Though I’ve (semi-) resisted turning this into a long-winded version of Facebook, from which I fled two years ago, today I must succumb. Perforce….
…kinda reminds me of that time I tried to drive a car while tripping…had to pull over and say to my friends, “I can’t tell which one is the traffic light, guys.”
Today’s soundtrack
Workingman’s Dead (2013 Remaster), The Grateful Dead. It seems impossible to avoid these remasters in today’s streaming world. Thankfully, this one does justice to The Dead, pulling out voices with clarity and adding a high-fidelity punch to the guitar playing.
17-11-70 (UK-Release Mix), Elton John. This has to be one of the best live albums from my teen-aged years (though the American version was titled 11-17-70 to reflect our peculiar dating system). Elton’s piano and vocals are accompanied only by Nigel Olsson on the drums and Dee Murray on bass. The performance occurred at A&R Recording Studios in front of fewer than 200 audience members, but was broadcast on radio. This mix has more reverb than my original vinyl–which I still have, by the way. I think the extra reverb mostly sounds better to my ears. The vocals are clearer than my overplayed vinyl too. After this Elton’s style began to change from a piano-ballad style; this represents the only live album of his to reflect what he sounded like in the early years. Wish I could stream the expanded version released a few years ago, 17-11-70+.
Captured Live At The Forum, Three Dog Night. Sticking with the great live albums from that time, and predating Elton’s performance by a year, this album highlights an interesting vocal group of the time. One of the great concert lines occurs a short way into the recording: after listening to some shouts from the balcony, one of the stars (look, I don’t know who’s who) says, “what’s that? you can’t hear us?” and another bandmate steps forward to say, “See? You shoulda bought the five-fifty tickets up front!” Fresh humor and remarkable that front row seats cost only $5.50!
After that? I’m thinking to stick with live pop-oriented stuff, so I think one of the greatest live albums is out: Live At Leeds by The Who just rocks too much. Likewise for Near The Beginning by Vanilla Fudge or Steppenwolf’s Live! Hmmmm…. what about Yessongs? That should do nicely. Later, folks.
what my latest poem looks like on my desktop computer monitor. October 2023.
Something perhaps has changed with WordPress. I’ve been irritated to see that choosing the “Verse” setting for a block, which I thought yielded the above, doesn’t even come close on some devices. Here’s what my friend received in his email:
what my poem looks like on an Android phone, as delivered in a Gmail message. October 2023.
I knew that WordPress converted poetry to a monospaced font, rather liked it actually, because I follow a couple of poetry blogs which deliver the entire poem to my inbox. I’m pretty sure in the past that I saw the same thing on the WordPress website when I used my phone. Ah, but now there is Jetpack, newly changed for the…better? This is what appears on my actual blog when using an Android phone:
What my poem looks like on an Android phone using WordPress/Jetpack. October 2023.
That’s not “verse,” WordPress, nor is it “poem.” That is called “paragraph” and “prose” and perhaps “simplistic crap” unless one makes a living as a stream-of-consciousness author, and even then one must establish a certain cadence and structure to ‘musically’ signal to the Reader that yes, this is something beyond prose. (Unless one is James Joyce, then nevermind.)
Canadian philosopher and communications theory god Marshall McLuhan invented the phrase “the medium in the message”. I’ve perverted what this means. He meant that content doesn’t really matter, that a children’s cartoon or a vicious slasher movie is all the same when broadcast identically on television. To me he meant the message of any communication effort takes its ultimate meaning from the medium by which it is delivered. Spoken words in a living room conversation take on new meanings when sung in a concert hall. More familiarly, books turned into movies tell a different story and cannot help do otherwise. Even if Peter Jackson had managed to control every reference in his Lord of the Rings movies, visual, aural, or what-have-you, the story still would have been just as vastly different than the books as they turned out to be.
For these reasons, it’s deeply unsettling to oldsters such as me to watch the different devices reformat and repackage the content of what purportedly is the same thing. I see this nearly every day as I follow Major League Baseball. MLB.com presents a side-by-side box score for both teams, but on the phone you must select one team or the other–never can you present them at the same time on your phone’s screen. Baseball-Reference.com displays a wonderfully useful tool when looking at any particular season for a baseball team: a histogram of green and red bars which tell the tale of the entire season, game by game, read left to right. Mouse over any bar and it tells you the date of that particular game, who this team played (and where), and what the score was. It also shows what the team’s Won-Lost record was when the game finished. On a mobile device (tablet or phone) this histogram tool disappears. It makes me wonder if certain features of a website are completely unknown to a majority of the younglings who stare into their phones for 90% of the time they’re awake.
Thus, we come back to my dilemma/consternation and the question posed in the headline. Have I delivered a poem at all when it looks like a short paragraph raising an offhand question? Does the trivialization effected by the mobile presentation indicate my poem lacked substance and can only stake a claim to poetry because of its window-dressed arrangement? (Believe me, I’ve thought some unkind thoughts about other’s postings which, if returned to a more prose-like arrangement, look like the musings of a teenager in a diary. Am I just as shallow?) Did McLuhan not go far enough? Does the message ultimately get defined by how the technology delivers it, even when it lives simultaneously in different media formats?
A light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence.
Marshall McLuhan from Understanding Media (as quoted in Wikipedia)
Ultimately I think McLuhan would argue each device configuration represents a medium. But I never signed up for this, WordPress! My understanding of the matter was this: you give me the tools to put my message together, and I pay for it by giving you ultimate ownership of my content (which I cannot believe I did, but there ya go). I expected a bit more, though. I expected a very nuanced difference to my content. Sure, I’ll accept McLuhan’s theory that those who read my stuff on a phone get a different message than those who read it on a big desktop monitor, but I would prefer to be left out of the “definition changing” part of the equation. You’ve made me a partner to it by changing my content not just the medium.
Which leaves me little closer to answering my question but has given me an excellent opportunity to rely on that first college degree and to prove yet again that old age clothes old men in curmudgeonly behaviors as surely as dogs become grizzled and oaks gnarled.
Small, shriveled golden oyster mushrooms. September 2023.
When I converted an old, seldom-used blog into this one, I envisioned a writing outlet and ‘daily’ blog combination. After all, I’d just canceled Facebook for reasons too obvious and previously stated. I figured my need to communicate, to shout into the gale winds of social media would inevitably fill this site up with lots and lots of pithy writing punctuating my daily doin’s. It’s now time to admit something about getting older I had witnessed but not from this side of the divide, so to speak: that driving urge to make something happen and accomplish something fades. Some of this is good. Recently I’ve reflected on my typical mindset four years ago when I juggled weekly trips across the continent to San Diego and Seattle from my Raleigh home, monthly visits to attend to my ailing mother in Spokane, and to arrange her final rites in October. (I ended it all with an audit performed in Toronto…in rainy November weather. Yay.) I barely recognize the person who kept multiple itineraries in his head, who could tell you which airports had which kiosks at which intervals, who had a set and efficient routine for unpacking and packing a suitcase, who parleyed sarcastic cynicism into a business persona, and who grabbed beers and food as time allowed. I wish I could convey the inner pressure which led others to give me wide berth at times, but which seemed to be crucial to my survival. But now…
Hard to thrill, Nothing really moves me anymore.
from “Hard To Thrill” by Eric Clapton/John Mayer, performed by Clapton & J.J. Cale on The Road To Escondido
When Covid partnered with retirement to give me a crash course in inactivity, I reverted to a boyhood prototype: read; pursue an idea as it blossomed; eat; drink; repeat. But don’t call me lazy. I bristle at being called lazy. “Inside my head I’m more active than you’ll ever be,” I think. (We’ll leave to another day what steps I took to slow down and/or turn off the voices in my head.) I learned early that giving voice to my stream of consciousness at speed guaranteed a fairly quick response: “oh god, would you PLEASE JUST SHUT UP!” (Well, I somewhat learned it. I’ve received refresher courses throughout the ensuing 50 years.) Example from a coastal drive during this past week’s visit from a lifelong friend: “There’s a Free Will Baptist Church…not to be confused with a movie about orcas…and definitely Free Willy shouldn’t be confused with that series of pornographic films.” I think I saw heads spin in the car. Did I mention I liked Robin Williams because he delivered comedy at a speed I could appreciate?
All of this by way of explaining my consternation at noting only three or four posts in the past six weeks. Remove the writer’s conceit of a Virtual Vacation and I’ve posted little in the past three or four months. No promises, but I’m headed into a (slightly) more optimistic future in October. In mid-month I’m looking at two periods in the month which hold a dozen days of solitude–a gift to a loner like me.
Our shriveled photo at the top represents a failure at growing a beautiful blooming of golden oyster mushrooms. I was promised a gorgeous cluster, maybe two or three from a kit I purchased in early August. It should have looked like this…ah but that would be stealing someone else’s photo. Let’s just say it would be ten times bigger than the clump in the photo above.
Instead, nothing happened within the 10-14 days it should have. I gifted a friend with the same kind of mushroom kit, and he started a week ahead of me. He didn’t reach harvest until about day 19 or 20, so I held on. About three weeks in, I finally got some growth where it shouldn’t have occurred and it consisted of two distinct clusters which both looked like the picture at the top of this post. It’s an accurate symbol of my shriveled hopes these days. The vendor came through though and sent me a new block which arrived Friday. I started it Sunday, and noted I had not followed instructions–imagine that. This time I made the required shallow incision in the mycelium-impregnated starter block as specified. Stay tuned.
It’s possible that the advent of Oktoberfest with its namesake beer has contributed to some of the lassitude I feel. Or…others…. I’m still polishing off some representatives from the Michigan trip in July. (Though not representative of the state: it’s where I found North Coast Brewing’s Old Rasputin, an imperial stout that drinks like a cross between beer, chocolate, and coffee, all without any additions. Good stuff, but potent. Two of these babies and you’re more than halfway through a typical six-pack.)
The glass is mightier than the sword…particularly when the glasses gang up on the pen.
September saw a few happenings. We got to know our new steel steed, Percy Pilcher:
Percy Pilcher, aviator extraordinaire!
We set out at the end of August to replace Mr. Lincoln, a 2015 Lincoln MKC and a beautiful realization of automotive vision, but who had become a bit outdated, frustrating, and tired after eight years. “A hybrid, dear,” I told my wife. “That’s what we need. And probably a minivan, though I’m loath to admit those words. We need the cargo room.” We went shopping. Hybrid Toyota Sierras would be available six to eight months–if we pre-ordered. Chrysler Pacificas looked cheap, even at the so-called high end of the model spectrum. The others were DOA, and so…we headed back to the Lincoln dealership where we were treated like returning royalty. No hybrid Aviators? There’s a familiar song. A ‘pre-owned’ model? (Hmm. Weren’t those called “used” not long ago? I think I’m differently opinionated!) Sure. And that’s how we wound up with a current-year Aviator which was returned after five months because the purchasers just loved the vehicle they had traded in, so they bought another one and used this one to cover the cost. Their disappointment was our gain. We bought a vehicle with less than one year’s mileage on it, looks sharp, has all the features we wanted, and…it’s a Lincoln. When I woke up from the euphoria, though, I realized we had purchased another gas combustion engine and that it had 25% worse gas mileage than what we had traded in! Ah, no matter. For now Percy is our new Aviator. Why Percy? Because Percy Pilcher, a relative for sure–there aren’t many Pilchers in the world–achieved quite a bit of notoriety as an inventor and aviator, and likely would’ve bested the Wright brothers at the first to fly a heavier-than-air aircraft if he hadn’t been killed right before attempting it. If you click through to that link, the photograph of him looks similar to my grandfather, the Rev. Howard B. Pilcher, enough that he could’ve been a cousin. I’ve not done much with genealogy, so I’ve no idea how close the relationship is.
Tuesday marked the beginning of a month of travel, both us and others. Or more specifically, both my wife and others. I’m not going anywhere. In my teen years I became acquainted with a guy who later became a good and close friend. Throughout junior and senior high I knew who he was, saw him in groups, but not until I dropped out of college after my freshman year in 1973 did I start working at a Spokane hospital where he also worked. We started hanging out, and because I had become just a little more “normal” we connected. Though diametrically different, we became friends. He was the best man at my first wedding in 1983. We fell into and out of touch, but by 1990 we had renewed it for good. I moved away, and he served in the wedding party for my second wedding. (It was only fair. I participated in multiple weddings for him. Perhaps I’ll tell that tale later.) This past week represented the second time he visited us in Raleigh; the first occurred only because he had followed a woman to Florida in 2009. Had that not happened….but that’s also another story.
This week my brother visits for the first time in over a year. When he leaves a week later, one of my wife’s triplet sisters drops in the next day to pick up my wife and continue to Florida where she (my sister-in-law, not my wife) will look for her retirement home. When that’s done my wife and I will enjoy a whole seven days all by ourselves before she takes off again with a group of friends called The Biker Chicks (though my wife has never ridden a hog or any other type of motorcycle that I am aware of). Finally, as October bows itself out with Hallowe’en, and All Saints and All Souls ushers us into November, I will settle into a sedate period of enjoying my life with my wife. I really don’t need much else. She lets me be to sit here and write these screeds, matches me drink for drink and recipe for recipe, creates handcrafted art in a panoply of media, and joins me in a love of good video, good music, and good times.
What could be better? It’s why I sometimes don’t post here regularly. I’m having too much fun.
Four Sundays have passed since last I posted, and more than a month since anything of significance graced (?) this blog. Let’s catch up and be witty about it (I hope). In mostly reverse order….
Red oak with tree trimmers. Raleigh, NC. June 2023.
In the photo above a local tree-trimming service prepares to limb the dead branches out of this fine red oak in our front yard. Most of the branches overhang the street or sidewalk and thus pose a safety risk for anything/anyone who happens to be beneath them. I could try to describe where they are in that photo, but only one is distinct. It’s in the upper, left-center of the photo, a dark silhouette against the light green pines behind it. No, not that one. The one snaking down away from it. In all, the two-man crew lopped four main branches and about a half dozen minor ones. The thick end of the branches measured six to eight inches, and I got a nice box of firewood out of it all. This company has given up cutting trees down (losing 30% of their revenue stream in the process), focusing instead on maintaining the health of the ones we still have on this planet. Further, they offer to return your yard to a natural meadow state (for a pretty hefty fee), something we are seriously contemplating. They use organic, natural substances for maintaining shrubs and trees. They help support the native plants and help eradicate or tame the non-natives. I’m pretty stoked about it–if we go the full makeover route, I may give them free advertising by mentioning their name!
Backyard bird feeding station #2. Raleigh, NC. June 2023.
“Month of Sundays” continues: I’m embarrassed to put up such a mundane photo, but I’ve yet to take any good ones. Last Sunday we sat to enjoy this new bird feeding station erected the day before. The squirrel/raccoon baffle works, at least for squirrels anyway, and by including mealworms in the feeder on the right I’ve managed to entice the bluebirds to feed once again. (Haven’t seen them since I quit offering mealworms about nine months ago–long and boring story.) I’m excited to use a Nikon app to link my camera to my phone and take photos of the birds without being anywhere near either them or the camera. It should be good. (It may not work at all, but permit me my optimism.) Installing this pole system proved serendipitous: the same day I planned to install the new pole system, I found the nice, squirrel-proof feeder which normally sits on the pole in the background nearly torn off, likely by something big, like a raccoon, perhaps a possum. Three of four nut-and-bolt fasteners were gone, and it hung sideways by the final remaining one.
Makin’ tortilla chips. May 2023.
Not exactly another Sunday back: the penultimate day of May I spent preparing what I call Deconstructed Nachos. It starts with taking all those fading tortillas which we never can keep up with and turning them into chips. We had several avocados at peak ripeness; they became guacamole. Some heirloom beans (Buckeyes, I think) from Rancho Gordo received the Mexican-flavored cooking I favor, using a recipe from a book I’ve carted around for 45 years. Using the same cookbook, I turned them into a bean dip. Then we just dip the chips instead of piling the ‘stuff’ on top of the chips. Sometimes I’ll make a picadillo, but we skipped it this time, and indeed skipped the melted cheese on top. Goodbye May! You were delicious!
In the past two months there has been baking….
Poppy rolls from the book From Scratch by Michael Ruhlman, baked in a cast iron skillet. They held lots of shredded pork and coleslaw and were dressed with Lexington BBQ sauce. May 2023.Hearth bread from The Bread Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum. May 2023.
There was altogether wa-a-a-ay too much of this…
A fine grain-and-hop concoction in one of the new Teku glasses purchased from Victory Brewing Company in Downingtown, PA. I’m thinking it’s a Belgian-inspired brew from Haw River Farmhouse Ales. May 2023.
…and too little walking and exercising. If there had been more, perhaps I would have encountered more of these while walking….
Deer crossing where the City of Raleigh has built a drainage pipe under the road just north of our house by a couple hundred yards. This allows an unnamed creek to flow to Haresnipe Creek. May 2023.
I’ve now marked the first ten days of my 70th year on this planet. I’d like to think it’s time to get serious, but why start now? Seriously, I need less serious and more lighthearted enjoyment. Apologies for a rambling travelogue through my past two months. We’ll get back to Serious Stuff again. You’ll see.
I notice I haven’t posted since April 10th, Easter Monday. Seems like more than 12 days. I’d like to come up with an excuse, even if it’s a poor one, but I don’t have anything leaping to mind. I could cite cracked ribs, but that didn’t seem to matter between March 13th and April 10th!
I have a piece to publish tomorrow. Meanwhile….
Sunlight on a wall of St. Mary’s Chapel, Holy Name of Jesus Cathedral, Raleigh, NC. April 2023.
In the approximately 18 months I’ve been writing this blog of…whatever it is, I’ve accumulated 31 essays or starts to essays which haven’t been published or weren’t worthy of being finished; 16 unpublished poems; three different memoirs which will never see the light of day; a rough draft of a play; the outline for a novella; a political satire; three chapters of a science fiction story blended with politics; and three dozen idea starters plus a dozen or two “snippets” to prime the writing pump. This doesn’t count some old blog entries which could be polished up and republished, journal entries which shall remain private, and older pieces of writing which predate using OneNote as a writing notebook.
Today I spent two to three hours writing what was supposedly going to be a ranging, breezy, entertaining look at my relationship to time and a look at time itself. When I stopped I had a pedantic, trivial piece of crap such as I would’ve written on deadline for the newspaper and never thought about again. “Disappointing” is when your realization is a pale copy of your dream; “abject failure” is when your beautiful idea is born as devil-spawn and requires an immediate stake through its heart.
Crocus (?) along the Little Spokane River. May 1972. Photographed with Honeywell Pentax SP500. Scanned from either negative or slide.
We’ve had several days of early spring-like weather. Despite all that assails one, sunny days like today lighten the heart and fill the soul with optimism. Sure we’re falling apart like a cheap toy and every famous person we liked as children seems to be dying, but just enjoying this moment beats not enjoying it.
Imagine you live in a country. It’s larger than Lichtenstein, but smaller than America, lots smaller. Maybe something like Portugal or Austria even. That’s significantly smaller than Texas. France is a bit smaller than Texas. We’re talking some country only a quarter or less of California. It’s still a country with cities and such–it would take quite a while to walk from one end to the other, especially if you stopped to talk to folks along the way.
Now suppose, in order to make it much, much easier for everyone in the country to talk to each other, all the sports fields–soccer pitches both professional and amateur, all the school yards, all of the parks–were converted into Talk Bubbles. A new technology. Inflated domes were put over these areas, shiny so you couldn’t see inside. Everyone could step inside the Bubble nearest them and talk to anyone…anyone, that is, who also had stepped inside a Bubble in their own locale. You didn’t even have to pay to walk inside your nearest Bubble; all you had to do was agree to wear a monitoring device which you were assured didn’t listen in “exactly” but parsed words it heard and relayed those words back to the folks who ran the Bubbles. Oh, and the device also relayed where you walked in the Bubble. That’s all. Easy-peasy, ever so sleazy. (woops, sorry about that).
You love it at first. Your job took you to Lisbon but look, right over there’s a handful of schoolmates from college, from that little village we loved so well (and so long ago)! And more, from your elementary school! You can just talk to them! Of course, as you walk over to them you have several persons intercept you and say things like, “Have you ever wondered about removing your ugly warts?” and “Let me tell you why you should never invest in stocks!” It’s annoying but you brush them off, basically just ignoring them and walking away.
Over time you start to wonder why the guy about the warts–or a woman; it’s not always the same person but the message is the same–keeps intercepting you no matter where you walk. You realize you once said to your friends, “Remember that song from when we were children, ‘Walter Wart, the Freaky Frog’?” (That’s a real song by the Thorndike Pickledish Choir; look it up.) Suddenly you realize you started seeing Wart Guy after you asked that question. Then you realize you’re starting to see that guy and his cohorts everywhere you walk. Even weirder, nameless folk come up to you and say things like, “Do you know Melissa Mickleberger? She’s over there.” Sometimes you do know Melissa, but sometimes Melissa is just some stranger. These interruptions occur a little more frequently now…plus your paranoia starts to grow, making it doubly annoying.
Later you find out the owners of the Bubbles actually are listening to what you say, and they’re selling that information. Never mind why, it’s too boring and scary all at the same time. What’s far more annoying to the point of effrontery seems to be occurring more and more: a contentious election approaches, and when you’re having a nice polite discussion with your friends, someone else walks up and screams “WHAT A COMPLETE IDIOT YOU ARE!”. Your friend just smiles and says, “Oh, don’t mind Roger, he just gets a little worked up is all.” Then pretty soon your friend starts saying to you, “You know, I’m not sure about that. My friend Roger says, ….” and then adds something so outlandish, you wonder what has happened to this friend of yours. If your friend and you were still in grade five, you would merely point out that Roger also wears his shirts backwards and the two of you would laugh, secure in the knowledge that you’re both still on the same friendship page, and Roger is a Very Peculiar Individual who shouldn’t be trusted to provide accurate, truthful, relevant information. Instead, when you cautiously query your friend privately, you find out she thinks Roger might be on to something. “After all, a lot of Roger’s friends are saying the same thing, and lately so are quite a few of my friends. You’re still my friend, aren’t you?”
Disturbingly, you’ve noticed your friendship now depends, at the very least, on tolerating Roger, and you can see the writing on the wall. Pretty soon you’ll have to agree with what Roger says if you want to remain friends. A friendship built on shared experience has become predicated on Belief and Opinion. You start to notice also that all of this friend’s friends say almost the exact same thing, much like a Twilight Zone episode or that Stepford Wives thing from a long time ago.
It finally comes to this: when you’re standing around as part of a circle of old high school chums–and frankly you don’t know a lot of them, but the ones you do know are all friends with the other ones, and hey, it was a big school–the topic turns political again. Strong opinions get stated, opinions you agree with. One person, though, says something not logical and all the others immediately say, “yeah! That’s right!” When you speak up to say, “well, but that’s not actually factual or logical” the group turns on you as if you were carrying typhoid or you had just molested a child or something equally reprehensible.
You walk to the Bubble’s exit. To the attendant there you state, “I am not coming back. You can take my name off of the list of approved entrants.” “Oh, no!” cries the attendant. “You can’t be serious! Are you sure you don’t want to just take a vacation from the Bubble?” You’ve taken vacations before so you say, “no, I don’t,” to which the attendant replies, sorrowfully, “well, okay, but any time you want to come back in, all you have to do is show up, say to the current attendant ‘just reactivate my Bubble Device’ and you can rejoin the Community!” The last phrase has a near-religious tone to it.
While walking the streets of Lisbon you begin to realize some things. Virtually all of those friends with whom you connected were not so important that you ever took time to look them up when you were in the home village. The few you talked to who weren’t historical friends–in other words, people you met in the Bubble–were people you only knew from limited conversation in the Bubble. You’ve had similarly engaging but shallow conversations in bars on a Thursday evening with strangers. Your friend who kept bringing Roger to the conversation had a habit of listening to and spreading outrageous gossip about teachers and students when she and you were classmates. You also realize your True Friends were those you stayed in contact with before the Bubbles. Though a few say they miss your presence in the Bubble, when they see you on the streets, you still see them, you still laugh/cry/argue with them. Nothing has changed; life still goes on outside the Bubble; the Bubble is not life or an approximation thereof.
And then it hits you: the Bubble has somehow focused, distilled, accentuated the tendencies we had before. It has connected the gossips from your early schooling with those of your university and those early co-workers. All of the people who annoyed you individually but in isolation as you grew up now have the ability to connect in the Bubble and reinforce each other’s message. They’ve grown in volume simply because they speak in unison. The promise of the Bubble–that we can connect and forge a more social and socially aware community–has produced just the opposite. People are meant to interact differently: anonymously sometimes, reservedly most of the time, and definitely more intermittently than in the Bubble. In the Bubble people seem to talk as if they are in their cars where no one can hear what they’re saying. What the Bubble has produced then are people revealing the thoughts which just ought not to be revealed. Not that individuals should repress themselves, but any psychotherapist will likely confess they hear things which should remain between the patient and the therapist for the good of society, for the individual, and for the individual’s friends and social life.
After a few weeks you notice other, rival Bubbles have sprung up which you did not know about. You see that the people entering these Bubbles do not enter your former company’s Bubble. Far from encouraging societal discourse, you realize people have been splintered into non-communicating Bubbles built, not on ideology but on the corporate interests of those launching the bubbles. Still, you try one, thinking it might offer something a bit less manipulated than the first Bubble. It does, in a limited way, but none of the people you want to talk to are here. The Bubble itself is confusing. Soon, lacking patronage, this alternate Bubble shuts down.
You go back to the Bubble nearest you operated by the original Bubble company (OBC?). When you approach the door, the attendant gets ready to admit you but you say, “No, I want you to erase me from your lists. I want you to make it so I will never enter a Bubble of yours again. I want you to delete all of the information you’ve gathered about me. I frankly never want to enter a Bubble of yours again.” The attendant huffs and makes you sign some forms where you acknowledge you will lose all of the conversations you’ve ever had in the Bubble–to which you inwardly say, “oh thank God”–and then it’s done.
You walk away with a bounce in your step, knowing you will have True and Real conversations for the rest of your life.
yes, I posted this once before…but it was just a year ago, and this month got me thinking, and…
all the voices in my head 