The Week in Rock

For someone who would have happily identified themselves as a "news junkie," I've been surprisingly successful over the last four years avoiding the details of pretty much everything. Part of the issue of course is that anything related to the news is either a) painted in terms that are so dire they defy any non-masochists from leaning into too enthusiastically lest you topple over into the inverse dimension where bad news starts to give you endorphinal comfort spoon-fed to you by your tentacled overlord Rupert Murdoch, or b) any actual useful information is now lost in an increasingly complicated informational soup so overloaded with ingredients you could walk across it if you filled a swimming pool with it. I'm trying to find the carrots and the noodles, but you have to pick your way around the navy beans, celery, okra, guanciale, orange peel, coffee grounds, whole loaves of sourdough bread, fistfuls of pennies, newspaper (ironically), unused trash bags, old McDonalds Happy Meal toys, gravel, sunscreen, a moose carcass, Crocs, Croakies, unmixed concrete, one whole JetSki and potatoes. And as bad as it sounds, the whole thing actually tastes like straight fentanyl.

I know a certain percentage of you are going to go "well, with that many unprocessed ingredients, you're technically talking about a stew," to which I said, ha, the joke's on you, technically it's a metaphor, you fucking pedant.

Honestly though just calling yourself (or anyone) a "news junkie" doesn't really mean anything anymore in all that indiscrete, unparsable miasma of goo that passes for stuff to know. All it really does is lets people know you were old enough to be an adult in the 1990s, when people still said shit like that.

Maintaining the integrity of your own mind becomes your own responsibility. Shutting it all out entirely isn't incredibly practical as so much happens on your phone that is necessary for functioning (banking, managing your insurance, tracking your children, meeting new people, sending unsolicited pictures of your penis to the new people you meet within the first 5-to-7 messages, etc.) that you can't miss the rest of it entirely. It becomes a question about cultivation and curation, developing a kind of tunnel vision that lets the unwanted infotainment ping off as harmlessly as possible while focusing on the things you want to know. In my case that mostly means YouTube videos where other people play Dungeons & Dragons. You can judge me if you want, but I'm comfortable putting that in writing alongside anyone else's go-to mind-bunker content. At least I know the only thing harmed by it is my social and sexual desirability.

With all this hiding out, I was shocked to find out that apparently, one week from the day this blog post is published, there's going to be a presidential debate. For the 2024 presidential election. I know! In the interim where I was super busy with other really important stuff, nobody had the good sense to just cancel it, like I'd hoped. Maybe the Republicans make good points: maybe democracy really is too much work.

Debates and conventions (the GOP one is a month? Fucking seriously?!) are normally the signal that I need to start paying attention, but I'm not sure what part of "mind-bunker" above was unclear to you. It doesn't feel particularly healthy or adult to continue turning away from the things that are upsetting, but I don't really see what's to be gained by diving in, even at this stage where the stakes are clear and the board is finally set. Am I ever going to seriously consider voting for any Republican in the way the current party is constituted, especially when all their energies are focused on that specific wad of processed cheese blocking up all of their systems, both voluntary and autonomic? It would be interesting to watch at least if it looked like the down-ticket races would wise and up and tack a different direction knowing that embracing the Trump-MAGA agenda has consistently gotten them trounced in anything like an competitively divided constituency, but no, they just keep running the same bullshit out there, even when it's pretty obvious (to me at least) the abortion issue alone will continue to cost them nationally.

So there aren't any compelling storylines even. Is Biden old? Sure. Older even than he was when he ran last time, it turns out. We're not in a recession, inflation is under control, essentially no unemployment, there's no crime wave, but those have all been the storylines. So what am I even turning away from when I choose not to engage? All the post-debate coverage is pre-determined, if Trump even bothers to show up. It's a knotty weave of incongruous narratives that want nothing more than to never touch one another, like same-poled magnets. In some countries they use those to make really fast trains that run essentially on magic, but here we don't really do infrastructure, we just do weak metaphors to justify our inattention. We've built an entire industry out of that instead of mass transit.

All that said, not engaging doesn't mean not participating. I will of course vote when it counts. And my children will too. Well, two of them will. The youngest for some reason refuses to register, even though this is the first presidential cycle for which he's eligible. It's not like I don't understand the feeling of alienation and cynicism (see: all the things written above this). But there's nothing in the way he's been socialized that compels him to act above the din of dysfunction of the polity. All I can really say I had was Kurt Loder yelling at me in 1992. But maybe that was the beginning of MTV not just playing music videos. Sure, it got us interested in participatory democracy, but at what cost?