Let me get that for you

Tuesday 8/11/26

I go online this morning and the first item in the Trending Now category that neatly summarizes our social, cultural, and human devolution without meaning to reads, "Brad Pitt resumes drinking."

Now, I have no doubt that Brad Pitt is a terrible human being, but really? Each ostensibly simple thing, of however few words, says so much about where we're at now, even if no one reading that simple thing of few words can understand this.

And what a horrible way to frame alcohol abuse. As it being news when someone has had a setback. This doesn't help the mindset of others with alcohol addiction and/or problems.

Yesterday I posted something about a work of music. I give. I share my expertise. People get things from me. A comment asked where the music could be accessed, with the person saying they were too lazy to look it up.

I'm the last person on earth you want to be saying this to. What's odd as well as this is a person who follows along to some degree with what I'm up to and sharing. Do I really seem like someone who is going to respond warmly to you saying you are too lazy to type a few words into a Google search engine while also asking me to provide not just my expertise, but run a kind of errand for you as well? Or are you that dense that it doesn't occur to you to try to locate this music by typing a few words into a Google search engine?

Such a person should be grateful I didn't respond at all. Because if I had, those would have been withering words. I have zero forbearance for this kind of attitude and behavior. Should I? Should anyone? Of course not. It's like people try to be as little as possible. I understand having a hard time finding the energy to do even basic life tasks. When we are most down, when we can't find hope or reason. But I don't believe typing a few words on Google--which would have been less words than those used to make this comment--ever falls into this category.

This is all perfectly reasonable on my part. But the world now is such that if the person who'd behaved this way was apprised of the reasonable objection, they'd likely get angry or seek to blame the person with the eminently reasonable view on the matter. I find this frankly insane to say to me of all people, though. Like, how can you possibly think I'll be like, "Cool, here let me get that for you"?

I did 100 push-ups and ran 3000 stairs yesterday at City Hall. The dew point had dropped some ten degrees, putting it in the low 60s. Made enough of a difference that I could do the stairs straight through, taking them two-at-a-time, easily enough. The humidity is the great determinator and this summer it's been as bad as I can recall it being. A man came over and said, "Good job getting a sweat going, gotta stay in shape." Yes, one does. I can do better on that score and need to. I gave him one of those grimace-y kinds of smiles with a head dip and a thumb's up.

Running the stairs at City Hall, I stay to the far right-hand side. I take up as little stair real estate as possible. People who use those stairs are familiar with me. They're very wide stairs. Wide enough that there's a railing in the middle of them.

But you will still have these people who cut across the entire length of the stairs and plant themselves, at the end of their elongated, diagonal journey, right in the space I'm about to enter. Then, like a stubborn wildebeest, they'll stand in place, waiting for me to go around them. They actually go from one rail all the way to the other. Because people are now too stupid, and too entitled, to understand that you go up and down stairs, not across them.

One of these people will have their giant Dunkin' Donuts iced coffee in one hand. It's a very light brown, meaning there's loads of cream in it, and if there's loads of cream, chances are there's loads of sugar, right? In the other hand, will be a bag from. Dunkin' Donuts no doubt containing an apple. Only kidding, of course. It's those donuts.

But at night, they're probably sitting there reading some really great writing and reflecting and growing and adding to their minds.

I hate this world. There's nothing in it worth being here for if you are a person of intelligence and substance. There would be for me if I could get away from that world via my work, with that work simultaneously impacting the world, as I'm off on my own where I want to be, which would involve very little human interaction save with the art some of them made.

Coming back to this, because it takes me aback that much, I just can't conceive of saying to someone, "Would you do this thing for me, I'm too lazy to so much as move my fingers briefly." I can't wrap my head around that. It's so arrogant to me. The expectation that someone wouldn't just tell you to go fuck yourself. This wasn't some young person either, displaying that glibness they often do in internet matters, which speaks to the endlessness of the rot in our culture. No one is unaffected. I am. But who else? To be unaffected by the rot is tantamount to having mounted, with the energy that requires, and the focus, a rebellion against it.

People aren't going to do that. They're going to give in. To slide down the slide. That's why the person who is seventy-five behaves and speaks the same way in these matters as the person who is twenty-five.

You'll see it with people claiming to be busy. No one is busy and humans are less busy than they've ever been before. They have all these technologies that they all use that put time back into their days, in effect. They also don't live lives of purpose. Purpose is time consuming. It requires devotion. Purpose involves a great deal of active pursuit. People are just going down, not going up. The latter takes the time, energy, work, commitment. The former happens if you don't do anything to stop it.

You'll see someone in their seventies who is retired, who doesn't do anything but watch a lot of TV, maybe, or work on their daily crossword puzzle, and who isn't what we now call terminally online, say that they're too busy to talk on the phone. The call doesn't get returned, but maybe eventually they send a text.

It's the rub off effect. Everyone becomes like everything around them, even when there's more distance, in theory, between them and the ways of everything else. That everything else, if you will, finds that person, trickles down to them, and then they trickle down, too.

Downloaded Robert A. Heinlein's 1951 novel, The Puppet Masters, this morning, which I'll read soon. Makes sense, right? Who am I talking to? Rhetorical question. Both. Because who is there in this world who'd be able to say, "Yes, that does make sense," perfect sense though it does make.