As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats his folly. —Proverbs 26:11
That, friends, is the epigraph to my first unfinished book, Rust World Problems, in which a hapless dumdum slinks back to his cruddy Rust Belt hometown with a head full of notions about saving the world, or at least some clapped-out, weed-strewn corner of it. Not sure why I’ve been brooding on it for, oh, the last two weeks or so; no reason, probably.
Perhaps we’d be better off collectively treating our vomit like cats, that is, by giving it a wide berth, covering it up, or (let’s face it) letting some other cat eat it. Before I take this metaphor too far and get an STD from it, let’s just say I have been avoiding my laptop like a cat dragging your July 2022 Better Homes and Gardens* over a pile of vomit, on account of (1) my latest unfinished book and (2) my unfinished thesis, both of which seem kind of pointless in the world we’re inheriting, where no one is apparently inoculated against brain worms and the only thing that makes sense is that yes, funding higher education is sort of just exactly like a WWE spectacle, so why not. Why not!
Let’s see, what have I been doing to calm my somewhat dysregulated psyche, besides screaming into the abyss. There are some good cult documentaries out there, as my friend Some Grim Lady has already noted, should you want to escape the cult documentary we are already living in. Saturdays I’ve been zoning out in front of classic Japanese monster movies with a leather-bound journal, some oil pastels, and a bag of Pepperidge Farm goldfish crackers like I’ve been transported back to 1983, watching Supherhost on Channel 43 and waiting for the 40-year do-over that isn’t coming no matter how hard I wish on that first evening star. Still, it is darkly comforting to spend 85 minutes watching a bunch of rubber monsters destroy each other, I suppose in anticipation of spending the next 30 years watching a bunch of real monsters destroy me.
It seems like a lot of people are decamping to Bluesky from Facebook and Twitter** and I don’t plan to do that. For one, someone has to say no more social networks, I’m going back to just reading books. And for two, someone else has to stick around and watch the algorithm poison civilization to death. Why not me! I’m like Cortizone-10 for that morbid itch you know you want to scratch, a soothing Tucks Medicated Pad on the hemorrhoid of modern American society.
OK, right, I know what you’re saying—Christine, please get thee bookward and dump all this wordsmithy genius into that and not this. (You’re not saying that, I know.) But I probably do have some cat barf to clean up, at least.
—CB
*True story.
**Got off Twitter in 2014 after a journalist retweeted something I said about healthcare and I was besieged by an army of Certain Ethnic bots. I was flouncing off social media platforms way before it was cool.