Love of learning

One of the great cultural positives of our digital modern world is YouTube, which continues to grow into this Vast Amazing Brainboggling Thing. Lately, I’ve been using YT to listen to various lectures from learned men who had something to say decades ago, philosophical cosmologists like Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley and Terence McKenna. Guys who weren’t much on breaking down blitz packages or filling out brackets, but whose lofty thoughts still provide illuminating balance in a scene now being constantly goofed by bizarro gaslighters.

In one of his remarkable lectures, McKenna (who ran one jiffy psychedelicatessen in the ’90s) quotes various guru types who regularly remind us that “everything is on track, everything is as it should be.” And, of course, that’s right. That’s spot on. How could it be anything else? And when you say something like that, which drips with Calming Big Picture Perspective, you imply that, eventually, things will be OK. Right? To assert that Everything is rolling along as it should is to also acknowledge there’s a trajectory toward some kind of reward, a trajectory toward some kind of success. That some day, things will—eventually—be better, in terms of an overall more tolerable human condition.

The key word here is “eventually.” How long will it be until we get to That Place, until we grab that Carrot on the Carousel called Eventually? 10 years? 50? 100? 157? 1,000? 10,000? Tomorrow? Never? (Tomorrow, I’m sorry to report, rates as a huge underdog.)

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Somewhere between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, my good ole iPhone 6 took a dump, developing an instant case of Coallumpitis. Just like that, it went to the Dark Place. And there it still resides.

Once I got over the initial shock of not having a functioning phone (which took a little longer than I'd like to admit), I settled into a surprisingly comfy “OK, this is fine” mode. As in, “It's cool. I'll be just fine without the damn phone.” (I told myself about 14 times a minute.) After a while, I was able to revisit my head circa 1993, that much simpler time when I had no clue that haranguing people via text would become a large part of my future existence. To be untextable due to a legitimate technical breakdown of phone was sorta … refreshing!

That throwback attitude lasted all of a day. Maybe. The next morning, I wasted no time in hustling down to the store and getting a slick new 8 for Xmas. Strung out on my communicator! I know you can relate! Technomonkeys unite!