Man Out Of Time

Sunday might be a little late to offer commentary on events from Tuesday, especially in this age of information as news cycles shorten and shorten and shorten until now, when I would say on average the life of a slate of news stories is commonly about 40 seconds less than the actual time it takes to report them. That means after a news anchor says the words "Britney Spears..." the average American viewer has changed over to WWE Monday Night RAW! before the anchor can say "...court date pending."

The other side is that, personally, though information churns and swirls like sewage in the surf (miss you, Bolsa Chica State Beach!), we have the digital options now to take it exactly at the speed we choose. This is necessary because we can't actually process the amount of raw data presented in real time (Extra is on at the EXACT SAME TIME as Access Hollywood). To solve this temporal conundrum, we have digital video recorders, video on demand and the persistent, indefatigable content storm that is the internet.

So yes, I "missed" the inauguration Tuesday in the traditional sense. Being an employed person, 9 am on a weekday is kind of non-negotiable if after Election Day and the momentous Jackie Chan appearance on Regis and Kelly, you're all out of dead grandmother excuses.

I can tell you, however, that in the cubicle farm I found myself planted in, there was very little happening in terms of productivity. So many people were watching it online, I think it no longer qualified as "streaming." I think it as inching more toward "tsunaming." The loss of life in the IT department was catastrophic. Even by IT standards.

Apparently I tried to jump into the current late, because I couldn't get a reliable stream. Besides that, I knew I had the DVR humming at home, so I was only half-hearted in my attempts to watch the inauguration live. The momentous echo of fifty people all around me listening to the same thing at the same time had an inescapable panaudicon quality to it. I was the guy trying not to find out the score of the game before he got home to watch it, while sitting in a sports bar surrounded by fifty monitors, all showing the same thing.

I did my best to preserve the sense of real-time involvement I wanted when I got home, but it just wasn't the same. I wanted the same kind of awestruck shaky-hands wonderment I had on election night as the elegant Two-by-Four of History blasted me, unawares, across the back of my skull. But I kind of knew the points before they hit: Cheney in his Rascal scooter wheeled out to random boos, John Roberts and President Changey McHope conspiring to fuck up the oath, scary speech about the collapse of our economy and way of life and the impending annihilation of our enemies, that Lowery guy with the Cab Calloway rhyming... I knew it was all coming.

Because of digital technology, I was there before, I was there during, and I was there--still there--eight, nine, ten hours later. I was astonished by the speed at which a Happening became a Happened. Unlike election night, there were no tears, no jaw agape, no slow-blinking incredulous absorption of something unabsorbable.

Maybe it was the technology shift, giving me the chance to see it happen live-on-tape after the colors had already been filled in. Maybe it was the nature of the event, more scripted, the outcome predetermined, unlike election day that made the difference.

I'm not sure. All I know is I had to delete it almost immediately so I could fill the DVR with the rest of the episodes of another House marathon USA Network. Presidents come and go, but man, that is still one cranky junkie doctor.