0607blog

Lighten Up A Little

I can’t tell you how many people lately have said to me that they really don’t want to hear any more about trump, that they are just worn down by it all and that they just can’t take it anymore. Yes, I can, two, yes two people said it but I think there are many, many more out there who have gotten so beaten and bloodied that they want some peace and diversion so they can breathe, as indicated by the tsunami of absurdity and silliness that is so incredibly popular as it wends its way through the Internet ether.

So this will be a serious commentary on not being serious, otherwise known as mindful disengagement. So how to do it when there’s not a whole lot of laughs and serenity in the New York Times and Washington Post, unless you consider stories about COVID-19, voter suppression and abortion to be hilarious, which I do in a funny kind of way. You could turn on Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Fallon, John Oliver, Jon Stewart, Jimmy Kimmel or Trevor Noah who are all very mirthful and very clever until you think about what they are satirizing and you realize it’s not funny at all but is rather deadly serious in a satirical way.

It’s very hard and very painful physically and emotionally to stay clear of all of the political humor and comments by people who claim to be smart but can’t tell the difference between a doorknob and a door mat that dominates Facebook and I know how addictive it can be and I know how it’s so hard to turn it off because you’re afraid of missing something really important even though it never really is that important and most of it is overwhelmingly meaningless. There are lots and lots of Facebook groups that have absolutely no redeeming value except to make you laugh, like “Close Cover Before Striking/Humor down through the Ages” or “The Bizarro Side” or “The Far side.” For a diversion, here’s one joke, “The first bottle of Coca-Cola from 1894 contained around 3.5 grams of cocaine. Explains why our parents & grandparents could walk to & from school, uphill, both ways, in the snow , barefoot.”

Other Facebook groups take you down memory lane for no reason other than to make you feel flushed with nostalgia, like “The Amazing Days of Then & Now,” “America — Way Back When,” which asks the timeless and pithy question “Who’s dad/uncle/grampa smoked a pipe?,” “Old Images of New York 1950–1989 or “Best of 1960s.” If sports is your meaningless, escapist, unobtrusive, non-invasive thing, try “Baseball 1857 through 1993” or “MLB 950–59.” And music is everywhere from “The Band,” to “Friends Who Like the Beatles” to “Leonard cohen’s fans” and “Tom Waits Club-The Piano Has Been Drinking- Not Me,” but be careful because many of Wait’s and Cohen’s lyrics border on suicidal in a beautifully lyrical way. And there are always the many groups that focus on Superman, who happens to be my favorite superhero, bar none, although I do like the Green Lantern.

So ask yourself this, what will I miss if I keep miles away from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the rest. I may miss some really cute photos of puppies and Marilyn’s latest lasagna but really life will go on. I like to experiment while on vacation when I turn off the computer, stay far away from newspapers and pull the plug on the TV. And after two weeks, amazingly, my life has not fallen apart and I have not been the only person on the planet who doesn’t know that a meteor will hit the earth in 10 minutes. A lot of the flotsam on-line is meaningless or worse, it is contrived to make people angry, unhappy and feel just downright shitty.

All of this is not to say that I think we should crawl into a cave and ignore the outside world because the world is small and it does matter what happens in Israel and the occupied territories and it does matter that China continues to imprison and abuse the Uighurs and it does matter if the Republican Party has become the diabolical tool of trump but that doesn’t mean that it has to be all doom and gloom all of the time but that a little doom and gloom is a good thing and so is Superman.