Unexpected rant. in A small but passable life.

Friday and Saturday it was too hot to go to the pool. Yeah, 111 degrees. I did manage to make it this morning. By noon it was 100 degrees and I’d had enough. When it is this hot I wear my sea straw hat to the pool. It’s like a loose weave straw hat and you soak it in water, plop it on your head and it acts like a swamp cooler when the breeze blows through it. But if there’s no breeze and the sun dries it out in a few minutes necessitating another dunk, why it just gets too brutally hot. Time to go sit under the A/C again.

Only 105 degrees today. 62 degrees back in the Ozark’s. Yeah, I know.

I finished reading “The Circle” by Dave Eggers. Published in 2013 and already some of the things he envisioned for the future have already manifested. And yeah, scary stuff. Scariest being the total lack of privacy coming for anyone living in an internet enabled society. At the present time that’s 51% of the world’s population. And what is selling the willing relinquishment of privacy is the selling of fear. Yeah, scary stuff.

The book did answer one of my most frequently asked questions though- “What is it you actually DO sitting at your job in front of a computer?” I’ve never got an adequate answer. Ever. And the main character in the book, who’s working for the cult-like planet wide tech companies ex-boyfriend who she left behind in her small hometown put it perfectly. He said she deals in gossip like a girl in middle school and spends her day “Zinging”, smiling and frowning, commenting and re-posting towards no real purpose. He called it “dorky”. I’m paraphrasing, of course. But you get the jist.

Anyway, just like every time I read one of those novels or even read a non-fiction about the possible direction this technology is taking humankind, I feel like never turning anything on again that has the possibility of connecting to the interwebs.

March 2015. A month in the woods. The only connection to the outside “world”, the matrix, was the FM (one station) and weather radio. I survived and didn’t feel as if I was missing anything.

The end of anonymity, yeah, that was probably the beginning of the end for a truly workable internet. But hey, you can’t sell stuff to strangers (like people have done for thousands of years), according to the advertisers and corporations. And that’s who pays for the internet.

Remember IM’s? All those anonymous conversations? Never any need to know what the person looked like or know their real name. Why? It wasn’t necessary to have a decent conversation.

Now, as soon as a person meets you for the first time and hears your name they run off to the restroom and look you up on google. Yeah, people are that pathetic.

Fuck, there was rant. Or a rave?

My first OD moniker was “The Raving Maniac”. Until some woman, trusted with non-anonymity, drove him to self-deletion from the site.

Anyway, I’ll be returning the two novels to the library tomorrow and picking up a non-fiction that is waiting for me.

Two weeks until we’ll be heading East for a bit.