THE EARTH MOVES UNDER MY FEET...

Most of what I think about is a colossal waste of time... of course, if you've ever seen this website before, you already know that.

I have to assume it has a lot to do with being one of the first wave of the cable TV generation- the first where popular folk heroes weren't Daniel Boone or Johnny Appleseed, but were instead Sgt. Slaughter and The Hamburgler, and instead of idolizing astronauts or the president, we spent time sitting in front of the TV, thinking it would be pretty cool to grow up and be a mutant tortoise who fights ninjas.

So- as an after affect of the brain-sludge I found filling my information-collecting apparatus as a child, I now find that much of my readily accessible knowledge is absolutely and utterly worthless. In fact, most of it was probably originally dreamed up to sell something to somebody... that is, after all, what "pop culture" IS when you get right down to it, isn't it?

As I wander the streets with little aim in particular aside from eventually being at my apartment, I occasionally catch myself thinking about these useless, trivial things.

Meanwhile, on a half-glance at the sidewalk, I have to stop for a second and think of the hundreds (perhaps thousands) of tiny fleeing bugs and creatures I'm inadvertently squashing the life out of as I dopily lope along trying to remember the name of the guy that was on both Bonanza and Battlestar Galactice (it was Lorne Greene. I have his country record!) Refocusing on this for a moment makes me realize how absolutely ridiculous and unfair "life," in all its forms, is. Tiny, harmless bugs go about their short lives with few purposes, but they're damned dedicated to them- collecting and eating food, building intricate dwellings and having sex with other bugs... um... that's kind of it for most of them. Meanwhile, we humans thunder around without a care in the world, undoubtedly destroying countless tiny civilizations on our way to go buy a Jamba Juice because, hell, we thought it sounded good after sitting on the couch watching "Maude" reruns all afternoon.

Humans have all the power in the world. We have the capacity to beat the life out of most of the other creatures on the planet to death. Those we can't pummel, we've been endowed with the ability invent elaborate contraptions to kill them so we can hang their heads in our trophy rooms, devour their bodies, or just because 'fuck 'em. And yet, when finding oneself all wrapped up in the endless layers of bullshit we've created to keep ourselves fat, happy, and entertained, it's easy to forget that, like those little bugs, our main purposes are the same- nourishment, shelter, and procreation.

Suddenly, everything seems like it'll be OK. After all, you should be smiling: You're a human being! You can choose HOW you want to waste your life instead of being a small, nearly unseeable bug smashed to death under the proverbial boot heel of a guy absent mindedly walking down to Ace Hardware to buy a bathtub stopper.