We Are the Desparate in the Decline, Raised by the Bastards of 1969

The events in Iran over the last week or so have been so overwhelming, so momentous, so emotionally and politically charged that I wanted to wait until I had enough time to gather my impressions for a thoughtful, coherent, meaningful post equal to the scale of the thing, compressed and processed with my usual grace and élan, fusing together just the right chemical ratio of studied longview perspective and dick jokes.

But look, now it's Monday, eight days since my last blogpost and, I am... something... embarrassed?... confused?... relieved?... to tell you that, in a content sense, I got nothing.

Now granted, this has never stopped me before. Back when I was writing every day, vomiting copy endlessly with little or no (please choose all that apply) information/insight/basic understanding of the topic was something of a leitmotif. The great joy of it was that nobody--and I mean nobody--was fooled by the bluster and nonsense. The bluster and nonsense, well, they were kind of the point. It was a joke we shared, but one that could never be as funny or as absurd as the idea of me opining in even the vaguest way about, say, economics.

The difference is that then at least I could patch the vast, craterous potholes of my lack knowledge with the kicked-together slurry of popular culture and whatever I read in the newspaper that morning.

But that was when I was still plying my trade in the World's Oldest Profession. People think that means prostitution, but it just so happens that for a prostitute's clients to get out of the house, someone had to be home watching the kids.

Part of a housewife's basic human rights (and you can go ahead and check with Amnesty International, it's all there) include morning talk shows, naptime, websites about award show fashion and generating lists of reasons why people who have jobs are spiritually, emotionally and intellectually poorer than you. This is necessary because, with that second income, they are kicking your ass economically. So we gotta have something.

For some of us, this superiority had to do with the basic ability to be informed. Newspapers could be read. Magazines could be parsed, cover to shiny cover. Whole gaggly lists of websites could be consumed, buffet-style, until we could compile a swirling pile of readily accessible superficial knowledge of everyone from Paris Hilton to Aung San Suu Kyi.

The Right Side, of course, is always the side we happen to be standing on. So I got a job and, embarrassingly quickly, became one of the Oh-work-and-the-kids-and-soccer-games-where-will-I-find-the-time people. I was, naturally, disgusted with the indolence and sloth of my old Housewife Life and adjusted in the shortest possible space of measurable time into the noisy, put-upon martyrdom of the Harried Uninformed.

Now, it hasn't all gone to hell. In some ways I am a better person. I do still read SOME things. For instance, I can use the word "Orwellian" without being a total fraud as I have now at least read Animal Farm. It's still cheating because, guessing from the broad strokes of the story I have not read, people generally mean 1984 when they talk about Orwell with the Big Brother and the doublespeak or whatnot. But that one looked a little longish for the flight to the Great Lakes region. Plus the other one: talking piggies!

To give you a clear example of the dichotomy, when I was staying home, I could read every day. When I started my job, I was about half way through Plato's Republic. Now the odds of finishing that before I die are right up there with appearing on Solid Gold and oil wrestling the Swedish Bikini Team. I set a lot of these goals in the '80s.

I tried to read Catch 22 but that book just seems so... old. I'm not usually one of Those People who think anything created before my own birth is beneath my interest. I read Don Quixote and that seemed like it was written yesterday. But that might not be fair as my fluency in medieval Spanish may be coloring my comparison.

Now I cut the newspaper back to three days a week (that "death of American newspaper" thing you've been hearing about? Yeah, my bad) and even those usually go to recycling still in the wrap. The Newsweek still comes, but I get to the part with the political cartoons and the little quote blurbs before I kind of run out of steam. It's not that the redesign suXXorz (which it do, for real), it's just holy crap, all those w o r d s. If Fareed Zakaria would quit figuring everything out and solving ALL the world's problems EVERY issue, they could get back to stuff I have more patience/time for, like picture essays about starving African children and one-page shots about how much George W. Bush sucks/sucked.

I wish I could tell you that my energy was eaten up by the novel I'm writing or the monograph I'm compiling, but sadly, what little of it I have has been bled out into space as heat loss in the form of Flight of the Conchords or Fallout 3 or Civilization IV or whatever else bit of distraction has my eye at any moment.

So that's why this is so long. And that's why these are so rare. And that's why I am somewhat troubled. I am a 35-year-old man now, eternally grateful and still genuinely surprised by the readership I have cultivated in this forum, but well past the age of prodigy. Any career of consequence that starts now would be predictably well-earned and unstartlingly non-meteoric. I'm talking about best-case scenario agreeable reviews and the respect of my peers. Those type of dudes almost never get groupies.

But those are academic points as I'm making no strides in those directions either. I am, like many of you, the World's Greatest Expert in whatever it is I happen to be required to do every single day at my big-boy job; a tautological skill only really marketable in the thing I'm already being paid to do.

With finite intellectual space to fill, that leaves little room for things that are interesting or enlightening or inspired by anything other than the drive to not get fired and subjected to the flesh-stripping sirocco winds of the Obamaconomy.

So this Iran thing, then... yeah, it seems bad.