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Life has been happening and things twist and turn, for better or worse, we keep spinning slowly around and around on life’s carousel.  I am lucky enough to not only be on the horse but one of the cool ponies that go up and down as well.  As I write this, I wonder if that even meant anything at all or is it just me, once again enjoying the sound of my own voice in my head?

Now, back to Marks’ statement: “Living ain’t hard, it’s just not easy”:

Being a child of the 70′s and 80′s I was witness to drastic advances in pretty much everything imaginable.  I mean, every generation has had this but I think that the last 30 years has seen leaps and bounds in a magnitude that not other generation before had witnessed.  I want to stay with technological items in this post, I think.  Things, in theory, inanimate, that are or were supposed to make our lives easier; perhaps too easy.  Obviously, I am no enemy to these gizmo’s and gadgets but there are limits, which a lot of us seem to have forgotten.

If I follow you down the highway on your road trip to wherever you are going, what will be left to say when you reach your final destination?  It was a three hour drive and for those three hours, you were on the phone for 2.5!  What, pray tell, was so damn important that it could not wait until you got there?  Or were you, in fact, speaking to someone else the whole time? I am sorry but to me that comes off as a little self-important and egotistical and a bunch of other big words mixed in.

Can your children do math without a calculator?  Can they add in their heads at all?  Why can’t the cashier behind the register, count out my change without having to look at the monitor screen?  I understand that we come up with better way to do things but I actually think “better”, is the wrong word.  Maybe I should just use, “easier” instead because it does seem more fitting.  We create anything and everything to make our lives more convenient; the less we have to do the better, right?

I think we’ve gone and screwed the whole thing up yet again.  Once more, we are on the edge of the abyss, an abyss that we ourselves have created and we’re not sure if we can make it over or plunge into the darkness forever.  Haven’t we done the exact opposite of what was intended?  While trying to “better” our existence, we have actually made it worse.  Trying to make life a little (a lot) easier, we have made it harder. 

How distant we have become, with not only society as a whole but ourselves as well.  I am scared of myself so I will take the pill that they just advertised on the television for that must be what is wrong with me, why else would I feel this way?  I call it, “Afraid to be alone in your own mind syndrome”.  We have made ourselves obsolete and we do not even know it yet; we’ve run out a terabytes and there is nowhere else to go but in.

I am not sure if it is irony or not but we talk on cells phone nonstop, yet we have lost the ability to communicate with one another.  Nothing more than a hollow: “How was your day”, or “Have a good one.”  Have a good one what, a case of herpes and do you really care about my day?  No, no I do not think that you do.  We are to self-absorbed in our own sitcoms that all we can think about is turning the ignition and speeding on down the highway.  To where though, to where?

No where.  We are on that road and unlike most of our roads; this one has been paved very, very well. . .

Until next time and until I figure it all out. . .

~BP Smith

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