I suppose to live vicariously is better than having never lived at all. In a world that favors the haves over the have-nots, the need to be witness to something “real” fills in for the instinct to participate. One needn’t hunt and kill their next meal; to kill an enemy is only allowed when sanctioned by the state, justice is not administered by the crowd but by the court, we mustn’t build our own home, and there’s no certainty a spouse will be found.

So, we passively watch the life we are not living. We watch the superman take out a gang single-handedly, the underdog is portrayed as overcoming adversity to win the day, and against the odds, the hero gets the girl. Compliment the fantasy on the big screen by encouraging the citizens to take things into their own hands while practicing fighting, driving, collecting treasure, and maneuvering through impossible scenarios so they might win and be heroes themselves. If you love fishing, there’s a tv show for that, hunting big game, a show for that too. Do you suffer from depression, witness someone else’s that’s worse than your own, and maybe you find solace that your life might not be all that bad?

Don’t like where you live? Maybe a war somewhere else will convince you that your existence is pretty good. After all, we can’t all go to the lake, mountain trail, Disneyland, Central Park, Paris, or scuba diving off Key West. But then again, we can’t let the natives become restless because we have no real idea where the boiling-over point of humanity lies. What pacifies the horde so the wealthy are allowed to enjoy the spoils of their war against those in poverty? If only the impoverished could easily be placated to accept their station in life. Just where can the balance be found between self-incarceration and minimal amounts of participation?

I’m going off-track as I came to this page after having watched a couple of dozen clips from Jack Reacher, John Wick, and The Equalizer. Obviously, I’m broken as I want to fail to understand the appeal, or maybe I don’t have a choice but to fail, as the idea of a solo Johnny Badass cleaning house to show the bad guy what it is to suffer for violating the honor of men. This primitive idea that a man’s rage, when employed for the greater honor, will propel our abilities to overcome evil; give me a break. At best, this is pandering to man’s primitive lizard brain; at worst, it drives home the ambiguities of having un-intentional, near, purposeless lives in the age of meaningless social media.

When knowledge exists in the forbidden vacuum occupied by the despised, those intellectuals, nerds, coders, scientists, engineers, professors, creators, and rarely controllers, these are then the class of people able to give context to their experiences which might take them into the corners of the Arctic, the Balkans, glaciated mountain trekking, Amazon river adventures, visits to museums, operas, and other places of sophisticated immersions. On the other hand, the vast void of ignorance holds appeal to those who needn’t lend meaning beyond the visceral, and yet, they travel with resentment that others might take more from their position of privilege while the masses feign indifference or discontent.

This then begs the question for me: where is the messaging about the importance of vast knowledge beyond the absolutely superficial surrounding manufactured drama that accompanies professional sports, television series, the antics of celebrity-based governance, vapid personalities that hawk indulgence, and finding completeness through consumption?

I can easily understand that I sound like the idiot thinking liberation from the yoke of banality can be found in intellectualism, but that would be a misunderstanding as what I mean to insinuate is that authenticity and curiosity are the missing elements that pull us forward in ways that are healthy for society.

Today, I’m asking, “Where is a place?” because a place that was once one thing has changed to become something else. There’s the fast and easy answer that says nothing has changed other than the observer, but that’s only part of the story. A crass example might be found in two plots of land found in Oświęcim and another in nearby Brzezinka, both found in Poland. Back during World War I, a migrant worker camp was built in Oświęcim. After that war, Polish soldiers took over the facility. Prior to this, I’d imagine the area was farmland, but I cannot find definitive information to confirm that. Regarding the other location, meaning Brzezinka, it apparently was wide open just before development activities got underway.

Starting in 1940, the army barracks and, subsequently, the large plot of nearby land were being repurposed. Up to this point in history, these places were of no significance at all, but that changed as Oświęcim, infamously known as Auschwitz, and Brzezinka, better known as Birkenau, became two of the most notorious concentration camps. During their years of being operated as extermination camps, approximately 1.1 million people lost their lives there. Following World War II, the camps became memorials.

As memorials, these sites have become solemn grounds that remind humanity of the atrocities people are able to commit against one another. My point is that places start out as ordinary, yet if extraordinary events transpire, they can end up inscribed in cultural memories with significance that transcends the easily forgettable.

I know that this is a heavy-handed example where readers might say that nothing should be compared to such things and that I risk sliding towards the sacrilegious, but in my opinion, places hold memories, and while it is our collective knowledge that imbues a place with such notable attributes, they do exist.

Well, this was a long-winded (I’m well known for such things) way of getting to the main gist of my post, “Where is a place?” I’m currently at a place where I find the memory of what it was to have greater meaning to me than what I perceive the location to have now. I do understand that my own trajectory is constantly moving, but I am not the change I register as I sit here writing, observing, and contemplating. The differences are arriving with others who have started considering this place as one they could consider frequenting. The place is being repurposed.

Similarly, America as a place and an idea are mutable with a plasticity that, while still pliable, could at any time calcify and appear destined to collapse due to a rigidity that steals its flexibility. Back to my ugly references to concentration camps and the prisoners whose lives ended in Oświęcim, Brzezinka, or Treblinka, those who arrived in the four-year period of mass extermination saw their limited time in a camp as the horizon looking at the end of their existence. A killing system had an infinite grasp and could never change in the eyes of those destined to die there. Similarly, in pre-Soviet czarist Russia, an empire ruled for nearly 400 years before Lenin and Stalin brought the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to be a force of control for almost 70 years before calcification crumbled its bones and wrought change. All systems appear to fail when change is lost to sclerotic stagnation.

Change is the operative word here today. Places change, and we change, but if we fail to transform ourselves and places do not change, we begin to normalize a docility that demands things stay the way they always were. The brilliance of America since its founding has been this endless metamorphosis that allowed us to adapt to the needs of the day, but today, we are seeing a pandering to base natures where those who abhor change want to pass on stability to strong men who offer promises of today being similar to the day, week, month, and years before when a place and your sense in it was known and familiar. This line of thinking negates ideas of change and, if not rooted out, risks dragging people into the inevitable convulsion that must catapult stagnation out of the doldrums.

The effort to break free of the crippling gravity found in the total loss of movement is akin to the rocket lifting a multi-ton payload into the heavens; all hell must break loose. The violence of the sort that tears apart what it is leaving behind is the revolution that upends those who brought malaise and are about to be murdered before their very eyes. War is then the inevitable outcome that must arrive to wash away the fear of change. Are we headed into that war?

I hope we are not moving towards conflagration as I surely do love the place I inhabit in my life at this time and feel loathe to change that, though I do enjoy my inner conflict that remains in a near-constant state of battle.

Our motto for the next decade could read, “Fighting an internal war against complacency for personal freedom.”

People who have all the answers are profoundly compatible with others as long as those others are looking to do exactly as these hypocrites proscribe. Some years ago, I bought 38db sound-blocking earplugs because I couldn’t stomach listening to a majority of the conversations I tune into when I’m out in public. Yep, I’m that intolerant of self-righteous, bloviating idiots, not in recognition of their disconnect with current situations. Sorry to those of you who believe that any other time in history (meaning during your lifetime when you were younger) was a golden age of perfection. No time has ever been more perfect than the current moments when we recognize we have woken to experience yet another day. If we are adaptive and flexible to meet the circumstances of that day, well, that is another question.

I recognize that I’m not an expert on anything at all, not what I might want tomorrow, what I could like next week, or even if the little I think I know will still be true after my next conversation. The only certainty I have at all is that I should try to remain positive and open to allowing my curiosity to guide me into tolerance.

Do you know where this is going by now? That’s right, I all too often have to listen in on old fucking boomers sanctimoniously going on about the problems of the world caused by young people, social media, Biden, inflation, technology, Jeff Bezos, some asshole they encountered just an hour ago, immigrants, the Chinese, Muslims, and the host of other worn and tired subjects the boomers and those like-minded turds excrete on a daily basis in my presence. Yeah, I know; just stay home, John, and stop putting yourself in their path. And I’ll be the first to admit that one of the luxuries I’m able to indulge in from time to time is being somewhere I don’t speak the language so I can avoid the “polite” inanities of an aging or stupid populace.

Look, I don’t really care about age or education, but if you fall into intolerance or poor education, stop claiming you have all the answers and insight you don’t know shit at all about. Say after me, “I know very little about the complexity of the world, and I’m okay with going about my life to the best of my ability.” Now, if, after reading this hyperbolic diatribe of anger, you might be inclined to think that I’m exactly the person I claim to abhor, you’d be wrong. I don’t watch TV, so I don’t have to filter the incredibly vulgar stupidity from the few grains of valuable entertainment that might be there. However, I can’t turn people off from putting on a public display of how profoundly disconnected from reality they are (in my opinion). You nor I have answers for much anything at all aside from what we should have for dinner tonight or where we should vacation.

The arrogance of our age is hampering our recognition of just how collectively dumb we are. Finishing school, be it high school or university, hasn’t granted us enlightenment status, nor should “finishing” mean we abdicate our responsibility to a lifelong process of learning.

Here I am at 59 years old, and I still want to try what I’ve not tried yet: visit museums and gardens to gaze upon beauty and go to faraway places with the hope of discovering something that is usually a gap or bias within myself. I want to dance to Korean pop-folk from Leenalchi and feel melancholy listening to trans artist Ethel Cain sing about god and guys. If a 20-year-old young student can broaden my horizon with their perspective, maybe they are giving me insight into how others will be seeing the world tomorrow. I should listen and not try to convince them they are wrong.

I want to exit this life in love with all that I was able to smile and laugh about. Scowls and dismissive condescension don’t mean shit and certainly won’t make for happy.

Luxury, as we understand it, is all around us, and we can certainly afford our share of travel, but the writing appears to be on the wall that all is not well in America.

We have scheduled a trip north into Utah for the end of May, but I was considering changing that so we could hit New York City once this year and finally find our way into the Metropolitan Museum of Art; we’ve never been. A roundtrip flight non-stop flight from Phoenix to Newark, New Jersey, is coming in at $1000 for the two of us. Hotel rates are cheaper than we’ve seen before but in Manhattan, that is still $1000 for three nights. Add $100 for two days of museum admissions, $500 for restaurants, the cost of Uber to and from airports, and some incidental costs, and we’ll be at $3,000 for three days in NYC.

So I priced out driving to New York, which would require three days there and three days back. The cost of the rental car would be about $550 and gas $800 plus the extra six nights of motels/hotels along the way, adding no less than another $500, not including meals. It adds up to be more expensive than flying.

What if we spread the costs out over a longer time frame, say we make a month of it and see America by car with NYC being a small part of a greater whole? I’ll spare you the details, but that would cost a minimum of $7,000, upwards of $10,000 if I’m realistic.

Running into these brick walls, I opt to look at a return to the Monterey, California, area for a visit back at an old favorite, the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Prices for lodging were good last year; oh, those were pandemic prices, which are now no less than doubled and, in some instances, tripled.

Phoenix, Arizona, to Frankfurt, Germany, and back would cost $796 each, with a train ticket to Paris, France, costing $51 or $102 roundtrip. I found a great rental apartment on Champs-Élysées for five days costing $650. So, ten days between Frankfurt visiting family and Paris goofing off would end up costing maybe a couple of hundred dollars more than three days in New York City. Something is broken.

All surface, no soul. A fluidity of style pulls masses of the American public into fashion compliance while intellectual activity is passed off as something others do. Education is a technical hurdle on the way to some relatively mindless jobs. When this vacuous gaping maw of American patheticism dropped in to become our standard-bearer is unknown; maybe it’s always been this way. Maybe we are simply normalizing the appearance of our underclass of stupidity by bringing everyone onto the public stage.

No longer is it necessary to have knowledge of reality, politics, the economy, the rest of the world, science, facts, or what true compassion is. Be angry, look cool, be confident in your pajamas, signal to others your narrow social identity, talk about what’s important today in the world of superfluous entertainment/sports/media/hostility because nothing is important aside from a new tattoo, the cool logo on your t-shirt or hat. Plug your earbuds in, and get Door Dash to fetch your coffee, burgers, and spring rolls because this life is all about you and the indulgence you’ve been afforded by being the owner of a gun, cock, twat, big truck, the trendiest bottle of craft gin, or some free-range, organic bullshit that fits your amorphous identity that depends on what brands and issues you’ve been spoonfed lately.

I don’t want to admit defeat, but when I’m among the idle masses, the sound of my grump seems to scream at me to just do that, admit total bitter defeat. Of course, this ugly sensitivity is likely connected to my personalizing of the events of our world and how I want to lay blame upon all those who are never going to give a shit deeply and long enough to help change anything of any meaning. They find salvation in the love of their local sports franchises, their personal relationship to Jesus, their need to fuck and be fucked, to dote on a pet, or ruin another human being in their attempt to raise a child. We are a society of nothing but surface; our souls are long gone.

Then, the media has the audacity to suggest that virtual reality, namely Facebook’s Meta VR project, as noted in the recent article “The metaverse will steal your identity” by David Auerbach, for example, will transform people into “mindless conformity.” Oh really, where does he think people are right now? I look around me, far and wide, and that’s all I see. At least with virtual reality, maybe there’s a chance we can turn away from the public posturing where appearance and behavior attempt to intimate a level of sophistication that is not backed up by intellectual relevance. You may look hip, trendy, or wealthy, but with a 5th-grader mentality, all the bling, muscles, beanies, and accouterments of your vapid state of being will never camouflage the operating system of deep stupidity.