usofa

Hot Springs or Busk: Chapter XVII (ready or not)

“What we know is a drop…
What we don’t know is the ocean.” ~ Isaac Newton

I tried… i really tried. Or maybe i’m adjusting to life’s inevitable curveballs scrambling the perfect symmetry of my best laid plan. You know, the one where i, knight-errant in a rolling studio apartment christened Rocinante, traversing the 48 contiguous states. The noble quest? To get my arms around the “fibrillating heart of our divided nation“. To get these insights from whomever in these sleepy college towns might be willing to spend five minutes with a weirdo packing a guitar and a head full of questions.

But fate, that fickle wench, had other plans. First, it was the librarians. Pale, overworked automatons shuffling through Dewey decimals, with nary a moment to spare for philosophical pontificating on state mottos. Was it time constraints, or a gut-wrenching fear of my “political agenda”? And don’t get me started on the chilling possibility that the modern anti-intellectualism plague has seeped its tendrils into the heartland’s libraries! The horror! I quickly concluded my approach was to blame. I mean, c’mon, what the hell is this all about?

Then came the body blows: Rocinante’s innards failing like a politician’s promise, and a Utah road pebble punching a hole in our windshield. The Hot Springs or Busk mission – a symphony of soaking in geothermal glory and serenading the masses for petty cash – lay in tatters. Sure, the Dakotas and Wyoming soothed my travel-weary soul with their natural mineral baths, but that dream’s on hold till the autumn chill sets in. And busking? That one never even sprouted wings. Turns out, maintaining personal hygiene on the road, wrestling with writer’s block, acquiring provisions, and figuring out where to sleep takes up most of a day.

But here’s the kicker, loopers. The world’s gone batty, and burying my head in the sand just ain’t gonna cut it anymore. “Project 2025” leaked like a sieve, painting a dystopian portrait of a second Trumpian reign that’d make Orwell blush. And don’t even get me started on the assassination attempt – the twisted pandora’s box exposing an unholy alliance of theocratic nutjobs, techie snake-oil salesmen, and white-bread racists all marching in lockstep toward MAGA-land.

This, loopers, is where Rocinante and i draw a line in the sand. It’s time to stand up, or at least yell obscenities at the oncoming storm, in defense of the freaking democratic republic our forefathers sweat blood to build. This ain’t some pre-packaged travelogue anymore, folks. This is a gonzo odyssey hurtling towards a cliffhanger ending November, 2024, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Let me establish some bona fides, loopers. It was 1993, the Jurassic period of the internet, when i, a late-blooming recently reformed rock-n-roll wannabe made his way to the meticulously landscaped limestone campus of Fort Hays State University. At this frontier outpost, i stumbled upon a great tech-fueled human awakening. The era, mind you, when dial-up modems whined their mating calls, and the internet itself resided in a fluorescent-lit dungeon called the “computing center” – a place that would make a Kafka setting look like some cheerful dentist’s waiting room.

There, on a terminal that resembled a torture device from a B-movie, i logged onto a primordial internet, a MUD (multi-user dungeon) teeming with virtual spelunkers from across the globe. It was like falling into a rabbit hole populated by Aussies, Brits, and basement-dwelling samurai – a world where geography dissolved like a bad acid trip.

Intrigued (and maybe a little scared), i embarked on a quest to understand this beast. I traded my dog-eared textbooks for a master’s degree in the field of “communication studies,” focusing on the particular learning styles of these early internet adopters. As the web blossomed (or maybe more accurately, sprouted like a particularly virulent fungus), so did my career. I landed in academia, a Don Quixote tilting at windmills of ignorance, determined to share this newfound curiosity.

Ah, but this paradise wasn’t built for everyone. Back then, computing power was the exclusive domain of pocket-protected engineers and those with the social graces of an abacus. The average digital apprentice, like myself, had two options: learn the arcane language of coding, a feat akin to deciphering ancient Sumerian, or grovel before the high priests of computer science. And for what reward? The dubious honor of navigating a buggy wasteland of productivity tools resembling a drunken Rube Goldberg contraption. The “graphical user interface” revolution, if you can call it that, was just another layer of lipstick on this technological pig.

Before the internet, navigating the marketplace of ideas meant a pilgrimage to the library, that mausoleum of knowledge and arcanery. You either wrestled with the Dewey Decimal System, a logic puzzle designed by Satan himself, or relied on the benevolence of the librarians, those gatekeepers of the pulp-n-ink media. The contrast between the Dark Ages of ’78 and the digital supernova of 2024 is enough to make your head spin.

Now, we drown in a tsunami of technological pronouncements – quantum computing, designer DNA, the ever-present threat of Skynet. But fear not, loopers, for even as we stand on the precipice of a technological singularity, nearly half the population still believes the Earth is flat and six thousand years old. We are a nation of flickering attention spans, perpetually distracted by the digital fireflies flitting across our screens – a society of shuffling zombies, hypnotized by the glow of our handheld gods, and there will be a reckoning… oh yea.

Look, i’m no Luddite. Here i am, hunched over a keyboard in the merciful silence of the library, instead of downing near-beer and swapping healthcare stories at the Bingo Hall. The digital siren song is hard to resist. But where’s the master plan in all this? Who’s steering this chrome chariot hurtling towards who-knows-where? It feels like a rigged game, doesn’t it? The puppet masters, these billionaire Übermenschen, dangle their techno-baubles in front of us, content to keep the masses hypnotized. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe it’s just economics, not some grand conspiracy. After all, we don’t wanna give spoiled, marginally-competent “self-made” trust-fund babies too much credit, right?

Anyway, we stand at a crossroads, teetering on the edge of a technological revolution. The chaos around us is a symptom of our collective unpreparedness. Let’s arm ourselves with knowledge, not just the latest gadgets. The future is ours to shape, but only if we wrest control from the digital puppeteers and use this power wisely. After all, wouldn’t you rather be the architect than another brick in the wall?

Either way, we’re in a heap of trouble. The gap between the haves and have-nots is wider than the Grand Canyon on a bad acid trip. We’re hurtling towards a technological future with all the grace of a drunken walrus on roller skates. What’s the answer? Jeezus! Who knows…? If i had the answers my dispatches wouldn’t live in an obscure blog no more discernable than a needle in the galaxy of obscurity. I’d be one of the puppet masters, right? There would be publicists, and media tours, and wardrobe people, personal trainers, financial advisors, domestic services staff, etc..

So, assuming my guess is as good as anyone with comparable bona fides, consider this: What if we were to pump our educational systems full of digital steroids, create a generation of media-savvy citizens who can think critically, not just parrot the latest pronouncements from Silicon Valley snake-oil salesmen? Also… maybe leave the religious dogma to Sunday schools.

Whatever we decide to do, it’s time to stop worshipping false idols (as seen in the 10 Commandments) and reclaim our rightful place as that shining pluralistic city on the hill. Let’s stop vilifying intelligence, but celebrate it. From there, maybe we really CAN … Make Humanity Great Again.

Ok… enough for now. Stay tuned for a reverse “red-pill” treatment… we’ll flip the whole “Cathedral” of the neo-liberal “deep-state” on it’s head. We’ll restate The Who’s pithy observation from their anthem, Won’t Get Fooled Again…

“Meet the new boss… same as the old boss.” ~ PT

Be well…
Be sane…
Good luck…
Pay it forward…

Onward through the fog… R.H.

Hot Springs or Busk: Chapter XV (moored at home port)

Ok… i get it. It was the week of Independence Day. I showed up to home port with a holiday approaching. But i made a point to stress i wasn’t in a hurry, i just wanted to get the process of ordering parts and whatever other rigmarole necessary for the repairs underway in a timely manner.

But when i returned, a week later, seeking a date for the drydock, the shipmaster’s eyes glazed over like a barnacle-encrusted hull. “Oh, we know about yer plight,” he said, voice as flat as the Kansas prairie. “Parts were on back-order. They’re on their way now… Tuesday like clockwork. We’ll have ye shipshape by Wednesday.” A week and a half after dropping anchor.

A likely tale, that. The truth, me bucko, is they’d forgotten me, a speck on the horizon of their regular business rhythm. But the mate had the grace to keep a straight face. “Parts Tuesday, repairs Wednesday,” he repeated, as if reciting a nautical prayer.

Now, i’m a man of modest stature, a captain of a vessel dwarfed by the tour busses of the world. And like any short-legged wayfarer, i’ve weathered the doldrums of indifference. I may be refreshingly charismatic, fit, talented, smart, even at times, kind, but yea… short. Oh well, it is what it is. I refuse to put my body through dubious contortions to compensate for shortcomings. Seriously, who unloads hard-earned cash for corsets to make their belly look flatter, or stealth elevator shoes to add a few inches to their height? “hair transplants?” Seriously? Naw, none of this for me, thank you. If i can’t charm driver’s license examiner or a prairie schooner repair representative with my authentic self, i’m just fine sitting out the delay, hanging out with me and myself. I’m fine. That said, our Hot Springs or Busk tour has taken a mighty wrench in the gears.

In addition, Rocinante hit a rogue wave in the Utah outback. A semi’s kicked-up rock, hurled from the road like so much earned karma, punched a hole in her windshield. So… our choices were, a.) wait for the repair in the Utah outback, all the while perpetually searching for shade in the July inferno, or b.) head back to home base (Hays KS), where friends and family graciously allow shaded parking for Rocinante while we wait for the windshield and power link parts to arrive.

And the topper…? Mother Nature saw fit to provide a sustained string of rainy days in the Hays area, so our moored time was downright pleasant. And what do you think of that? Now i don’t believe in interventionist supernatural forces, and i’ve had my share of bad luck, but also, this. You see, without these setbacks, Rocinante and i would have made our way to Northern California by now. This morning’s weather report mentioned how Northern California was breaking heat records. So, rather than our temporary repose in Western Kansas with 80 temps in the day and 60s at night, we could be baking in 108 temps, there.

I’d say we’re right where we need to be, and like Joe Walsh once sang… “Life’s been good to me so far.” By gawd, the universe has been fairly good to me, all things considered. And we’ll leave it at that. Whatever the case, i’m moored at home port, but content, a solitary sailor in a sea of prairie grass. If you are somewhere in the extreme northwest USofA, and you were waiting for me to arrive, i offer humble apologies. I am detained by the random rock-kicks of fate. I will get there when i get there… and i’m looking forward to experiencing your slice of This Land.

Until then…

Onward through the fog… R.H.