One Way Beer Conversation

If I was sitting at a bar and talking with you, this is some of the mindless gibberish I would be spouting, about how life has changed and how we can make it somewhat better. Grumpy old man stuff. Obviously we can't make life better or worse because life evolves socially and culturally and there's no going back. It has a mind of its own so to speak. But there is certainly the ability to whine and complain about what has been lost, or simply changed. And like any good bar conversation, it deteriorates as it goes on, though it sounds better to me by the end and after the last beer, as I am writing it and as it would evolve in my neighborhood bar, were we sitting together drinking. I think this is an interesting writing experiment. At least I'm enjoying it - especially the beers. It is somewhat incoherent, snooty, changes subjects rapidly in a disconnected fashion and hopefully emulates in a random fashion, disconnections of conversation as seen in drinking establishments. All slurred speech has been edited out.

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There's a lot of talk these days about limiting social media to adolescents and younger. Especially in Australia. I'm sorry, I really don't care about Australia that much. They are killing all those cute little rabbits. They refuse to pass a referendum to recognize indigenous peoples’ rights. For about 250 years. They even deny them their water rights. Nothing personal but it evolved from a penal colony. Actually a poverty colony. During family reunions, pretty much the entire population can say, “We're very proud of our great-great-great-grandfather. He was dirt poor and lived in the streets of Liverpool and got caught stealing bread and was sent over on a dilapidated ship to live here in this godforsaken place. And look at us now!”

Anyway, I can't necessarily argue for or against social media censorship or restrictions, but it certainly seems to me that social media has a more negative influence on adults overall. Adult human behavior is generally egregious. People are nuts.

I don't believe in censorship and many forms of limitations, but I do have one critical suggestion, based on personal historical perspective.

I remember my childhood all the way into college that at exactly midnight, the few TV stations you could watch would shut down. In a very ceremonial way. There would be the image of a waving American flag and the national anthem would be played. That's right, to celebrate the end of television each day, we would pay tribute patriotically to the wonders of our country. I often wondered if anywhere in the country people stood up with their hands over their heart or if they saluted as the TV shut down. I can imagine that current generations find this hard to believe. In retrospect, I do.

But the result of this night time pause was very subtly important. You could no longer mindlessly entertain yourself by staring at the screen. As someone who didn't go to bed at midnight, I generally turned out the lights and put on some music to listen to and daydreamed, usually while smoking a joint (college years). Occasionally I might read something. But whatever I did was significantly more stimulating and in retrospect, enjoyable, than staring at the idiot box. Which I admittedly did enjoy immensely most of the time. Somewhat addictively as many of us do.

So my suggestion for current times is not about censorship or parental rulings or other subjective means of telling people what to selectively watch or do. Let's face it. People are going to do what they want to do and Prohibition proved it. You can't stop people from doing what they want to do if it's available. The key is to really make it unavailable. No black markets. Turn it off at the spigot, so to speak.

My suggestion is simply to shut everything digital down from midnight to 7:00 am. That's right, no cable TV, no streaming of visual imagery. Cell towers almost totally shut down. Except for emergencies. Music is excepted, is perfectly fine and in fact to be recommended. It is the highest art form of humanity. The human mind was never intended to immerse itself in endless artificial digital visual imagery 24 hours a day, nor to engage in electronic conversation with others 24 hours a day. So no texting or email either. Perhaps with the exception of night workers who can have their access to the digital world restricted for 7 or 8 hours a day during the daytime.

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A second suggestion for improvement of quality of life is to develop a new field of therapy called Eye Contact Therapy. It has become apparent to me that when I am up and about, people are generally unable to maintain eye contact with me for more than 1 to 2 seconds. This may be related to me and my personal appearance and affect, but I have also watched others and note that eye contact is becoming a thing of the past. The human eye is now predominantly in contact with screens. Accordingly, I believe there is a strong need in society for eye contact therapy, eye contact clinics and therapists to retrain modern humans to be able to sustain a conversation while maintaining eye contact. Eye contact is a pretty important thing because as they say, it's the entrance way to your soul. And expresses a great deal about who you are. As well as making possible the entire process of human connection.

So I'm considering either a GoFundMe or an actual startup business for eye contact therapy. Let me know if you want to participate.

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Other improvements involve a restructuring and enhancement of the entertainment industry. Enough with the comic book movies, city-sized cruise ships, and current trends or actually lack of trends in music.

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There are two things in music that absolutely astound me that I would never have predicted. Both of them involve stagnation - the failure to progress. First of all, who would have thought that rap would still be popular after 40 years? In pretty much the exact same form. Yeah, I know, I'm an old white guy who just doesn't get it. There are some rap songs and entertainers who are quite good, but simply going nowhere. Their artistry is not evolving into any higher or more progressive form. It's the same shit over and over again. When rap came along, (I personally think it was started by Gil Scott-Heron, when he said, “the revolution will not be televised” in a song), I figured it would last about as long as disco, perhaps the lowest form of popular music during my entire lifetime, excluding the Broadway musical, of course. And emblematic of disco was the lowest form of fashion imaginable at discotheques. Whatever. Just as the blues and jazz and R&B progressed (e.g - Charlie Patton to Robert Johnson to Elmore James to Muddy Waters to BB King), rap music needs to move on as well. I can't tell it where to go because I'm not a musician, but I'll be able to hear it when it happens.

Even more astounding than the stagnation of rap and a lot of pop music, is the absolutely insane stagnant continuation of progressive rock from the '60s and '70s more than half a century later. It should now be termed regressive rock. I'm sorry, but watching 80-year-olds performing the same music that they performed in their twenties just doesn't cut it. It's not only boring, it's boorish, self-indulgent, and they are not very good anymore. Which is why a lot of them have backup bands of younger, more technically proficient musicians, who unfortunately are still playing the same old riffs. It's very clear to me that some of these performers actually have early to moderate dementia, but through rote memory and robotic machinations, they are still able to perform the same concerts they did when they were young. Except they really suck. I believe all of them should undergo psychological testing and if they fail, they need to be placed in an assisted living home for out of date billionaire performers. Or simply get sent back to their own palatial mansions under strict supervision, with a caveat that they can never return to public performances ever again. Thankfully this situation will take care of itself in another 10 years or so.

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And finally we come to comedy. While comedy is admittedly entirely subjective, I don't find any current comedians particularly funny anymore, with a few exceptions. Of course, I think part of that is that there are no longer real comedy teams. Two-person comedy teams are simply funnier than endless monologues. The interaction of two people with a straight man and a funny man and the ability to show reaction and emotion has been lost. Yeah there have been a few recent ones like Penn and Teller, Key and Peele, and a few others. But they are more performers with TV shows than they are true comedians. I'm talking about the classics like Abbott and Costello, Burns and Allen, Stiller and Meara, Laurel and Hardy, Reiner and Brooks, and the largest team of all, the Marx Brothers. These people were truly funny and though you may not have liked all of them, everybody liked some of them. It seems to be a lost art and there's no reason why it can't be resurrected either. Well, maybe there is. Tastes change as do attention spans. I think I need another drink.

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All right, fine, maybe I have had enough. My wife seems to think so. I'm spilling more beer on the floor than I'm getting in my mouth. I have finished my eighth beer and that's all I have to say right now. But I really did enjoy our beer chat. Not that I really cared what you had to say.