ominous cloud
I find myself camped out on the singles' sites every so often, trying to hunt down a date (and before you think it - meeting a woman at a bar seems tired and I can't bring myself to see past the cliche, even though I can't honestly think of anyplace else to meet people). There's no reason, I figure, why I shouldn't be dating more - or just dating at all, fuck's sake - and so I spend long hours on Nerve.com, wondering why it is all the women in Denver seem to want a man who's five-foot-ten (which has got to be the equivalent of me posting that the only girl I'd like to meet doesn't weigh more than 103 pounds). Anywho, I walk right into this hole every couple of months, bright-eyed and hopeful, despite a record of failure and bizarre-pathetic online date stories that would make Joel Schumacher blush with shame, because last time didn't count, because this time will be different.
Early in the week, I'd been scratching my head over this, this, this, this, and just now, this - the connections between how we live our lives and the all-too-quickly manifesting consequences seem so obvious, so why do they go unremarked? Why hasn't Tom Friedman cooked up some half-dumb, two-syllable catch phrase to make it click for the on-the-go digerati? Whither Russert? Fox or CNN? Blame, once you consider who's in charge, comes easy (and you can bet there will be plenty in the years to come - minus a health condition somehow worse than Alzheimer's, the brutal judgement passed on the Reign of the Younger by angry, stone-broke future generations may end up being his karma).
However, the blame for not seeing one plus one does in fact equal two lies entirely at our feet. And I don't mean that in the everyone-only-cares-about-Brad-and-Jen-and-Angelina-kinda-way: Social Security "reform", for example, even though it looked like a number of Dems were more than willing to go along with the Prez's clusterfuck, flopped bad. And it flopped because a majority of Americans didn't want Social Security "reformed," even though that same majority of Americans really do only care about Brad and Jen and Angelina.
As for the ominous, headline-shaped clouds which floated past this week - our collective response to those clouds is no different than me logging on and logging on and logging on to find a date. Even though we should know better, even though we can easily recall recent history. Because this time, it's just a really dry couple of months, or a queer spike in the market, or a nasty seasonal thing. Why? Well, because. Because last time was last time, because this time is this time, and the present is a bright-eyed and hopeful one, and same with the future, and this time will be different, even if history really doesn't make allowances for "because."
Think about that while I go and peruse the personals.
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