Tonight’s Thoughts
Everyone’s first theory of the world is magic. Nobody starts off thinking in quarks or physics. Nobody starts out thinking limits or possibilities. Nobody starts out thinking about sin.
The news isn’t real. The news is just people competing for our attention. Things don’t occur to us unless they affect us. What’s going on in Haiti right now doesn’t matter to me. Not really. As an abstraction maybe, as the idea that it is generally a good thing to try and help out people, sure. It goes in the same category as not bashing in kitten heads. There isn’t possibly enough stuff to fill up an entire 24-hour news cycle. It’s not that there isn’t plenty going on, because there is and, jesus, you don’t want anything to do with it, believe me. It’s that there’s not enough stuff that we give a shit about to fill up that much time and keep it fresh. A few things happen everyday that matter to all of us, the tv watchers and newspaper and blog readers. Way less than our insatiable hunter-gatherer’s appetite for intel.
My yeah-and-a-half-old son’s toy Elmo depresses me. He doesn’t know it’s not real. He thinks because it needs batteries, Elmo’s sick. That’s fucked up to play with a kid’s emotions like that.
