Time... Passes...

Ay, mierda... How'd that happen? It's 2007?!? What will be my excuse? Home ownership, perhaps? Racing History? My job?

Yes.

Volumes 1-3 are for sale at www.dppstore.com... I'm working on Vol.4 now -- and expect to have the final files up by the summer solstice. At that point, I can turn my attention to other things. Like the Racing History website and Lulu.com print-on-demand versions... So many ideas... so little time...

Time. It's not really about time these days. It's about brainpower. Can I get an amen, sistah? So many days, I get home from work, I gots nothin' left in the noggin' but a hankering for some din-din and a desire to watch the latest episodes of Prison Break and Heroes... (And gawdhelpme if it ain't Monday!) So bloggin' and writin' and workin' on RH files... jeeze it's all a lost cause. Ah well, and then the politics catch my attention and it's all over from there. I turn into a ranting, sputtering, whiny little liberal pain in the neck.

Heh. She said neck.

I'm serious. It's all too much. In fact, I've been thinking that's the whole mechanism of oppression in our modern society. Wait, now, hear me out: Freedom of speech, and all that, right. Great things. The Internet. This blog and all the thousands of others... Comix (my current obsessions are www.toothpastefordinner.com and www.marriedtothesea.com), movies, music, talk shows, reality TV, entertainment galore... So we got work, our jobs, whatever they may be -- from studifying at the local university to selling computers to making a magazine, etc. The job takes up 1/3 of your day, another 1/3 of which is lost to sleep. The remaining 8 hours are for eating, excreting, washing, tidying up, family stuff, and entertainment. Right? Videogames. Magazines. Novels. The Web. MySpace. It's so easy to consume. There's so much choice. Your brain slowly but surely becomes overloaded. Oh yeah, and why aren't you going to the gym? You're really getting out of shape, y'know. We live such sedentary lives...

Creation is hard, whether that be a letter to your grandma or a short story or a song. It takes large chunks of time and concentration. Why bother? There's another episode of Law & Order on TV. What time is it? Ah, bedtime... See ya' tomorrow, world.

The weekend is for recovery. Whatever you do, don't use that time to think, question, reason, or any of those silly things. Be a good consumer. Go shopping. That'll show those terrorists. Look how free we are!

This is the most insidious form of oppression in human history -- that which masquerades as freedom. We're free to say what we want about the Grammys and Brangelina and fashion and Anna Nicole's death and the latest trial of the century and whatever else is there to take our attention away from things that matter. We're free to consume. Free to be customers. Free to waste time.

Time = life.

Such is freedom. Welcome to 2007.