’s rad.