Ennui Go
So yesterday I'm flipping channels, happy to be back in Pacific time, where the baseball road-games come on at 5 pm. The late afternoon is for baseball watching with my kids. That means that once again, the night belongs to Michelob. And vodka. And porn. And miniature York Peppermint Patties.

Round about 5, I check the local broadcast station to see if they're carrying the game. The Dish TV infographic says Elimidate. OK, changing station... hang on... is that... Honey, come in here! President Bush in on Elimidate!

Unfortunately as I left it on the station for a few seconds, my perfect world where the president of the United States participates in tacky, forced non-reality reality shows featuring blurred-out boobies was destroyed by the cruel intervention of the truth: Elimidate had been preempted by a presidential speech.

Immediately I thought two things: 1) there are lots of people in trailer parks and dorm rooms everywhere swearing at their televisions, achy and twitchy from Elimidate withdrawals and 2) what's that other station that carries the games? Oh yeah, four-one-seven...

A while later, I started to get that old pre-vacation feeling I used to get, where I think about concepts for blogposts in my head while life happens beyond the gauzy pale of my bleary-eyed compositional stupor. Dropping into that mode of semi-conscious disengagement was an enormous relief. I'm almost back to the point I was before I left, where I only have to pay attention enough during any given 24-hour period for one thing to either happen to me or catch my eye, however fleeting or on the far edge of perception, anything to pad a bunch of bullshit words around and vomit out as a half-digested morsel for my readers' enjoyment.

I was going to drag out the old trope about the sand in the oyster that becomes the pearl, but it really didn't seem relevant or appropriate concerning this blog. I think of myself more as the dung beetle pushing before him a (relatively) giant ball of poo to no particular end or purpose. I'm almost certain you'll agree the latter is more metaphorically fitting.

Yesterday, then, my one thing turned out to be not watching the president's speech on Iraq. That's right, I derived a supreme feeling of accomplishment, enough to justify my existence for an entire day, from the act of non-participation. Yes, I'm all the way back from vacation.

This blog has been around for nearly a year now (10 days to go until that anniversary... consider yourselves warned). As I sat there on my couch, mustering all my mighty reserves of energy to steadfastly and heroically not pay attention to a presidential speech on the life-and-death foreign policy issue of the day, I thought wow, I've come a really long way as a blogger.

There was a time not so long ago when any appearance by our Benighted Leader would be good for three days worth of blog posts: one to make fun of the content, another to make fun of his vocabulary and one more to figure out how to link him sexually with a farm animal of some kind.

But those were the heady, serious days before the election, when we were all laboring under the now-laughable misconception that the shit we thought about other shit mattered.

And now look at me. I got 750 words of blogpost in from a speech I didn't even have the patience or political conscience to watch.

Wow, hey, just like a real columnist.

Does this mean I'm progressing or regressing?

It's all so meta, I can't even handle it. All I know is I've got a lot of shit going on right now besides paying attention to politics. For instance, we bought one of those really big bags of Cheetos from Costco last weekend. That's four days' work right there.



This post on the Narcissus Scale: 9.8


Pops
- posted by Pops @ 10:18 AM