Month: July 2016

Apparently, I’m going to see these youngsters next Sunday night at the old ballyard. I wonder if they still bring this kind of intensity. Do any of us?

It’s day 14, and I’m OK, though she still haunts me. Yeah, I miss the funny updates from some people, and the content curation, but with the presidential circus ramping up, it’s much saner out of there. I had Facebook friends (and family) that support Donald Trump, and others who believe he’s Hitler with big skyscrapers and little hands. In the other corner, some fervently believe Hillary Clinton killed Satan with her bare hands, lied to his family, and now occupies his fiery throne. Others really love like will settle for her. When the Facebook political kitchen got too hot, my college roommate, Phil would post:

“Politics is the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex.” – Frank Zappa

I searched the interwebs to make sure the quote was real. The actual quote appears to be not so much anti-government, but more anti-politics. Here’s what appeared in a 1987 interview with Keyboard magazine:

Question: “Perhaps many musicians simply aren’t concerned with political issues.”

Frank: “Well, I think it behooves them to have political thoughts, but let me make a definition clarification here. I say politics is the entertainment branch of industry.”

Frank was a bright guy. Here are a few more of his memorable quotes.

Ah, yeah. The Facebook thing. It’s a timesuck, but increasingly the “suck” is that people are just at each other. The political poop just gives people more stuff to throw. It’s not that I don’t care. I really do, but even civil discussions on Facebook eventually devolve into hate-fests.

If we’re the only life in the universe, and we may be, so far we’ve really squandered the gift. I intentionally left out “intelligent,” because there’s too much evidence to the contrary. In spite of the scientific proof that we’ve evolved from a miraculous combination of elements over 13 billion years (about 4.3 of them on our “pale blue dot”), for the most part we’re destroying each other and our planet over “beliefs” (another distraction) and relentless competition to profit from resources that really belong to all of us. Take the military-industrial complex, for example. If you don’t know what it means, you should. It’s why we’ve entered failed wars like Vietnam and Iraq. It’s why we spend $1.5 TRILLION dollars on a fighter-jet that has been outperformed by the 40 year old F-16 jet it’s supposed to replace. And it’s why there are so many guns on our streets. Our “civilization” now is largely about profits for those with capital at the expense of human life for those without.

If I was on Facebook, that statement would invite comments like “fucking socialist.”

So I’m not.

My mind is a freakin’ funhouse. Last weekend I Ubered around Boston, and then yesterday read news that a guy was killed when his Tesla on autopilot “failed to distinguish the white side of a turning tractor-trailer from a brightly lit sky and didn’t automatically activate its brakes.” Oh, then last night I caught some of Ted2 involving a stoned, hilarious, foul-mouthed teddy bear with the voice of Peter Griffin driving a car into the second story of a barn.

OK, so mix all that together in my Ninja 900 mind blender and dreamland puts me in the back seat of a driverless taxi speeding down “thickly settled” Bennington Street in East Boston to the point that I stretched my left leg from the rear passenger side seat to the front drivers side brake (I can do that now thanks to yoga…) to slow that bad boy down. Next thing I know I’m in a dark barn and I need change for my fare.  A computerish voice says, “It’s in the back.” I crawl into the back and see cardboard boxes with clumps of bills… $10’s $20’s, $50’s, $100’s… No $1’s and for whatever reason, my change involved only $1’s…

I found three $1’s, then walked outside because that barn location was my destination.