TL;DR: Thing Happened

You're probably going to think I'm making this up, but I'm old enough to remember when aspects of a venture like this were actually kind of challenging. Keeping up a regular blog on any kind of schedule--and I started out doing it pretty much daily way back in 2004, just before the inevitable start of the first John Kerry administration--was a series of mountains to climb all named Content, laid out in dead-straight line. And you have to choose every day/week/month/whenever your medication kicks in to walk that stupid straight line, peak-valley-peak-valley-peak-valley in a sine wave resonating with the frequency of Whatever Happens To Be Going On, when the obvious and best answer in every circumstance would have been to Just Not. Go around. Walk a different way. Where's the audience waiting for one more random person's take on politics, sports, news, culture, food, health or entertainment? And long form? It's 2024, I think 140 characters pretty much counts as "long form" anymore.

Normally, the grind of it wears you down. You get desperate, lazy, sloppy. If you're not vigilant, you start mixing metaphors like topography and signal oscillation as though it makes sense.

But that's how things used to be. The made-up Chinese curse of living in interesting times has not just arrived, but has embedded itself in our skin, like a literally-proverbial tick. How many more days of momentous things has to happen before we get a break? I have friends who believe in things like the power of the jinx. Everything sort of feels like a civilization-wide expression of bad juju from the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11 when foolish, reckless mortals everywhere went around saying things where anyone and anything could hear like "we're living at the end of history" and "nothing really seems to happen anymore" and "both of these political parties are pretty much the same."

Now look at us. Battered. Exhausted. Suspicious of each other. Chastened? Humbled? Nah, neither of those really. I think most of us still pretty much think we've got it figured out. In this most complicated of times, we're ironically more inclined to reach for simple explanations, and in this case we've primarily landed on "it's all the other team's fault." Who the other team is shifts slightly issue by issue, but this is the world wrought primarily by Facebook and its drive to ultimately make the world exactly as it used to be before the internet (a culture driven primarily by the power of advertising), except a lot more miserable for the people experiencing it day-to-day.

That's the takeaway, though: the good times only last a really brief period. Everything else is strife. In retrospect, a stretch as long as 1989 to 2001 seems like a pretty good run. The fact that that coincides pretty well with the period between the promulgation of the world wide web and the invention of Facebook (1991 to 2004) is probably not a coincidence. The internet was once all promise and an infinite potential expansion of human discovery and social organization, but then George W. Bush gave it to the Boomers and now here we are, somehow, in 1952 again. It's Joe McCarthy and the Geritol Television Theater Presented By Lucky Strike Cigarettes. We're actually living in the Good Old Days, god help us.

In this extended post-peace period, the undulation of Content isn't a rolling prospect in front of you, it's a cresting wave bearing the weight of the whole earth RIGHT BEHIND YOU, all the fucking time.

This week? The actual sitting president opted out of re-election in July of an election year after having won all the primaries, that happened. It felt both inevitable and shocking in the moment, I can say. There's a groundswell of support for the transition to Kamala Harris as the nominee, which I also felt once the sadness gave way to some relief. In the wider political horserace culture, I'm sure that will change and there will be ebbs and flows. She's a decent but not great natural campaigner, but now there's only one dotardly old white man in the race, so she looks like the second coming of Bobby Kennedy by comparison, which isn't great news for the actual second Bobby Kennedy who continues to run a cancelled-in-all-measurable ways campaign in the name of everyone getting measles.

So this shit kinda writes itself. I mean, look, only one paragraph directly above this one even addressed the actual historically unprecedented events of the week. The rest was just how I felt about stuff. Content is happening whether we want it or not. Pioneering my way through blogposts used to feel very different; a lot less Tenzing Norgay anymore, a lot more foie gras goose.