There’s nothing like binge-watching an hour of Joey B. Toonz to head-kick you into reevaluating what stupid shit you are sharing on social media. While my blog isn’t promoted on social media per se, it is my version of social media for my wife and me along with whoever might accidentally stumble across some post here. So I scrolled down to find out how guilty I might be of posting narcissistic bullshit: GUILTY! Who cares how much dish soap we use or that we are cleaning out hoarded stuff and believe we are doing something altruistic by giving some of it to Goodwill? Guilty. Meanwhile, I’ve been doing some backfill entries that don’t appear in the current scroll meaning, based on old photos I scanned, I’m putting together some dusty old memories, embellished with the fog of time, about my escapades in the red light district of Frankfurt. Here I go again, bragging about a period of nearly 1000 days in which I would have gladly exchanged my parents for 20 minutes with some prostitute, and towards the end of my sojourn in carnal depravity, I was looking for a Thai Surprise, butch Italian woman with beefy dildos, or that woman whose boobs had to weigh in at 40lbs each (she was big and smelled funny, but that didn’t stop me).

Makes me consider that, at one time, my life was real or a different shade of grotesque. Have I really been reduced to filling the pages between travel photos with how much toothpaste I’ve used in my lifetime? Sure, I tell myself that this is all for some future anthropological study 200 or 300 years from now when people will want to study our current time more in-depth, and I’m supplying an aspect of that, but maybe I’m just providing more ammunition for others to reel in the pain of how profoundly stupid we all were. Even those of us who thought they had a clue. Then I think about the masses from 200 years ago or 2000 years ago, and I’m afraid that they were also as dumb as a box of rocks, and I’m simply carrying on the tradition. If it weren’t for my oversized ego still believing that I have something to share and it might yet turn out to be relevant, I’d have to stop this nonsense and realize that these missives into the ether are going right where they belong, into nothingness.

After reading this to my wife, she consoles me that at least I don’t include mukbang sounds in my blog entries about dishwashing, tooth brushing, or eating a whore’s ass.

Do you think free speech is what you find or deserve on Facebook? Are you outraged when Zuck censors you, thus stepping on your 1st Amendment rights? Well, please let me help inform you that there is NO social media site that owes you a place to share ideas, NOT A SINGLE ONE! Twitter, Instagram, Discord, Facebook, TikTok, or even Parler are companies, not government-sponsored platforms financed by taxpayer money, for the benefit of the people to vent whatever crazy idea they happen to be espousing.

Never in the history of the United States did a radio or TV station have to provide broadcast time for an individual to share their thoughts. No publisher of books, magazines, or newspapers has ever been obliged to print the opinions of someone. These businesses operate under the capitalist idea of needing to make money, end of story. Even public broadcasters like PBS and NPR operate under charters that demand they only distribute content that is in the best interest of the community and extends culture; they are not political platforms for sharing ideologies.

So why do people feel they are entitled to use a for-profit service on the internet to say or share whatever they strongly believe in? I’d guess that, in part, it has to do with them watching stupid cat videos and porn on the internet so that this idea seeps into their head:  if these people can distribute this stuff, why can’t I share what I want? They fail to understand that cat videos draw people in for entertainment, which pushes advertising, which makes a profit for those involved in the behind-the-scenes operations, and the same goes for porn. But somewhere along the lines that delineate a business and a public area such as a park or the front of a government building, individuals come to see social media as an extension of the public domain, and hence, they have the “right” to say what they please. They do not.

This rapidly changing online sphere is evolving at lightning speed, and when the general public fails to understand history, they are blinded by their insatiable desire to have things their way, or so people want to believe when they’ve grown up in America in a system of total freedom. They don’t understand boundaries or evolution. Take books and newspapers, the printing press was invented in 1440, but it took almost 560 years before the average person could print on demand a title they wrote. Television was invented in 1927, but it took more than 70 years before an individual could stream their own content to try to find an audience. The first social media site was created in 1997, but it wasn’t until 2004, when Facebook launched, that the social media craze began in earnest. We are now in the age of growing pains.

The first books did not have photos because it took almost four more centuries until photos were invented; color printing first happened about 100 years ago. Color television wouldn’t start broadcasting until 26 years after the TV was invented, and now people watch 4k images on 86-inch flat screens and take for granted that it’s always been this way. The internet is going to go through the exact same transformations, and the reality is that someone else’s company, no matter how large, is not your personal platform to say and show what you please. The platform you feel you deserve is up to you to create, pay for, maintain, and deal with any legal ramifications that it might run afoul of.

At the root of people’s desire to put themselves on a platform is a history of the individual being on the sidelines, existing in the realm of the anonymous. Then in the past 15 years, humanity has been witness to every type of character finding riches by some act or other that catapults them onto the public stage. The person watching this feels that they have something valuable to offer as well and start looking for their voice. Controversy seems like an easy stepping stone, and so the messenger races down the rabbit hole, hunting for topics that have the ability to incite others. Raising eyebrows is a profitable business, and everyone wants their fair share, their moment in the spotlight, so they too can be important.

Cultivating something worth sharing other than a constant outpouring of rage requires one to hone the ability to craft something. While some would argue that manufactured outrage is valuable to our discourse, since when has bludgeoning an enemy ever brought those persons to a new way of thinking or living? If you are on the edge of the spectrum where the mainstream resides, you might try art, indie film, philosophy, or wrap your message in music to find like-minded souls, but believing your anger deserves the highest platform is delusional at best. But what of recent politics, John? Populism is typically (and hopefully) a short-lived movement that doesn’t inflict too much damage on the masses, but it can be undeniably profitable to exploit that part of the population that typically exists without a voice. If we are lucky, populist movements disappear, allowing the march of science, logic, and reason to move forward.

After I embarked on my newest chore, Caroline sent me an article about Hyperfocus ADHD. She knows me well and knew that after I started on this bit of work, I wouldn’t come up for air for a while. So, what exactly am I doing? I’m running 2,568 blog entries through Grammarly to verify that things are okay among the 1.3 million words I’ve written over the past years.

This all started because of a prior Herculian task which involved putting together a page featuring a single photo from every day we traveled since the advent of the digital camera. At the 501st post, I grew weary and took a pause, which lasted months. This is tied in with today’s entry because it was something related to the photos I posted for a particular entry and a seemingly lost image I thought I included on the page titled Travels In The Digital Age. As I got to that post, I saw errors in the grammar and felt I needed to correct them. That took on a life of its own, and now I’ve finished validating the grammar of 940 blog posts and have 1,628 to go.

Obsessively, my hyperfocus drills deep into my sense of “I must finish this as soon as possible” so I can focus on something else. Two something elses are in line to take over my hyperfocus. The first is I have to expand the photos included with early blog posts as those often only include a single photo to represent an entire day of travel; this was due to bandwidth limitations on the internet back before 2015. I needed to be conservative with how many images I shared; now, I’d like to rectify those omissions.

I’m estimating I’ll be done with this aspect of quality control in about ten days, at which time I can turn to determine the exact blog entries I need to flag for adding more images and consider what I might be able to say about them so many years after the fact. In the past, when I’ve written to images where there were no notes to help in the exposition of what transpired, I’ve given a warning at the front of the entry that what I’m sharing is wrung from memories that might be over 15 years old. So it goes.

Now we get to the ultimate reason for this diligence: this blog will someday disappear. When it does, I would like to know that my favorite writings will continue on into the future and the best way I’ve identified for that to happen is in print. To get to the point I can take much of this into book form I really need the grammar and images I want to include to be the most representative of our time.

But John, why do you think there should be any interest in these missives 100 years from now? Two people ventured deep into the breadth of America, recording their adventures for decades. With over 250,000 digital photos taken during those years and hundreds of thousands of words that accompany the images, I tend to believe that few others armed with a camera and notebooks captured so much detail while exploring America and occasionally Europe. I’d posit that we are the first to extensively chronicle our travels and life in America in the history of the country as what are the odds of another couple traveling for the past 22 years armed with digital cameras on over 200 travels and countless experiences?

With that knowledge and knowing that the bits and bytes that comprise this endeavor are temporary in nature, I feel it’s imperative to push this history into the permanent record. So, on I go with running Grammarly over this labor of love before focusing on prepping photos to fill some gaps and then identifying which entries should be preserved. Once all of that is finished, I can go to work on preparing the images for print, which have different requirements than what I’ve done to share them electronically.

Now, back to the endless repairs.

Update April 13th: I’m up to about 300 posts a day, with only 970 awaiting repair.

I recently wrote about the Origins Project that was operating through Arizona State University for a number of years and which, in many ways, came to an end by 2017. This got Caroline and me talking about how many great lectures we had attended, and then it all stopped, just as the music stopped once the COVID-19 pandemic shut things down. The difference, though, is there wasn’t a pandemic per se but a catapult of rationality that happened to coincide with the program going quiet. But why?

It was time to legitimize that segment of the population that had been feeling excluded and fearful of becoming irrelevant. As society progresses during this age, there is an increasing requirement for a wide swath of our population to wrestle with complexity. Due to limited resources of deep intellect to explore difficult problems, humanity must pull from all corners of culture to find the talent that can rise to the daunting challenges we are facing. In these ever-shifting sands, it’s inevitable that people will be left behind; this has always been part of the price of progress.

When we attended our first Origins event, it was in 2011, which was also the year that the Google Brain Team was established. Look at any image of that group, and you’ll see a microcosm of what our workforce is inching ever closer to looking like. This was also the same year the Occupy Wall Street movement began, though this might have had its roots in the Tea Party movement that got underway in 2009. Another part of this puzzle is that the smartphone gained serious popularity with the release of the iPhone back in 2007. So, how are these disparate elements playing a role in the catapulting of rationality?

Since the advent of the commercial internet in 1995, and even before that, with the rollout of the personal computer, great stressors were being placed on the way business was evolving and how people were employed and remunerated. Between 2007 and 2011, we left the first stage of the internet behind as it became ubiquitous in everyday life. Out of the ruins of the housing collapse, we saw the demise of the Big Block stores accelerate and a move away from Mom & Pop restaurants. People were simultaneously heading online for shopping while at the same time looking for uniform experiences from those things and places where they were spending money.

The speed of innovation and the changing face of the labor force combined with social media platforms that were spreading information faster than ever were all contributing to more and more people being able to see the place they were living in clearer than ever before. While some of us who grew up in Los Angeles, San Francisco, or New York City in the 70s and 80s saw this cultural shift first hand, the majority of Americans only had only caught glimpses through television. As time went by, these same isolated citizens were starting to wake up to the fact that gay marriage, Indian programmers, and pharmacists, along with predominately Hispanic kitchen labor, were all around them, and they panicked.

By 2017, the momentum behind the Make America Dumb Again and Pride of the Deplorables was in full swing. Behind the movement of silly archaic ideas was an exploitative media blowing dog whistles, convincing this segment of our population that revolt was the best way forward. This culminated with a near-full-on attack on the U.S. Capitol in a half-hearted attempt to overthrow the U.S. Government.

The progress made after the 1968 countercultural revolution has been curtailed by the events and messaging of the past four years, and I can’t yet see that this momentum will be recaptured as America must deal with the recognition that abandoning any segment of the population is detrimental to its overall health. Failing to lift up those who are less fortunate is equivalent to having an immigrant problem but ignoring it while it serves particular economic benefits. Our problems are deep and complex; calling a group dumb, deplorable, liberal, racist, or any other moniker that riles the “base” only contributes to issues becoming intractable. Fixing things from the end of a gun barrel might work in some war situations but has never been conducive to propelling societies forward in any prosperous manner.

But the catapult of rationality has been launched, and where its payload landed is beyond my purview; I can only hope that 2020 will not have been our 476, and we are so far gone that all is lost.

The coin image is licensed by Creative Commons and is titled Claudius “ROMAN EMPIRE, CLAUDIUS 41-54 A.D. b” by woody1778a

The question occasionally arises in media that asks, “What would you do if you were confronted with your imminent demise?” Well, neither Caroline nor I am facing that right now that we are aware of, but we do have a somewhat similar question in front of us that asks, “What must you do or see in this corner of the planet if you were moving to the other side of it in the future?” What places are so important that should you no longer live in that country or state, it would become a hardship to return just for that one location? For example, imagine you went to Paris but were unable to visit the Louvre.

So we’ve scoured the map, and the first glaring omission is that we’ve never visited Central or South America. Closer to home, the list turns out to be quite short. We only identified four places we’ve never been to, three destinations we’d like to visit again, and two events we’d like to catch. They are in the order I just listed above: Lowell Observatory and the Arboretum in Flagstaff, Arizona, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and taking the Amtrak from old Route 66 in Arizona into the Great Plains. Our return visits would bring us back to the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, the Oregon Coast, and relatively low on the list of priorities for culinary reasons, Oki Dog, Shakey’s, and the Northwoods Inn all in the Los Angeles area. Finally, the events include the International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the Rhinebeck Sheep & Wood Festival held in New York state. That’s it for the United States

From Mexico south and Central America, we have three or four things on our list, including kayaking in the Sea of Cortez among the whales, a textile tour in Peru, and another textile tour in either Oaxaca or Chiapas, Mexico. With that, we’ll feel we did justice to seeing the world around us while we lived in America. For anyone who’d point out that a visit or two to points south of us would never do justice to understanding an iota of our southern neighbors, we are well aware of that, but life is too short to ever know everywhere.

Sure, we’d like just one more visit to the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and a number of other national parks, but lodging in those parks is already sold out for 2021. Believe it or not, we’ve seen the majority of America, and while we’ve never been to Vancouver, Canada, or taken in Butchart Gardens in Victoria, we’re okay with that.

After 26 years in America, we are approaching the need to immerse ourselves in something else. The natural beauty and ease of meeting people are certainly attractive, but the detractors are growing too big to ignore. The prices of housing, health care, and transportation will garrote our retirement experience or demand that we work to death. That ugly idea of working to death is beyond the pale and feels inhumane, and so we’ll be looking at when our time in America has to come to an end and have another new beginning where limited resources can go further. After all, this is all about going further.

Image licensed under Creative Commons titled “Old Globe” by ToastyKen