Based on my YouTube suggested videos, Google thinks I’m a lefty urbanist who’s fascinated with trains, planes, bikes, walkable neighborhoods, civil infrastructure, and has a passing interest in science, psychology, sex ed, and questionable comedians. There’s some malignant threads of amateur radio and electronics tacked on for good measure.
Damn, do they have me binned.
Some Guy With a Blog says:
I get it. I know why TED Talks are so popular. Why we watch them and share. We all fantasize about being that expert up there, giving our experiences and laying out the facts, as though the truth we bring forth is something everyone should hear, something everyone should take in.
We so want to be that person on that stage. And, to some extent, we carry on as though we are that person on that stage. Standing alone inside the red circle, our minutes counting down on a screen in front of us, we make our elevator pitch explaining our entire academic oeuvre to an audience who was not there during the hardest times of our research.
We want to be bringers of the holiest of light.
But nobody’s life is truly changed by a TED Talk, is it? At least, not those who didn’t already want it to be changed.
A lot of smart people out there; wise people. But not everybody with a strap-on mic is wise, no matter who vouches for them enough to give them stage time. So listen critically.
Solving all the worlds problems
Over caffeine and booze
Only to be forgot
By the second press of the snooze
July 28, today, is my 22nd anniversary since moving to Austin. Twenty. Two. At the dumb, hopeful, stupid age of 28 I drove my broke ass to this town to sleep on a futon and have dreams. Now at 50 I sit my fat ass on my futon and wonder where my dreams got off to as every creative drive gathers dust in the closet of my collected hobbies.
Austin, what have you done to me (that I haven’t already done to myself)?
At this point, I wonder if I’ll ever press Eject and pop this tape out to play it in some other town elsewhere. I just don’t know, really, what options there are for old fucks like me other than to fade off to a flyover county and occupy a bar stool next to the swamp cooler at the end of a cinder-block box and read novels in the dim buzz of an animated beer sign, hoping no one calls my ticket number before it’s time.
Ah man. What has this place done to me.
I have nothing good to say, not after today. I don’t want talking. No. More. Useless. Talking.
They hinted, leaked, and made rumors, but today it became true. The fed does not want to protect women. The fed does not want to take responsibility. The fed does not want to enforce the same rights across the land. Now it’s a states-rights issue. And that is morally and legally repugnant.
But the people paying the judges aren’t stopping there. They’re coming for me. They’re coming for you. They’re coming for everyone who deserves privacy and autonomy by natural law. They won’t stop there. Rowe was the next domino to fall, and it clears the way for every domino down the line to fall onto the table of states-rights. This country is now riddled with land mines.
And our national enemies are laughing with tears in their eyes as we crumble from “one nation, indivisible,” into 50 territories squabbling as we figure things out.
I’m tired of talking.
