I learned recently that my father had printed out one of these posts, and my grandmother had read it, and remarked, “Someone’s trying to be funny.” When she found out it was me, and that I frequently try to be funny here on my blog, she simply replied, “Blogs are ruining the world.”

Ruining the world! It’s nice to know that my grandmother believes I’m involved in something as important as ruining the world, really warms my heart, but I can’t take credit for it. I wasn’t involved in creating violent video games, movies with ratings of “R” or better, comic books, Howard Stern, pulps, jazz, country, or rock and roll. I didn’t replace live musicians with 78’s, vaudevillians with movies and television, or telegraph messengers with telephones. I haven’t modernized or downsized or offshored anyone’s manufacturing job. I haven’t sold anyone a tranch of anyone else’s shitty mortgage, nor have I sold anything resembling an insurance bet on anyone’s tranches of other people’s shitty mortgages. I didn’t replace human-scaled towns and cities with unwalkable automobile slums, and I sure as fuck didn’t fill these streets with luxury automobiles the size of train cars, complete with cybernetic navigation and personal multimedia systems to absorb all the surplus cognition their drivers have left over from buying these asinine metal mammoths and paying almost no attention to actually piloting them.

But perhaps that’s not the part of the world she’s talking about. Perhaps she’s referring to the world of opinion journalism, a Broderian utopia in which respected public figures like Michael Gerson can take to the pages of the serious, tempered, grown-up pages of the Washington Post and opine…

American conservatism — intellectually ascendant during three decades in which relatively low taxes and a stable money supply produced the greatest accumulation of national wealth in history — is now staring into an abyss.

…without some anonymous scoundrel from a steel town responding…

Low fuel costs, improved communication technology, and the political disintegration of a competing economic sphere allowed companies to shift production overseas. Cheaper labor combined with inexpensive transport made it more profitable to build shit there even if the main consumer market remained in America. With the end of an effective labor movement and the decline of productive industry, real wages stagnated, but financial institutions, ever more central to the so-called service economy, made it increasingly easy to obtain credit. The “engine” of the American economy became the consumption of commodities produced cheaply overseas and sold domestically. The financial institutions playing the credit game conceived of a series of increasingly elaborate hoaxes to make what was at root the provision of seemingly limitless IOUs to individuals and businesses regardless of collateral assets or ability to repay seem like a profitable business model. The only major area of non-military domestic production that remained viable and vibrant was the construction of bullshit, half-assed houses in which Jenn-Aire 8-burner ranges and Sub-Zero side-by-sides gave the nouveau riche sheen to 6,000 sq. ft. houses with 4″ interior walls and brick on the street-façade only. Successive governments, declaring home-ownership a sort of human right, not to mention patriotic duty, along with their colluders in the Fed, made monetary policy to encourage easy lending and financial institutions folded that in right along with consumer credit to drive a go-go economy of trade-up houses, credit-card purchases, and new cars every 18 months. The Ponzi-themed fantasy-game of infinitely rising home prices made everyone feel richer than they really were. The inevitable point at which the money due would become unrealizable seemed . . . evitable. The stocks of the shell-game players kept rising, buoyed by the titanic confidence of those who believed that cycles and bubbles had been beaten. The foreign nations who sold us greater and greater quantities of oil and produced greater and greater quantities of shit for our domestic markets bought our currency and financed our consumption. The greatest, Babelian tower of horseshit phoney-baloney non-wealth ever in the history of everything anywhere amen hallelujah inshallah was constructed over thirty years in an orgy of bland consumptive excess that would impress in a Satanic sort of way were it not so monumentally crass, asinine, soul-vacating, and chintzy. We were not even good at being gaudy, as the above-mentioned mass-produced mansion and its matching driveway Hummers suggests.

I realize, of course, that it’s just a matter of perception. When I look at the discursive world she thinks is being ruined, from where I’m standing it’s a crispy smoldering lump without much in it worth saving. I’ll consider it substantially closer to unfucked when IOZ has a bi-weekly column in the Washington Post, while Gerson checks his mailbox, fingers crossed, hoping he’ll find a check from Pajamas Media.

Also in my unfucked world: Joe Scarborough is arrested, but it doesn’t make the news, because who the fuck is Joe Scarborough? In my grandmother’s unfucked world, by contrast, people don’t say “fuck” on the Internet, or anywhere else. You can understand how we’d be pretty far apart on the most effective route to media Nirvana.

A few days ago, I knocked out my not-very-old Facebook account. I was already feeling pretty ambivalent about the whole enterprise when I got a message from my past that I definitely didn’t expect. It’s not that I bear this person any malice, but the last 25 years of not being in touch with them was going really well, all things considered. There are some loose threads in each of our tapestries, I believe, that are simply better left unrepaired. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that what I ought to do is ask some of the folks I’d gotten back in touch with for their preferred method of contact, and that I should actually write (or at least call) them if I was really going to make the effort to “stay in touch”. So I asked, some have responded, and now the Facebook account’s toast. Good riddance.

Today, as I was scanning Twitter more out of habit than interest, I realized that there was nothing there I truly valued, that I was just spending time. Typically I feel like I’d get more out of watching the Brady Bunch for 30 minutes than I do reading people’s tweets throughout the day, and those are from people I know and love. I couldn’t come up with a good reason to keep the account, so that’s toast as well.

The problem with these revolutionary digital thneeds, like the consumer crap and cultural detritus that form waist-high drifts of meaninglessness in my life, is that there’s novelty, but little else worth caring about. Each of these toys cost precious and finite moments of my life that I could be doing something worthwhile, unrecoverable time I could be spending with my children before they grow up and I grow old, time I could be spending eating and drinking with friends or cuddling my wife.

I turned the same critical eye to this blog, wondering if it too needed to go, but I stopped short of dropping the axe on it. Updike I’m not (and thank the good Lord for that), or Mencken or Royko for that matter, but art, craft, and skill are part of what I’m doing here. I’m writing, and I enjoy it, that’s what this is about.

I would have a hard time justifying the time and effort I put into this, were it just about the roughly eight of you gracious enough to drop in on a regular basis. But making this blog, to me, isn’t just about the posts or the audience. It’s about thinking and writing and photographing and editing and publishing, about the joy that comes from creating. And it’s about more than just producing any particular work of art or craft, it’s about cultivating the artist and craftsman. I’d find value in that whether or not I ever showed this to another soul.

So the blog stays. Lucky me, lucky you.

Perhaps I’ll change my mind about all this tomorrow. Maybe I’ll see the value in the social media revolution, and decide that the rare, beautiful gem one occasionally finds in it makes all the digging and sifting through mud worth it. But for now, my distilled sentiment on such things is that social media can blow it out its web-two-point-ass. I’m just a blawger, I suppose.

On the commute home last night:

• Coming up T St. NW, I come upon this fellow with his truck parked across the bike lane, which was both narrowing the lane for cars and forcing cyclists out into the traffic trying to get around his pickup. He had, oh, 8 bags of mulch or soil or something like that. I let him know that there was a parking spot 14 feet behind where he was double parked, and he yelled back that he was unloading. Evidently, he couldn’t be bothered to move those bags 14 extra feet, so commute traffic had to accommodate him.
• Don’t mistake my anecdotal evidence for real data, but I’m pretty sure that I’m one of the very few cyclists in D.C. who stop at lights and stop signs downtown. So I’m stopped at a light on New Hampshire, with about a foot and a half or so between me and the car stopped next to me. A woman on a road bike in business casual mode squeezes between me and the car, then blows through the intersection forcing cross traffic to brake. I only realized she was shooting the narrow gap between the car and I as it was happening, because she didn’t see fit to break her ninja silence at any point during her approach. She looked annoyed with me as she snaked past.
• Coming down the east side of the Taylor St. overpass, where it crosses over the Red Line, I’m doing about 30, keeping up with traffic, and taking the lane. Much to my astonishment, a yuppie scumbag (now now, no need for that) young professional in a Yukon passes me on a pretty tight part of the street, with traffic oncoming, giving me about a foot of space on my left. Since I’m on pace with traffic, I actually have to slow down to let him back in (or not get hit by him as he floats right, though I can’t say for sure if he’d have actually hit me). I look into the Yuke’s window to see if he’s doing this because he’s pissed at me, and he’s got the blankest, most apathetic look on his face imaginable.

Some days, there’s just no winning. Last night’s ride didn’t trip any serious pressure valves, but it did depress me enough to consider riding the Red Line for the rest of this week to relax and maybe catch up on some reading. I woke up and shook that off, it’s a beautiful day and I couldn’t let the jerks steal my morning ride.

But it did get me thinking about whether or not it was realistic to expect anything but ignorance, arrogance, and self-centeredness from our single-strand society. If I’m not well acquainted with the people who provide my sustenance, or my entertainment, and my job doesn’t involve me directly providing anything to the people in my community, then where’s the value in kindness, consideration, or humility? Why wouldn’t I adopt a philosophy of I got mine, now fuck you? What’s the penalty for treating my neighbors and fellow citizens contemptuously in the pursuit of my own goals, or the benefit of putting my own desires aside for the good of the community (much less my country or the world)?

I mean, aside from avoiding a physical attack. But is that what it’s coming down to, where the only reason for me to signal a turn is so that I don’t end up having another driver pull a bat or a gun on me? Is that the end state of a society where we dispense money and fuel from machines that say “Thank You”, order every scrap of our Chinese-made clothes and every shiny gadget from the internet, get our food from factories a thousand miles away, and only find pleasure in entertainment made by professionals? That courtesy is self-defense, and nothing more?

(I should make clear that, for me, the answer to “why” is: “My kindness, consideration, and humility shouldn’t be a response to you as a reward or punishment. That’s about who I am, and who I want to be, not who you are or whether or not you deserve it.” I should also make clear that I don’t think I’m particularly overflowing in those qualities, but I care enough to keep workin’ on it. I don’t know what other people’s answer to those questions are.)

Makes one feel like heading into eastern Pennsylvania, growing a mustache-less beard, and learning to live Amish just to see what it’s like. Hell, I don’t even need a barn, but I’d sure like to raise one in the neighborhood just to build something with my neighbors and share some lemonade. Ya know? It also makes me want to redouble my efforts to find a local bike shop in which I don’t feel like a plebe diminished by the whithering gaze of a barrista with a bone through his nose because I made the mistake of ordering a “large” coffee instead of a “venti”. Or maybe to open one.

Of course, I could be wrong, and I’ll probably do something on the way home tonight out of obliviousness that will convince someone else that the world is gone to Hell. And maybe I just rode through the wake of a few people having a bad day. Fuck do I know, anyway?