It was a cheap, addictive entertainment.
Like Netflix.
Like porn.
Like the buildup to the Super Bowl.
The big event, as far as most media was concerned, was the landfall in Florida. This, it seemed, was the point to which all of our lives were leading, the apocalypse that was sure to prove whatever it was we needed proved. Days, perhaps even weeks before this happened, there was wall to wall coverage promising cataclysm. I learned to fear the “Cone of Uncertainty” and “Life Threatening Winds,” I listened to talking heads as if they were debating some sport, and I watched relentless loops of footage of nature destroying any puny mortal concerns that stood in its path.
And as the hurricane carved out it’s terrible path, each demolished, little island a grim foreshadowing of what was about to happen to over-populated and under-prepared Florida, the hurricane was simultaneously a prophecy of doom and a trailer for a Hollywood disaster film. Almost giddy, each day the broadcasters revealed– in all its punitive majesty– another verse in this Book of Revelations.
The media, of course, profited from our obsessive fear, and turned the volume up as loud as they could. The more clicks the better, and if it was terror and anxiety that ushered in these clicks, so be it. At one point a rain-soaked reporter, bent and staggering against the elements, conducted an urgent interview with a man who had not evacuated. Clearly the reporter was hoping for some Florida Man archetype to emerge from the scrub, a guy who looked like Kid Rock and was armed with a crossbow and some alligator mace, and wasn’t going to let some “lady storm” tell him what to do.
Instead, the reporter got a genius cardiologist, who with astonishing knowledge, detail and reasoning, explained precisely why it was safe to be exactly where he was. He was calm, too, not a trace of panic to him, and he made the reporter look like the very bad actor he was.
That the media manipulates and distorts news events, or even creates disaster porn, is nothing new. When 9/11 took place I literally could not take my eyes off the tv.
It was the most riveting thing I had ever seen, and it was a rating’s sensation. Now, with all our various technologies even further entrenched, this sense of chaos and anxiety has become a permanent, immobilizing fixture of our lives. The media, desperate to make a buck, feed us all the worst case scenarios, whipping us into a frenzy of panicky, dependent consumption.
My level of excitement had reached such heights that when Hurricane Irma finally struck Florida, I was actually disappointed–like I would be if I saw a movie where the trailers were better than the actual product they were selling.
This is completely perverse and backwards, but there you have it.
It is instructive when you’re caught in the swift currents of one of these types of stories to look up beyond your computer screen and out the window.
Remind yourself that we are actually living in the safest time in history.
( https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-10-23/world-actually-safer-ever-and-heres-data-prove )
Go outside, for surely something beautiful will fall to you.
]]>According to various reports, he is currently wandering around the remote BC island of Alert Bay, howling at the moon as if he’d just had his massive, mythical heart broken.
The news stations that deliver such stories do so with a smirk, as if it was on par with a Dachshund Super Bowl, a little bit of fun to indulge in at the end of a tough new cycle. Santa Claus stories packaged for children.
And yes, of course, unhinged obsessives touched with a kind of religious fervour and pranksters, make up the undying core of Bigfoot promoters. The sober mainstream asserts that Bigfoot does not exist because there is no proof or evidence that he does, and to believe anything else is to indulge in fantasy.
However, I would argue that this is a position of arrogance. We are inconceivably small in this universe. It’s impossible for us to process how small this pale blue dot is in the vast darkness of infinity.
There is more that is unknown than known in this world and beyond, and more that is invisible than visible. Our tools for perceiving the universe (sight, sound, smell) are pitiful. As humans, everything we know and sense, is created and processed by the mystical chemistry of our brain. It is literally true that the universe exists inside of our head, and it is worth keeping in mind that a different universe exists inside the brain of a spider. As a species, we apply our technology to expand our tools of perception so that we might better understand some of the things that lie beyond our natural ability. In short, we see very, very little.
Imagine you were a lobster living on the bottom of the oceans floors.
If you could be imbued with a consciousness like a human, there is simply no way that you could conceive of living on the same world as a creature like a human being. Physically, you could hardly be more dissimilar.
Your skeletal structure exists on the outside not the inside, you shuffle along in the bottomless dark of the cold seas. Humans, bipedal giants. You cannot imagine a world beyond water. You cannot imagine air, this transitional plain, or that there is a world yet beyond that, a terrestrial land where humans live in palaces, farming and managing your species and then devouring them as a delicacy. Such a thing would seem ludicrous and completely beyond your imagination, but we know that it is true. Perhaps, in the great expanse of time, distance and dimension, a similar analogy can be made, only with us as existing as the lobster and something else as humans.
In searching for Bigfoot we seek his proof on our terms, not his.
He must exist as we understand things to exist, not as he may exist. He must be visible to our eyes. But what if like radiation, or the wind, he’s not visible to to us? What if he’s not quite of this world we live in, just as we, are not quite of the world the lobster lives in?
The older I get, the weirder the universe becomes, and the more ridiculous it seems that we profess anything with certainty. The people who believe in Bigfoot are no more flawed in their methodology than those who claim his existence an impossibility, and so I am content to imagine his howls at night, a reminder of the limitless mystery both inside of us, and beyond.
I’m a huge fan of Homeland, the show in which she’s the star, and it was startling to see her. I think that the thing that was most surprising was that she looked exactly like she did on TV. This shocked me, as I always imagined that in real life celebrities were somehow unrecognizable. You know, they were all much smaller than you would have imagined, much more average and disappointing– just less. However, Claire Danes looked exactly as she was supposed to look.
She was in a bit of a hurry, like she always seems to be on Homeland, and was rushing to add some sort of “healthy potato chips” to her checkout pile. Nobody else in the place seemed to be paying any attention to her, but I was trained on her like an owl. I was giving her a suspicious look (are you actually Claire Danes?) while also trying to give her a receptive, warm invitation to small talk. No doubt, she had seen my type before, many thousands of times, I suspect, and managed to avoid creating anything that might be misinterpreted as space in which a conversation might open.
It was driving me fucking crazy, that.
She was just four feet away from me and when I felt the moment slipping away, I blurted out, “That Mandy Patinkin (one of her co-stars on Homeland) sure can sing!”
I wasn’t quite looking at her when I said this and the declaration clearly caught her off guard. She gave me a quizzical look, like she does on Homeland when she’s trying to figure out a complicated mystery, and then nodded her head, a wary smile on her face, “Yes, yes he can.”
“It’s like God just filled the man with talent,” I continued.
Claire Danes gave the cashier a look that suggested it was very difficult to be a star, and then handed her a credit card.
“Personally, I think he should be doing the Super Bowl halftime show and not Beyonce.”
As she was passing by me she said in a clipped and sarcastic voice, “I’ll pass that on to him.”
“Enjoy your Super Bowl party!” I shouted cheerfully.
Claire Danes did not look back at me.
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This is a recent email that I sent to him:
Slobber!
How’s it hanging, Mister Touchdown?
Things are pretty great in our world, one reason being that Rachelle just introduced me to a new App on my iPhone called Draw Free. It’s way cool, like Pictionary for your phone. You play with a friend, and each one of you gets a word you have to draw out using your finger on the screen of your phone, and the other one has to guess what it is. Here’s my drawing of Bruce Lee, pretty awesome, eh?
We should play sometime. It would be an awesome drinking game and I’d fucking love to play a kind of adult version (NO HOMO) with you!
Anyway, the real reason I’m writing is that an acquaintance of mine was in a library the other day and he wrote this about the experience:
“Hoards of youth in the library today. Dozens & dozens. We’ve got to do something about young people in the library. Will lead to trouble.”
Just thought the Mayor should know.
Keep well, Slobber, keep well!
Michael Murray
Mur:
I am completely fucking in with the Draw Stuff game.
Art was one of my favourite classes back in school, and my teachers thought I had talent. I used to paint kick ass Star Wars scenes. I did one watercolour of Luke and Princess Leia that was so out of the box they made me see the school psychologist. Miss Hancock. Jesus, she was hot. Boner City, man, Boner City.
I’m glad you brought this library shit to my attention. The last thing we need are libraries jammed full of teens. That would be a shit show. I’m tough on crime, and I’m not going to help create an environment that would make things easier for crazy shooters. Libraries should only have a couple of nerds in them at a time, while the rest of our kids are at football practice, learning how to drive or at home on the Net. We need to shut down the library gravy train.
I’m going to launch a campaign called Library No More. It’s going to be fucking awesome. We’re going to have pro athletes on board and look into the idea of mobile libraries, kind of like the ice cream truck, only with books. We can shut down libraries all over the city, and then service those areas with the library truck once a week.
Dude, can you come down to City Hall so we can talk more about this? And let’s play that Draw thing! Why don’t they have that in bars, anyway, like Karaoke for drawers? Drawaoke, they could call it. Fuck, my brain is on fire with ideas! It’s a Rob Roll!! A Ford Fire!! Gotta cancel all my meetings and stoke the flames!!
Slobber
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