Long-Time Reader, First-Time Blogger

So this is blogging, huh? It's a lot like keeping a journal, only it's launched into cyberspace and lands who knows where! And, frankly, with all the tens of millions of people who think that what they have to say is worth sharing with the rest of us, I can't really imagine that too many of you will ever come across my random rants and miscellaneous musings. However, in the pioneering spirit of our ancestors, I accept this daunting challenge and hereby declare myself open for the blogging business! Thanks a lot, Leslie, for yet another excuse to waste time online.


It's Sunday, January 10th, 2010. About 4 p.m. in the so-called Heartland. The world is its usual, restless self today and the palpable cold of this merciless midwestern winter is making life difficult for some of us, even those of us sitting indoors at our keyboards. Fortunately, composition is quite easy, as my fingers are still capable of independent thought. I mean, really, none of this ill-begotten prose is being processed by too many neurons! I daresay it's much the same story for the rest of you. Pick a topic, shut down the mind, rattle off a few keystrokes, call it a day. No wonder the world's newspapers are losing revenues. There's so much the rest of us want to spew forth there's no one left to read anything but computer screens these days! What's next, widescreen cereal boxes? Will we have graphic novels in 3D for the Kindle? Will we be hardwired like our cellphones and surrounded by strange floating texts like in Keanu Reeves movies? Will we be able to have 100% safe sex because it's totally virtual? And does the phrase "totally virtual" even make any sense? I'm picturing the decline of civilization (as we've come to think of it) mostly from the lack of any kind of face to face socialization. Everything will come to us as packets of digital information and we won't have to send our children off to school, we won't have to go to a jobsite (because machines can obviously handle all our construction projects and solid waste processing for us), and the only type of stimulus we might need besides a new playstation offering is caffeine. But, seriously--how many of us does it take to change a lightbulb? Or tie shoelaces, or tell time on a clock which only has hands? Once the magazines and newspapers disappear, will the libraries be far behind? Once the hook and loop revolution (aka Velcro) finally puts an end to snaps, buttons and zippers, would it really be so awful to look even more alike than we do already? And who needs to "tell time" anyway? We don't have that many places to get to and even if we did, somebody would probably have gotten there first....Still with me then? Can't think why. Have a nice blog, I'll catch you again in a few millennia--when all the cursors on all the flat-panel monitors in all the gin joints have finally stopped blinking!