Friday, April 8, 2011

Cat-herder -OR- I Can't Help Myself

The Internet might just join other near-misses in the long slog of mankind.
Don't get me wrong, the POTENTIAL still exists for the progress of humanity via the World Wide Web. Sort of like Religion, Television and indoor plumbing (to pick just three). Its practical applications are still viable and its boundaries, literally, virtually limitless, yet the practical distractions, commercialization, dumbing down and deliberate obfuscations make it less likely each day that it will be any more successful at reining in the determined inertia of anti-change than all that has come before. Still, the arc is discernible toward a continued slog.

On a micro-scale, there have been jaw-dropping instances of glimpses of the power and potential. The new millennium's prospectors, boom towns and scallywags, carpet-baggers and snake-oil salesmen, with all of their shills and side-show geeks cannot take away the game-changing adaptations committed to the struggle and fleetingly seizing the day. Only to be swept under, back, aside by the next wave and the next and the next. By its very ethereal nature, unable to maintain form before it is less of a memory and more of a mirage. What happened? Did it really happen? Will it ever happen again?

In that, the internet is the ultimate facade. Its lofty canvas and the sequoia sized tent poles are surreal magnifications of its billion flea circuses. Beneath its tiers of bleachers, packed with children of all ages, the gate is sorted, stacked, counted and apportioned out to cover the costs.

This tiny way-station on the internet super-highway labors under the delusion that, with the right circumstances and perspective, if you tilt your head and squint your eyes almost shut, it is every bit the greatest show on earth that HuffPo pretends to be. Well, okay that's a reach, even for a delusion, but the premise could be sound.

This secular pulpit is every bit as valid and potentially viable as any other, perhaps moreso since my expectations and ambitions begin and end at the site's URL.
I post; therefore I am.

The glimpse I offer comes without cost or obligation. It's not a counter, but rather an alternative interpretation of people, places, events, spectacles and things that might otherwise go unnoticed. I've stepped away from the arena. Several, to many, steps back in an attempt to see a bigger picture.

Because I don't presume a universality of circumstances, I've noticed that my posts are hopelessly vague. What's the point? Is there a point? What is Rehctaw trying to say? I think they may be deliberately vague, but if so it is an unconscious deliberateness. They start; they end. They become part of the ether. Twas ever thus?

And still, here it is. worked without a net. flopping, skipping and quivering, waiting to be picked up and applied usefully by some enterprise or need.
Take a step or two back and look again, head tilted, eyes squinted just right...

See it yet?

1 comment:

amber ladeira said...

Dear Watcher,

Occasionally the vague approach
gives a certain timeless quality
to your various observations, kind
of like poetry or fiction while
being neither. It's a fine technique,
I'd keep it.

You're funny and witty too, so there's that....then there's emotion,
so, all in all, a full plate.

I'm glad at least two of the
candidates we wanted got in on
April 5th. As to the rest--the
reelected less than desirables
better watch out, 'cause I'm on
the case, now more than before.
Maybe you saw my anti-racist rant online at our local paper?

Meanwhile, stay well, try to be
reasonably happy just to spite the BS all around us.

Best, A.