I am trying to give up swearing. It is proving to be difficult. Even more difficult is attempting to give up being sarcastic — and whatever derivative or similar humor that’s in the same vein.

Sarcasm is too expensive an activity to engage in for me personally, and frankly, the same goes for the United States. The ability to be able to detect the nuance of that kind of humor is absent in most. Certainly part of it due to mere naivete. More alarmingly the line between what is reasonable and what is absurd is all but gone. The mundane is unbelievable, and the norm is irrationality. Satire requires a common reference point, and that reference point is so divergent among everyone, that it renders satire irrelevant. A practical example is The Onion. With an uncomfortable amount of regularity, it is cited as an actual news source. The insidious corollary to that is The Onion also seems to accurately predict cultural shifts towards the absurd. Or it reports actual news in a screamingly satirical tone. Sigh.

Humor is the sugar that helps us cope with having to deal with the drudgery and the terror of life. But the US has a problem with its humor intake much like its actual sugar intake. I’ve written about this before, how gravitas is lacking in many aspects of our life. News reporting in particular has to be sweetened with humor in order to make it palatable to most. Kind of picking on The Daily Show here, but we are well past the point where we can hope that Trevor Noah or John Oliver or Jon Stewart will spark an understanding, through humorous presentation, that the issue they are reporting on are important, serious. I tend to think that it downplays the gravity of it; that those issues can be shelved for another day while we browse for our next entertainment fix. Although I think Jon Stewart has pivoted away from that sort of thing now.

Sorry to be a Gen-X wet blanket, but I think things are going to get a lot more dire if we don’t put on our “Well, we gotta get this done” boots on and stop trying to laugh our problems away. Don’t get me wrong: I absolutely feel that urge to pull inward, to coddle my own helplessness, and embrace the futility. I don’t know if writing about this is a first step or an only step.

It’s easy to be glib about things we feel we cannot affect. Even moreso when social media (and mainstream media, too) encourages you to be the most 15-seconds-famous as you can be. Entertainment is valued above purposefulness.

We are living in history. But we cannot be passive observers that the neverending buffet of media teaches us to be.

Fuel your purpose with love, not hate. Be resolute, but always introspective.

Three years ago my dad died. Guess this was knocking around in my head the last couple of days without coming to the forefront of my mind.

So that’s rad.

I love each and everyone one of you! No, really.

This Valentine’s Day begins with a breakup story: I deleted my Reddit account. Having an account didn’t feel like it was bring much value to my life: the upvoting, downvoting or commenting on random things. Nobody cares. After all I have my own platform to write stuff that nobody cares about.

No Valentine’s Day is complete without sweets. I purchased five pounds of candy from Jelly Belly. What the hell is wrong with me? But candy is fun.

Remember when Netflix used to deliver DVDs to you? That was pretty awesome. I know that streaming media is actually way cooler technologically speaking, but there was something about waiting for the DVDs to arrive in the mail. And the roulette of whether or not the disc was so scratched up it would actually play. Well, I had enough of Netflix and have moved onto Hulu.

Am I supposed to write something more meaningful than this? Maybe tomorrow…

I think the only way that you and I can make this work is to understand that this is all a work of fiction.

…is afoot. I’m getting ready to close one chapter in my life and (re)open another. The prospect of it is stupidly keeping me up at night, while I bandy it about in my head like a plaything, not achieving anything productive in its course. I think it will make me happy. In the end, it is change, and as this very odd year comes to a conclusion, that is what I crave.

The sad part is that it is also an admission of defeat; an inability or unwillingness to put forth the effort to make the best of a situation. I feel shame in that, and perhaps, that, too, is keeping me up, stoking that anxiety that so easily erupts.

I guess I’m feeling wordy. Or shall we say logorrheic?

Maybe I’ll just shut the fuck up.

There. Happy?

This second wave of Covid has further extended the need to quarantine. And it sucks. I suppose there are worse things in the world than to be stuck in the sticks away from people during a global pandemic. I’ve been here over a year, and during that time, only four months not under restriction. But with those four months during winter, when you don’t want to do much exploring anyway, held in by the warmth of the house.

Here I am, with the trees and critters, the leaves and the birds. It’s beautiful. I’m tired of it.

OMFG. It’s the Halley’s Comet of blogs. Wecome back!

I Moved

I moved and started a new job. Then when I had a bad day, I asked my old boss if he’d consider hiring me back. He said they’d love to have me back, but then I stayed at my new job.

I’m…such…a…little…bitch…

Changing up your whole world when you are on the dark side of middle age is a fucking challenging thing. I don’t mean to wax on about getting old [again — see my previous post from four years ago], but it really does change the way you operate. Hence the old adage “don’t trust anyone over 30”. I mean, yeah, some of it is ill-intent because you’ve gotten salty and adopted a DGAF attitude. But a lot of it is just the brain not working the way it used to, and going into flight-or-fight mode for stupid things. Desperately clinging on to bygone dreams

I miss my friends. I miss the places and things that are familiar. I am having imposter syndrome pretty hard. And I wonder if I’m faking imposter syndrome to cover up the fact that I really don’t know anything. Any kind of social anxiety that I had just got turbocharged by all this.

All in all, though, life ain’t too bad.

I no longer have to worry about some things. And in trade, the things I do have to worry about now can be planned for. It is a much better situation that I am in now.

My Dad Died

That sucked. He died in February of 2019. I wasn’t there at the bitter end. I don’t know if he wanted to spare me that experience even as he was laying there unconscious. I can’t really it remember well; it was like one long blurry day, even though it was like, two weeks? Shit. I just remember telling him I needed to head home, that I loved him and would visit again. Then he died the next day.

I had imagined that I would use groink.net as my platform for my own buffoonery and crotchety, old-fart rhetoric in relative anonymity.  I don’t know if that is such a good thing after all.  Maybe it was because I received an AARP card in the mail the other day, but damn, I’m feeling old and reflective.

The thing that’s been bugging me as of late (other than co-workers and traffic) is the overwhelming lack of gravitas in the US.  And sure, this has been exemplified by the current US presidential primaries, but even before that cast of characters even took the stage, it feels like society has been dead set on squeezing in a dick joke (apologies to Bill Hicks) into every social commentary.

Of course, I don’t mean literal dick jokes — although you wouldn’t strain yourself searching for them.  But everyone has to get their snide, snarky or cutting remark in to every discussion.  The rise of social media has given equal voice to all who can connect to the internet.  You would think that this egalitarianism born of this would be a great thing.  I have yet to see the virtue in it.  All it is meant to do is stroke the egos of those who engage in it.  And the most prominent voices are those who are the most boorish, outrageous, and who can generate the most “Likes”.  All you have to do is be entertaining.  Fuck being right.  Fuck being moral.  Fuck being nice.  All those things are boring and do not entertain.  

I remember watching the likes of Walker Cronkite, David Brinkley, and Peter Jennings on the national news when I was a kid — usually forced because that’s what the parents were watching.  But I never recalled them cracking wise or doing anything other than reporting the news.  Their demeanor demanded your full attention; they were telling you shit you needed to know because it was fucking important, so listen up America!  And they never had to resort to low humor, or sarcasm to get their message across.  Now I can’t vouch for the veracity of their information or say that were political neutral or that they weren’t knowingly lying at any point in their careers.  But they treated the whole affair with the proper amount of gravitas.

I feel that a true comedian has a message to deliver, and usually its a serious one.  My first thought goes to Dave Chappelle and his reasons for ending “Chappelle’s Show”.  First off, that show was fucking funny.  But its point was to show you that the shit happening in those skits was absurd.  It wasn’t license for people to use the word nigger or bitch or to be okay with the status quo.  It was a call to do something.  You laugh because it was slightly uncomfortable; who would do that?!  Oh it really happens.  Well, shit.  Dave Chappelle said:

“You know why my show is good? Because the network officials say you’re not smart enough to get what I’m doing, and every day I fight for you. I tell them how smart you are. Turns out, I was wrong. You people are stupid.”

I agree.

I think the founding fathers (here I go) agreed, too.  Everyone in America screams “Democracy, democracy!”  Those guys looked at all the dirt farming fucks that made up the bulk of the country at the time and said, “Uh, let’s make this a democratic republic.”  

​But then we got the Internet.