The Reality Of Last Decade: Pt 2 of 17

The idea was very simple, actually, and I would have been all on board even if I hadn’t lost a coin toss: I was to report on the state of American life, I was to try to describe what it was to be an American, white, happy subject. And we agreed on one thing: the only way to do this right was from far away. It is a Gestalt thing: You can not see the whole picture if you are focused up all close on a fine detail here or there. Like I have always said - You can not possibly cover the war in Afghanistan embedded as a war correspondent, or a member of the press corp. Just the way you can not observe any organism, a seal, a snail, a Golden Retriever from under a microscope – all you could see would be cells and vessels and nuclei, you have to take a few dozen steps backwards and look at this thing through a telescope, or with squinted eyeballs, hand over brow, shielding the sun. As the cliché saying goes, the forest for the trees. This is exactly the sort of thing that makes me physically ill. I knew I would not possibly be able to report on the state of being in mainstream America if I was a participant therein. I would have to get back, back, back, and look at it from afar. I would have to alienate myself from those people I was going to write about, I would have to be cold, alone, uncomfortable in order to have any perspective whatsoever. I knew this. I learned this. I executed and stepped into this with total submission. I was going to do everything I could possibly do,wrong, for the next ten years, and as I accepted the four one hundred dollar bills from my publisher/ friend a few days later, I began to worry : Just what the fuck was I thinking? I had behaved like a mongoloid in the past, to be sure, but this went way beyond the tip: this was not just acting like a retard any longer, but actually becoming a retard. My throat ached. The year was 1998, or 1999, I forget which, and there was a lot of talk about this ‘internet’ thing. There was talk it was ‘the future’, that it would make an impact on our lives. I, for one, felt like it was not going to catch on at all. This being ‘connected’ with other people, ‘going online’ ? A mess of ballyhoo and poppycock, in my opinion. It would never take hold, just like Rap music. I was sure of this. This shit is just for kids, and will never amount to anything in the real world...