Oral Roberts? Are you kidding me?
Actually, this is not about basketball. Well, maybe a little. It’s March…one of the solstices happened yesterday, so it’s spring…many of us are getting vaccinated and feeling pandemically hopeful…stimulus checks are hitting bank accounts…immigrant kids are flooding to our border…Florida, Texas and Alabama, oh my…Tucker Fuckin’ Swanson Carlson and every, (yes, every), Republican Congressperson…Dr. Seuss…the British Monarchy…downloading plugins to ProTools…Cuomo…and sweaty, full-contact, heavy-breathing sports, (there’s your basketball)…it’s all madness.
It certainly doesn’t require extensive, historical research to formulate a thesis purporting the insanity of humans. We war based on the craziest of provocations or, often, for no provocation at all. We, individually and universally, (when we ponder alone, free from external stimuli), want the same things from life; love, comfort, kindness, security, but then we weaponize them, making them unattainable. We have trouble with truth, some much, much more, (Fox News), than others. Choosing, when given the obvious options of right or wrong, is a toss-up. Mayonnaise. And, of course, there’s the race we’re all running to see whether our intrinsically bad behavior will wipe us out due to armed conflict, pandemic or the wholesale abuse of our ecosystem, (another toss-up).
The information disseminated via social media, (oh, hello), is, even in its most credible and well-intentioned use, an evil genie released from a very cramped and musty bottle. Opinions, tweets, cats, memes, dick pics, shaming videos, cats, goat yoga, re-tweets, blogs, vlogs, dogs and cats enter the sphere of liminal or subliminal consciousness in supersaturated, perpetual torrents, and the sheer volume of all that noise, content aside, has driven us all batty. Casual conversation, as well as once trusted print and broadcast news, is salted with the inanity of it all, and every one of us has been guilty of opining, as fact, something made up of whole cloth by a pimply fat guy in Peoria. An observant alien, a logical Vulcan, perhaps, would find our resultant asylum babble to be…well, illogical, of course, but insanely unproductive, for sure.
I have a solution to this dilemma, but I have to quickly hide this. Nurse Ratched is coming with my meds.