What Kinda Dream was 2014?

If you're reading this, you survived 2014, unlike a fairly large number of other people. Congratulations.

You may be wondering what you've gained by surviving another year. Truthfully I don't know. Maybe you lived only to find anguish and lamentation in your future. Maybe reality has a cruel sense of humor. Maybe you're fated to find true love and then lose it in a desperate struggle against the way of all things. Who knows? You got another year out of the deal, and in some way surviving Jan 1st to Jan 1st is more

Maybe you didn't survive it. Maybe, somehow, your consciousness continued to exist in a purely sophistical realm in the tiny unknowable increment of possibility between life and death. In that case, I don't know how you're reading this, because as far as I know I exist in a world shared with other fully conscious and existing beings, not in your mind. Then again maybe you're a figment of my imagination... but what would that mean... what would that make me? I've often thought that I've merely poured my attempts at writing into a dark void. Maybe I was right all along.

2014 - The Good

So what was good in 2014? There was some stuff...

The movie Birdman came out and was actually really good, good enough that if Shakespeare was around he would love it and probably encourage other people to watch it; or cry tears of joy; or demur any opinion but secretly watch it again and again, planning his own remake on similar themes... it's a great movie, and I'm speaking as a lameoid who saw it in 2015. The meta-factor is a little steep, but if you can look askance of a little bit of preciousness there is an humorous, beautifully (if not impeccably) shot masterpiece there.

John Maus hinted at a 2015 release for a new album, which is in this humble writer's opinion the best music news of 2014. Now I have most of a reason to see this year through, instead of going ahead with my original plan of throwing myself off a building in March.

Gas got really cheap. I realize it's a side-effect of a geopolitical game that only serves to stress our hopeless plight as small nothings in an unfeeling world, but... it's probably not even good news, but filling up hasn't felt so good in a long time.

The World Cup - mixed bag but let's face it, the Germany/Brazil game was the stuff of legend. What a brutal slaying. I still catch myself thinking of it from time to time when I wonder about how fucked I am compared to various World Cup games.

Uhh... there was other stuff, but I neglected to plan this post out at all, and to be honest 'good' is kind of a subjective term. Maybe you're a tineared fuck who doesn't like John Maus. Maybe you hate the idea of unrestrained fossil fuel feeding frenzies. Maybe you hate good cinematic films. Well, I know I'm a lazy bastard at the moment, and I think it's stupid to look up other people's 2014 Bad/Good lists and basically... fuck it. 2014 was mediocre, but I'll get into that a bit later.

2014 - The Bad

There's so much. I could do my research on this and go on about it until next year. Gluten-free idiocy, a continuation of the growing divide between the wealthy and poor, mediocre job markets, 'good economic news' that translates into the status quo, all sorts of murder, all sorts of unrest, a couple of unnecessary extinctions, casual brutality, hatred flaring up everywhere, the old guard firmly in control as ever. All sorts of stupidity. A dazzling galaxy of insipid and bright distractions. An increasingly etherized worldwide populace. The motherfucking internet.

There was one story that was so stupid, and such a fulfillment of a prophecy I made in the Nerd Bubble post a long time ago, that I have to include it here. It's the GamerGate scandal - a nonevent that blossomed into a great expression of childish fecklessness, misplaced values, and good old fashioned hate. I don't even really know what happened. It involved a journalist, the guy who used to date her, maybe someone else, and a bunch of what you may as well call men who proved without a doubt that they have worthless opinions and misguided priorities. I had a good chuckle every time this story reappeared, and by the time it got to the TV I was thoroughly tired of it... a worthless scandal.

Ebola, petty squabbles, a bunch of disheartening stories, The Colbert Report is over... war and rumors of war... perverts... the internet...

One whole jetliner disappeared. People got to remember this one because it's a little crazy. You'd think there would be at least one piece of debris found at this point. Was it pulled into space? Did it vanish? Did North Korea or ISIS hijack the plane, saving it for a terrible spectacle? Did they collaborate? Did you know that ISIS used to proceed with the essential blessing (non-action) of the West, way back when Assad was the main villian? What's going on with that narrative?

Meanwhile in news nobody cares about but that affected me deeply: I fucked up badly with a few experimental blog posts and it seems like I've lost basically all of my 50 person audience. I apologize for posting one or two really bad, pretty dumb, and mostly unenjoyable posts. I don't know what to do anymore. I don't like being a commentator, I don't have a special insight or overarching interest to report on, and it's really hard to do anything good. So yeah, I got a bit drunk and wrote the Ross Heffi bit. It sucked.

The Logitech thing was crazy, too. I can see you'd get an idea that I'm just a filthy mouth with no spine, but consider that social media/tech support person is not actually the project designer or parts buyer and might deserve respect. And if I fell for a fraud? Well then, I guess someone proved something about duplicity (I've been using a shitty mouse again and it hasn't stopped working, it's just really uncomfortable and unhandy). And basically every post I made since then has had as much traffic as I used to get when I still had any hopes for this blog. I've been close to jumping out of this business for a while, mostly because I'm a stupid coward and I doubt there's anything creative or fun left in me at this point. Maybe I'll push on. I want someone to pay me to write at some point in my life. I want to get published. I learn from mistakes.

I'm pretty tired. I'm only 5 days into 2015 and already it seems like all the technophiles in the world couldn't make me feel good about it. If I'm lucky... hell if we're all lucky, this will be a much better year than 2014.

North American Politics Redux

That the governments of North America function as ears into which special interest groups pour their bile shouldn't surprise a single thinking person. The best part is the most worrying: there is no more point in even pretending to aim for a government which serves the people. The best one can hope for is a government that serves corporate interest, foreign investment, itself, and its elites and prays earnestly for that service to trickle down into the cracks where dwell the invisible, rotten peons which they have struggled to get away from.

In this era, where the American dream could be dismantled for the pernicious, self-destructive, blind and ignorant mess that it is, there are entire groups of people with frothing mouths trying to blame anyone for the demise of their beloved ideal. Instead of doing the American thing and hardening up and finding something better and smarter, they still worship the car cult, the sprawl cult, and the consumption cult. Bridges are fabricated in China and assembled by foreign labor in America. Nobody can do a goddamned thing about it, no matter how shameful it is, because American manufacturing and labor have been gutted in the interests of iPhones, service-industry, and the downright vampiric finance industry (which, rightfully, is more of a quack cottage industry, as its very nature is antithetical to true industry, which creates products of value).

A populace distrustful of its government moves apathetically to cast its meaningless votes into the mire of corruption and ineptitude that will bring them an even more degraded government. Someone says he doesn't  care about roughly half of a country – well of course, nobody ever has, or will, and if this percentage would only dream the right dream of wastefulness and satiety then they could pull themselves out of poverty and darkness.

Meanwhile democracy is a dead byword, remembered by some, but truly forgotten by all. We have several hundred statist, nationalist, authoritarian and totalitarian pieces of shit running the world. All of them are lackeys to the 'real players' who wish, respectfully, not to be named or pointed at. Yet we consume their products each day. It's harder to farm food than it is to process it into unhealthy products to sell to masses, which it poisons into leprous lumps which look forward only to the faded idiotic 'leisure time' involving yet more consumption and little else.

Big bad governments pass hundreds of laws and amendments in so-called 'omnibus bills' which politicians are too lazy and inept to read and understand. All sorts of toxic policy are passed into law without so much as a cursory glance, and the culprits are paid and pampered, travel around the world, and don't even bother to defend their use of public money or trust in such a despicable way. The instigator even allows that it is undemocratic and scary, but continues doing it anyway, because god damn doing work you are paid and trusted to do. Revolutionaries, under these pressures and more, are still branded as idealists, idiots, and heretics. The placid horde feeds on scraps from the table and licks its chops contentedly, smiling at the less fortunate.

In some considerable and old parts of the world, a potentially faked video has caused a number of deaths because it portrays a prophet in an unfair and unkindly light. Free speech is cited and forgotten, and outrage is the rule of the day. If only outrage was the rule of the day, and apathy didn't rule, where truly important and existential affairs are concerned. As we pass into the twilight of this era, hoping for a better tomorrow, we would do well to remember the words of one J.J. Rousseau. That is, if any among us can remember them.