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I guess it says a little something about the things I read that I recognize this as a very tired clich

Places I’ve been:

Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela will turn red sometime soon. And I kind of assume I’ll make it to India and China and Australia somewhen, I don’t know why. Antarctica, though, even though it doesn’t show up on this map (a gross oversight on the part of the World66 people), will be a tough nut to crack.

There are constraints written into the fabric of the world which we do not see but are nevertheless there. It’s fun to talk about planetary, stellar, and galactic civilizations as if we will inevitably progress to them; it’s fun. But where’s the evidence of civilizations that came before us? The universe should be lousy with their leavings, the inevitable shitpiles that gargantuan projects always produce. Of course, some say the reason we don’t see any of these things is that we don’t know what to look for. They say it’s like asking a marmot to find a contact address in Outlook; it’s something completely beyond its (and our) ken and ability.

I suspect that the real reason we don’t notice these stellar shitpiles and .pst files is that they aren’t there. I suspect that there are good, unknown reasons that make it virtually impossible for a civilization to spread much beyond where it originated.

We establish the importance of an event or idea by mashing and smashing it, kicking it around, to see where it ends up in the community’s Big Ball of History and Importance. “9/11 goes here; pet rocks go here.”

After the thing has found its spot on the ball, if it’s deemed important, it takes a lot of effort to move it. That’s why no one wanted to hear what Galileo had to say. It would involve a lot of digging and heavy lifting, and everybody was already sitting down comfortably in easy chairs.

If it’s deemed unimportant, it comes to occupy a little hidey-hole in some out of the way place, and is very easy to move about. If one can track down all the mentions of an event, one can fabricate plausible lies and change history: “The pet rock was first mentioned in conversation in Little Rock, Arkansas.” “Really? Whoa.”

Britney Spears will end up in a little hidey-hole in an out of the way place, eventually. People will tell the most obtuse lies about her, and other people will believe them. But since we had the tremendous foresight to hammer her onto an inconsequential region of the Ball, none of it will matter.

Here’s an example of what we will deem important: the coming presidential elections. The coming presidential elections will matter. These elections are weighty, and what comes out of these elections will be even weightier. Sides will be taken. No dumb lies will be told; all lies will be cagy and mean.

These elections are going to be put in the Ball’s juicy center. It will be decades before a historian offers a different view of what happened than that which the winners will dictate: “We’ve agreed to bury it here; we’re going to bury it right here.”

Nobody in the United States is untouchable by the law. Everyone has done something that could have resulted in fines or imprisonment. Everyone. It almost goes without saying, except that I had to say it in order for the next paragraph to make the right kind of sense.

The inculcation of patriotism into every one of us at a young age is identical in form to the inculcation of a sense of religion into church-goers. People have used processes of religion such as this one to set up this thing that behaves like a god: it demands reverence; it demands tithing. It has the power to make your existence miserable, should you incur its wrath.

And, again, everyone has given it cause. There is no one who obeys all the laws or scrupulously calculates his taxes. He does not drive 35 in a 35 mile-per-hour zone, nor does he come to a complete stop. The person who does that would be a saint: The Saint of Traffic By-laws. What kind of crappy saint is that? It’s the crappy saint of a crappy god.

Government and the government are constructs of human imagination and need. They are an attempt to make a real, live, actual god. A drunken, lurching, real, live, actual god, but a real one nonetheless.

Government is not now omnipresent or omnipotent, but we’re trying to improve this god by allowing it to learn how to keep better track of where everybody is, for example, by satellite tracking of our stuff. And if you know where our stuff is, you know where we are. That’s key for a god; You have to know where Your people are. And people are fine with that because they don’t really know what kind of power they’re giving this drunken thing. People aren’t ready (yet) to put computer chips in their bodies, so the chips are going into the cellphones for now.

We can almost pay 10 dollars online to find out where any person is within an error of fifty feet. And I see a day when we can almost pay 5 dollars.

Did the founding fathers know what they were doing? That they were replacing one god by another? I think so; I think the founding fathers knew that they were setting up a substitute god when they separated church from state. That’s practically a smoking gun. And I think they thought of it in just that way: that it was time to change gods. And they knew their new, stupid god would never work if the older gods were allowed to bind to it; without that separation the substitute god would never have taken hold.

And the fathers had reason to do what they did. The old gods hadn’t ever seemed to work out. Why not create a new one? Things couldn’t get much worse.

In reality, things got much better. For a long time. Because the substitute god was consciously made to be crappy, and was meant to stay that way. But now, because engineers–the priests of the crappy god–are able to build things with the potential to allow the government to know where we all are all the time, the god is becoming less stupid. It’s getting smarter, taking on more of the qualities of gods. This is not a good thing. This is not what the founding fathers wanted.

I’m not ready to watch the crappy god evolve and grow; to become less crappy. The reason this god is tolerable to me at all is precisely because it is so stupid. I’m not ready for the government to know where I am all the time. So the more ways I can keep actively bothering the record-keeping function of the government while keeping a low enough profile that I still adhere to the American Compact, the longer I can keep the lurching god off balance and dumb.

That’s the curmudgeon’s goal, even if he doesn’t know it.

A kid’s job is to figure out who he or she is as quickly as possible. A kid’s next job is to start being that person and no one else. That way, the kid wastes no time with people who are attracted to someone he’s not. It’s really the quickest way to surround oneself with people you can stand to be with.

Most kids don’t know that’s their job.