Thursday, March 1, 2018

The struggle to keep up......

  With all the new advances in technology the struggle to keep up can be somewhat exhausting. Between updating your status on Facebook, adding photos on Instagram and doing whatever the hell it is you do on Snapchat the world of social media is a very busy place. But it's not social media that keeps me one step away from full blown sleep deprivation, it's the easy access of information always at my fingertips. When my brain says "squirrel" I can instantly look up the average weight, height and life expectancy of the American breed. Are they different in China? Not sure, better find that answer. This is not to say that I'm savvy with the internet. I once opened up a Google to search for Google. (True story). Nor am I innately in tune with the current pop culture. Last month I came home raving about this cool new song I heard at work. It was called "I can't drink you away". After some extensive research I found out it was only five years old. I say only because last year I stumbled on to this great new song call "Drops of Jupiter". That one was over a decade old. Yep, I'm hip.
  Given the fact that I've spent most of my life with what is clinically described as chronic insomnia the internet has made what was left of my sleep pattern look like a Gitmo detainee. I fall asleep to blaring rock music only to be jolted awake an hour later to the screeching sounds outside my window. I hate morning birds but that is a subject of a different rant. There have been many mornings where my wife comes down the stairs to find me banging away at the computer keys like one of those monkeys that you wind up and they bang to cymbals together. All this for the never ending quest for the most useless knowledge on the planet. I've amassed so much minutiae that I can literally bore myself during conversations. I find myself starting to explain something critical like the flattening of the yield curve or the ten year high in lumber commodities and I have to stop myself. Not even I give a shit about what I'm talking about, why would anyone else.
  But this constant journey to become Alex Trebek (who is from Canada, stop it, just stop it) can be fraught with peril. During one period I had terms in my search history which included, 'best terrorists' is uranium located near copper' 'shipping patterns from the Middle East to Lake Superior'. I'm pretty sure the surveillance drones fly by the house on a regular basis these days. My son Zachary learned the dangers when he was searching for background sound on one of his songs and he Googled bedroom sounds. That will help you grow up fast. My money says he heard noises I didn't cover in that birds and bees speech I mumbled my way through a few years ago.
  The gold medal winner for bad searches to try and fill in the gaps of knowledge still belongs to me. We were talking about card games we used to play and I mentioned I played a lot of cribbage as a kid. I was trying to explain the game to some novices who had never heard of it. I explained how you play on a board, with a deck of cards and so on. You moved up and down the board by moving your peg. I was trying to explain it further and couldn't remember the exact details. So I turned to my trusted midnight friend, Google. If I had thought about it for one minute longer I would have typed in 'Rules for Cribbage'. Sadly I did not. I typed in 'Pegging' which is how you keep score in cribbage. Urban Dictionary had an answer. I wish I hadn't clicked on it. For all of you who are now searching 'pegging' I sincerely apologize. An innocent mistake led to a loss of whatever crumb of innocence I had left. I think I'm going to go back to looking things up in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Do they still make those? Hang on, I'll check.

Till next.......
 

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