Well, did you ever . . . .
. . . what a swell party this is!
" Have you heard? It's in the stars
Next July we collide with Mars.
Well, did you evah?
What a swell party this is!" ... Cole Porter
And so begins my next "discovery blog" post about another form of strange, modern amnesia -- what I'll dub, for lack of a better term:"Surf Haze".
Surf Haze is what I call that odd phenomenon whereby you begin a Google search by entering some phrase like "news, hurricane" and end up, hours later, at a website, reading about the adorable thirteen-year-old white-supremacist twin-sister singers who have finished their second album and are making their first music video.
And you have no idea how you got there.
And you could not reproduce this treacherous journey step-by-step if you tried.
And luckily, you are not in the Alps.
You can simply hit the close button and be back home in your office, shuddering from the chilly aftermath of your weird journey.
This happened to me.
Yesterday.
Okay, okay -- indiscriminate click-through is a bad habit with me, it's true. I'm known to wander the internet, seeker that I am, in search of truth, justice, and the American Way.
Or bits of information about odd sightings from the Hubble telescope.
Or schematics for constructing sacred geometric objects.
Or parts for the electronic innards of a Sears lawnmower.
I do this, I admit it. I do it whenever I have the time. I enjoy it, for the most part.
But I don't like "Surf Haze". It leaves me feeling somewhat slightly dazed -- a bit gummy, soiled, and disoriented.
And it all feels a bit too much like a game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon gone wrong. (6° of KB? What's That?! It's this.)
See now, there -- I've done it. I've laced this post with links that you might click-through on, leading you into your own amazing maze of Surf Haze Hell.
And I'm not going to stop. Because I think I'm on to something here.
Yesterday, when I hit the goose-stepping doublemint twins, I found myself sitting there, rather stupified, trying to figure out whether it was for real. This happens to me all the time on the internet these days.
For example, take a look at these two sites -- click through to them for no more than 5 seconds each, then come back here (I mean it now, come right back here, do you hear me? Do not click on any of the links on those pages -- hey! Can you hear me?!). Just click over to them and then back without reading any fine print: RepentAmerica.com and LandoverBaptist.org and now, tell me -- which one is the spoof?
As I clicked through the pages and pages and pages and pages of yesterday's surf haze, I found myself coming to that same old place -- of doubting all of it -- and being engaged only by some particularly witty writing or extremely bizarre story. I found that, by the end of my trek, everything was in question for me -- except -- except -- this one thing -- really personal truth.
Truth that had little or nothing to do with "facts". I could find sites that swear that Tom Delay is guilty, and could prove it with "facts", and an equal number of sites that swear that he is not guilty, also proving this with "facts". By the time I've read through three or four of these, I just find it hard to care anymore, which may be dangerous, from a discernment standpoint.
Consistently, I find that, if I click enough links, scrounge deep and long enough, run my eyes over enough read-out, I get to this place where I can just glance at a page and know whether there is any intelligent life there. And the life I find there mostly has nothing to do with "facts" (those ever-pliable commodities which, like statistics, seem to serve any master as that particular master would like to be served).
There are sites whose content I even find objectionable, but I go back there and check in from time to time because of this "life-like" quality they have.
As a metaphor for the self, I like the variety of the internet -- even the stuff that I find kind of scary -- because I think it's one of the few forums that even approaches equality in our world (one reason I think that every single human should be given a computer and web-access -- if they want it) You don't have to be a celebrity to put yourself out there -- and the internet doesn't prevent you from putting out crappy or stupid or brilliant or radical or conservative or whatever stuff. Ultimately, the receiver is the editor.
I believe that this forum has also put a perspective on the "news" media that I have wanted for a long time. As people learn how far they can go in opining from a purely personal stance, I think they begin to realize "Hey, this might be what the media is doing, too!"
When I was a kid, I actually heard, many times: "It must be true. It was in the newspaper/on TV." I don't hear this kind of statement much anymore. Nowadays, it seems that people are at least slightly more willing to assume that it's possible that news reporters could just be graduates of MSU (Making Shit Up), or that they are thralls of a gigantic media machine that is becoming more and more transparent as a simple money-making device.
Which is why I love (most of) the blogs. Here is a massive movement of people just spouting their shit, not dressing it up as authoritative, not claiming it as truth, just saying "this is what I think/feel/experience". It creates a sort of enforced humility, particularly when I consider that I am but one among millions of other people engaged in this activity, many of whom are probably doing it "better" than I can, more adroitly, or more consistently.
This creates, for me, a freedom. The blog doesn't have to be great. It only has to be true -- for me.
With that, back to "Surf Haze". I thought I would list a few warning signs -- a sort of a "turn back now before it's too late" list.
Top Five Warning Signs of Surf Haze:
And it's not all bad, I will say that -- for example, in my long tidal ride yesterday, I was blessed with this gem -- CAT-HERDERS.
So why the Cole Porter riff as an opener? When I was a kid, I used to entertain myself as I attempted to fall asleep by imagining that somewhere, it was daytime -- somewhere, people were just awakening, or sitting in school at 10 am, or eating lunch, or basking in the sun. I didn't like the night very much when I was a child -- and I'm remembering now that my sister and I used to engage in a form of "surf haze" in the days when we used to share a bed. We would talk sleepily, quietly, after the lights were out, drifting from topic to topic, then suddenly, one of us would say "How did we get onto that?!" and we would attempt, usually without success, to backtrack the long and winding conversation that had brought us to the odd subject at hand.
But as we drifted off to sleep, somewhere there was a wild late-afternoon party going on.
For me, the internet now provides that comforting pre-dream thought -- it is always buzzing behind my back, filling up with wild conjecture and pithy comment --
"Have you heard that Mimmsie Starr
just got pinched in the As --tor Bar?
Well, did you evah! What a swell party this is!"
Next July we collide with Mars.
Well, did you evah?
What a swell party this is!" ... Cole Porter
And so begins my next "discovery blog" post about another form of strange, modern amnesia -- what I'll dub, for lack of a better term:"Surf Haze".
Surf Haze is what I call that odd phenomenon whereby you begin a Google search by entering some phrase like "news, hurricane" and end up, hours later, at a website, reading about the adorable thirteen-year-old white-supremacist twin-sister singers who have finished their second album and are making their first music video.
And you have no idea how you got there.
And you could not reproduce this treacherous journey step-by-step if you tried.
And luckily, you are not in the Alps.
You can simply hit the close button and be back home in your office, shuddering from the chilly aftermath of your weird journey.
This happened to me.
Yesterday.
Okay, okay -- indiscriminate click-through is a bad habit with me, it's true. I'm known to wander the internet, seeker that I am, in search of truth, justice, and the American Way.
Or bits of information about odd sightings from the Hubble telescope.
Or schematics for constructing sacred geometric objects.
Or parts for the electronic innards of a Sears lawnmower.
I do this, I admit it. I do it whenever I have the time. I enjoy it, for the most part.
But I don't like "Surf Haze". It leaves me feeling somewhat slightly dazed -- a bit gummy, soiled, and disoriented.
And it all feels a bit too much like a game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon gone wrong. (6° of KB? What's That?! It's this.)
See now, there -- I've done it. I've laced this post with links that you might click-through on, leading you into your own amazing maze of Surf Haze Hell.
And I'm not going to stop. Because I think I'm on to something here.
Yesterday, when I hit the goose-stepping doublemint twins, I found myself sitting there, rather stupified, trying to figure out whether it was for real. This happens to me all the time on the internet these days.
For example, take a look at these two sites -- click through to them for no more than 5 seconds each, then come back here (I mean it now, come right back here, do you hear me? Do not click on any of the links on those pages -- hey! Can you hear me?!). Just click over to them and then back without reading any fine print: RepentAmerica.com and LandoverBaptist.org and now, tell me -- which one is the spoof?
As I clicked through the pages and pages and pages and pages of yesterday's surf haze, I found myself coming to that same old place -- of doubting all of it -- and being engaged only by some particularly witty writing or extremely bizarre story. I found that, by the end of my trek, everything was in question for me -- except -- except -- this one thing -- really personal truth.
Truth that had little or nothing to do with "facts". I could find sites that swear that Tom Delay is guilty, and could prove it with "facts", and an equal number of sites that swear that he is not guilty, also proving this with "facts". By the time I've read through three or four of these, I just find it hard to care anymore, which may be dangerous, from a discernment standpoint.
Consistently, I find that, if I click enough links, scrounge deep and long enough, run my eyes over enough read-out, I get to this place where I can just glance at a page and know whether there is any intelligent life there. And the life I find there mostly has nothing to do with "facts" (those ever-pliable commodities which, like statistics, seem to serve any master as that particular master would like to be served).
There are sites whose content I even find objectionable, but I go back there and check in from time to time because of this "life-like" quality they have.
As a metaphor for the self, I like the variety of the internet -- even the stuff that I find kind of scary -- because I think it's one of the few forums that even approaches equality in our world (one reason I think that every single human should be given a computer and web-access -- if they want it) You don't have to be a celebrity to put yourself out there -- and the internet doesn't prevent you from putting out crappy or stupid or brilliant or radical or conservative or whatever stuff. Ultimately, the receiver is the editor.
I believe that this forum has also put a perspective on the "news" media that I have wanted for a long time. As people learn how far they can go in opining from a purely personal stance, I think they begin to realize "Hey, this might be what the media is doing, too!"
When I was a kid, I actually heard, many times: "It must be true. It was in the newspaper/on TV." I don't hear this kind of statement much anymore. Nowadays, it seems that people are at least slightly more willing to assume that it's possible that news reporters could just be graduates of MSU (Making Shit Up), or that they are thralls of a gigantic media machine that is becoming more and more transparent as a simple money-making device.
Which is why I love (most of) the blogs. Here is a massive movement of people just spouting their shit, not dressing it up as authoritative, not claiming it as truth, just saying "this is what I think/feel/experience". It creates a sort of enforced humility, particularly when I consider that I am but one among millions of other people engaged in this activity, many of whom are probably doing it "better" than I can, more adroitly, or more consistently.
This creates, for me, a freedom. The blog doesn't have to be great. It only has to be true -- for me.
With that, back to "Surf Haze". I thought I would list a few warning signs -- a sort of a "turn back now before it's too late" list.
Top Five Warning Signs of Surf Haze:
- You actually did sit down at the computer to search for something useful or necessary, but you now have no idea what that was. If this has happened more than once today, count this a second warning sign.
- You have called out to someone in your household (who is likely uninterested) "Hey, come and look at this!" If there is no human at home in your house, you have emailed that juicy link to one or more other humans in your frantic excitement over the "funny cat cartoons" page, which you located in the course of a search for a solution to your problem with Microsoft Word that has prevented you from finishing your master's thesis (which is due Friday).
- You have sat, alternately fascinated and disgusted, for ten minutes or more, reading a post, webpage, or other tidbit by someone whose views you find repugnant and absolutely counter to your own. You have made audible groans as you read, but you have kept on reading.
- You have found a news story that put your knickers in a twist and have desperately Googled five or six different phrases in an attempt to find a comforting counter-story that will assure you that it just ain't so, OR, you have found a news story that had you snickering in delight because it so validated your viewpoint and you have Googled five or six different phrases in order to corroborate it.
- You currently have 20 or more browser windows or tabs open and have only just realized that it is 4 am -- oops -- no, I just looked at the clock again -- 5:15 am.
- Eat some chocolate.
- Read at least four pages of Walt Whitman
- Walk around (outside for god's sake!)
- Have an orgasm, just to be safe. This will put you right back in your body, where you belong. As you are doing it, imagine the various strands of your consciousness returning from cyber-spaces unknown to the safe haven of your physical vehicle.
And it's not all bad, I will say that -- for example, in my long tidal ride yesterday, I was blessed with this gem -- CAT-HERDERS.
So why the Cole Porter riff as an opener? When I was a kid, I used to entertain myself as I attempted to fall asleep by imagining that somewhere, it was daytime -- somewhere, people were just awakening, or sitting in school at 10 am, or eating lunch, or basking in the sun. I didn't like the night very much when I was a child -- and I'm remembering now that my sister and I used to engage in a form of "surf haze" in the days when we used to share a bed. We would talk sleepily, quietly, after the lights were out, drifting from topic to topic, then suddenly, one of us would say "How did we get onto that?!" and we would attempt, usually without success, to backtrack the long and winding conversation that had brought us to the odd subject at hand.
But as we drifted off to sleep, somewhere there was a wild late-afternoon party going on.
For me, the internet now provides that comforting pre-dream thought -- it is always buzzing behind my back, filling up with wild conjecture and pithy comment --
"Have you heard that Mimmsie Starr
just got pinched in the As --tor Bar?
Well, did you evah! What a swell party this is!"
posted by Carol Steinel at 4:51 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home