Medium will be spared my midsummer rant. I’m not sure why this is the time of year when I usually pick up my poisoned pen. Perhaps it’s the riot of ice cream and badly grilled hot dogs in my belly, or pond water trapped in my inner ear, or the accretion of mosquito and deer fly bites keeping me up at night, but somehow this period of hours, when all seems good and there should be nothing to complain about, inspires me to sit down at the iron pig and subject you, beloved reader, to a tirade against some “pack of assholes” that “didn’t do what I want them to do.”
Have you seen the horror flick Midsommar? To me it makes sense that this is the time of year when you burn the guy in the bear suit.
As I say in almost every post, I hate the world we have created. Let me make that a pull quote; not because I should, but because I can.
I Hate the World We Have Created
That’s part of the problem, right? The technological imperative. Because we can do something, we have to do it. I mean we can stream the Olympics, so we must stream the Olympics.
Before we start, I want to state, for the record, that I understand that ranting is one of the hateful things that the tubes have given us. In the old days, before the ether, we just complained or kvetched. “Ranting” was the domain of asylum bound maniacs and unmedicated housewives trapped by society in a carnival of domestic horrors.
When I was a boy I was taught not to complain. Strong opinions were “bad manners.” One should never discuss religion or politics in social situations. You were to be “civil but strange” with unfamiliar people, which meant confining your conversation to “small talk”.
For lots of good reasons we got rid of small talk and “got real”. I’m not here to defend the old regime. There were lots of other things you weren’t supposed to talk about… money, menopause, alcoholism, or the word “cancer”, for example. We put a knife in small talk and took the varnish off of our opinions. We all decided to act like some aged grand dame pontificating on the porch of her beachclub after one too many glasses of sherry. We are going to tell the world what is really on our mind. OK, I understand.
