Friday Love/Hate

I hate how the internet is so goddamned stupid now. At one point during my recovery period, I actually got to end of it, which was an All Your Base Belong To Us graphic at a geocities site. But being someone who enjoys content, albeit brief blasts of it in online formats, the way things have shifted to meaningless lists spread out one per link so that you go to some dumbass website and have to click through 50 goddamn pages to see what they were building to in the first place. Or it's endlessly circular blogospherics, little sub-cultures of wacky moms or old school hip hop fans or people who collect roadside pictures or whatever, that all just point back to each other in this giant slightly cacophonic chorus of self-importance that if you step back for five minutes and look at with a fresh set of eyes, you will realize to yourself rather dramatically, "Who gives a fuck?" The saddest part of this is if you want to try to make a living creating content for the internet, it is through such watered down methods. You get a $20 bump to your paypal account for a list of 10 hot TV moms from the '80s, or insane Senate races from the 1800s, or some other stupid fucking shit that invariably gets split it into five parts to ratchet up page counts, and you feel stupid for dumbing yourself down, and then random internet commenters who decide that while they are looking at pictures of scantily clad women who are not quite naked, they want to get indignant about one tiny fucking joke you made in this thing that you cranked out in fifteen minutes, because seriously, you're getting $20, and if you start breaking down the dollars per hour on these things if you start to try and actually do a good job, you're making less than custodians. Now I don't think we've become all Idiocracy or anything, because there is still real shit out there, that you can read and not get bogged down into and either enjoy or feel, "Yes, this dude is of my ilk, we are together though far apart with cyberbot umbilical cords connecting us." That is what I strive for. And I don't allow myself the $20 HOTTEST CHEERLEADER MASCOTS IN THE NCAA TOURNAMENT'S FIRST ROUND pieces anymore. I do still do some secret unclaimed shit, but it's for straight up businesses, usually of an odd and upstarting variety. I do not feel like I'm better than anybody, just saying, I have my limits. We do what we do here at Rojonekku (and by "we" mostly that means "me" but I consider regular readers a part of this, thus the "we" and I will allow myself to be worked into different directions by comments, emails, personal letters to my PO Box, and bribes with the Donation button) because it is what we would do anyways. I could be scribbling on the walls of abandoned schoolhouses in Buckingham County, or I could throw it into the cyberbot umbilical cords, and let it fester with you, and be ignored by everybody else.

I love the rain, and the teasing of spring. Green is out there in places. There's buds on the forsythia, some even having bloomed during some of these warm spells. My goddamned never-ending belly hole should hopefully be in the rear view mirror for the most part once we flip the flower fairy calendar on the kitchen wall to April, and I will be able to throw horseshoes and poke plants into the ground and walk to my pigs with a giant wheelbarrow full of dumpster produce. It is going to be glorious. The first biggest tease of this was today when a shipment of like 30 creeping phlox plants I ordered from some sketchy place online showed up, in various levels of neglect or care. I don't care. I'm not looking boutique plants to put in the ground and look like flower right now. I want the crummy little fighters that are ugly as fuck when you dig them into the dirt along the road, scattering more phlox every year, and by next spring, they've taken hold, and they show some flashes of color. And then in a couple years, for a few weeks every April, it's a blinding red, purple, pink, and white carpet running alongside the road at my house. That's what I'm building towards. Ultimately, I'd like to build a retaining wall in a square and fill it with sod and sew grass, about 12 feet by 12 feet. Then I want to build another retaining wall on top of that and fill that with sod and plant grass all over that, each level about a foot high, the second level you plant nothing but creeping phlox. That one's about 8 feet by 8 feet. Then I throw up a third retaining wall, about 4 feet by 4 feet, sod and grass, and put me a nice wooden bench up there. And that's where I sit.