The ultimate buzzkill

I think I will skip over the entire Spitzer scandal (since you can get your fill of that just about anywhere today) except to say that no matter what some people want to tell you, irony is never out of fashion. And I will also say I have an inverse proportion of not-sadness for him offset with sadness for this 22 year old girl who will now always be known as a high-priced call girl. Drudge today has a link to her MySpace page, which presents her as a singer, and thesmokinggun.com has a passel of photos, and it all adds up to a story that probably plays out thousands of times a year all over the world - pretty young thing wants to be a star, tries to make it in the big city, doesn't have the talent or doesn't want to pay the dues, and ends up selling her body. It's really all too sad and tawdry.

So instead, let's talk about the end of the world as we know it.

I have been immersed in the end of the world in the last week. During a spectacularly enjoyable 3-day vacation, I read The Road, Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer-winning novel - watched I am Legend in the hotel room - and then caught up on some DVRed episodes of Jericho, my "nighttime soap" style guilty pleasure. Kind of an odd pileup of depressing fare for a week when everything's blooming, the baseball season's starting, and I have seventy-eleven reasons to be cheerful.

As post-apocalyptic fiction goes, The Road is two things most efforts are not - tremendously well-written and touching, and tremendously bleak. Most of these stories give you something to rally around, with a core sentiment that there's no plague, asteroid, nuclear bomb or space goblin that can wipe out good ol' humankind. We will always rise above it, will always make a comeback. The Road is different. The redemption is of a different kind. I'd read it if I were you (but maybe take an extra Xanax.)

Why do we dwell on these kinds of stories anyway? It's not a new thing - Mary Shelley is credited with writing the first modern story in this genre in 1826, and if you count the Book of Revelation, I guess we've been entertaining ourselves with this dismal prospect for a few thousand years. Lots of modern versions show our love-hate relationship with technology - the robots, or the computers, or the weapons, or the microbes, will be our downfall - but it hasn't always been that way. Maybe there' s something larger to it, like basic species self-loathing? Like we're not suffering enough? Like we don't deserve all we've got and ought to be wiped out?

I think I have depressed myself now. Does anyone have a puppy I can play with for awhile...?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How I have neglected my blog and the sadness that results

So jeez, I am feeling a little contrite because I have neglected this blog. Feeling a little like I have let an old friend fall by the wayside while I have been spending all my time with someone new.I even got needled by one of my (few) readers today - "Wow, no blog post since April 2!"  Feeling a little frivolous and superficial because my good old reliable Blogger blog here has fallen victim to my other time sucks - namely, Facebook, and of course, what I like to call "real life." Maintaining a blog is no simple task, my friend. Just mouse up there to the top of the screen, left of center, and start clicking on "Next blog." You will soon soon discover there are lots and lots people who start a blog, make two or three posts, and discover it's kind of demanding. (You'll also discover that about two-thirds of all the random blogs you'll see in the "next blog" mode are in Spanish, which I find strangely fascinating. ) Maybe those whose ...
Read more

"Mikey Angels" flies off in both directions at once

Image
The expression we've all heard is "you can't be too rich or too thin." I suppose that gets said a lot around the tennis court at the country club, the changing room at Sak's? I suppose it draws a wry smile every time. Or is it really said in the aisles at Target by people who are at no risk of being too much of either? The expression we've never heard is "you can't be too smart," because we all know it is possible to be too smart. Kind of ironic since we spend a lot of energy trying to force kids to be smart. We pound them with homework, make them take tests, tell them the kids in Mumbai are going to take your future job. We try to get them into the best schools, the ones for the smart people, but they are always at risk of becoming "too smart for their own good." Based on what I've heard about last weekend's Presidential candidate activity, Obama is running the risk of being too smart for his own good. He and McCain did these l...
Read more

Burgers with daddy

Image
Sometimes on Sundays I am transported to a place that was called Gene and Darlene's. (OK, that sounded kind of Shirley MacLaine. I am not talking about out of body experiences here. It's a memory, ok?) Gene and Darlene's was a bar down on Shoal Creek south of Joplin. The building still stands (photo proof here, taken August 2008.) No telling how many other names the place has had since it was Gene and Darlene's, but that's the name it has in my mind. On Sundays sometimes, when I was a kid, daddy would come up with the notion that burgers from Gene and Darlene's would really hit the spot. Being always in favor of food in general, and carry-out food being really exotic to me, the idea was always a winner in my opinion. I would be eager to climb into the car with daddy and ride along. It was a short trip down to Redings Mill, around the infamous curve that topped a bluff over the creek, where all kinds of carloads of people had suffered hideous deaths in spectacula...
Read more