Come for the Laughs, Stay for the Class Warfare

So much has happened since I last bothered to write something. The Pope, Johnny Cochran, Mitch Hedberg, Frank Perdue, Saul Bellow, Prince Ranier, and presumably several less famous people all passed into the great beyond. And let's not forget Terri Schiavo finally getting what was coming to her. Somehow, though, none of these events moved me to write anything. Neither have the day-to-day details of my decreasingly fulfilling (but increasingly lucrative) job. There was this one exchange I overheard in an elevator at the Virgin Megacenter, in which this shrill, unpleasant young woman told her relatively pleasant young friend that the reason she was going to see Fever Pitch was because she "literally used to live a block from Fenway Park," to which I nearly responded, "That's funny, because I figuratively used to live a block from Fenway Park," but I said nothing, because what would have been the point?

Shit. One paragraph in, and I'm already out of material. I could force it and probably come up with something good in the process, but, again, what would be the fucking point? This blogging shit is for the birds. That's right, I said it. Somebody had to. For the birds. Seriously, what can I hope to get out of it? I've been doing this nearly three years, and my greatest success has been a brief mention in a sports column in the Palm Beach Post. The people don't want art, they want mundane opinions and hipster name-checks. They want cookie-cutter politics. They want breaking news on the cultural icons of the moment. They want to know what Tiffany fucking Stone ate for breakfast. Most of all, they want other people to write what they are thinking, because familiarity equals comfort and comfort equals complacency and complacency equals living in a bland, middle-class rut, to be jarred into brief moments of consciousness by the occassional passing crisis.

Am I bitter? Oddly, no. But I am starting to feel like I'm wasting my time. I imagine that's a good thing, but I'll withhold judgement 'til I see where it gets me.

Mother Love, of course, said it best: