The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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An old friend of ours recently wrote to say he was trying to test drive some Buddhism. Be Here Now. Be in the moment. Pay a little attention. What my old man called Wake the Hell Up! …when we were what he referred to as ‘glommy’. My response, typically smartass, was something to the effect, what ELSE you gonna do? We’re paying attention to SOMETHING, even if it’s dopey.

You want to update your Facebook, well, I guess that’s your world. You want to watch Fox News all day, I figure you like being pissed off incessantly. Your choice. What I think is the world, your universe, is pretty much those thoughts in your head all the livelong day. Change your thinking and you change the world. Course, you could still get hit by a meteor coming right out of left field and WHAP! Brand new day. Or not.

We mostly live in a virtual world now. The kids already put down earnest money on the mortgage. Us old farts are working on how to forward e-mail jokes, but the computer’s tractor-beam is reeling us in, slow at first, but even if we never notice, accelerating all the time.

On the South End we still prefer the Old World, the one where we let nature and weather have a say in what turns and twists our day takes, the one where we still throw ourselves into a building project or a repair job or an art project or planting a garden, what I think of as the creative process, but is really just an attempt to do more than just Go with the Flow, maybe actually try to bend the river. God isn’t the only dude who believes in creation, not down here, no disrespect. You ask me — and, as usual, I know you didn’t — a good religion should ask for more than just paying attention.

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So the World Health Organization just declared a new psychopathology, Gaming Disorder, the addictive propensity to sit for hour after hour with an X-box, disdaining sleep and food and exercise.  Good diagnosis, guyz!  But you forgot to include Facebook, You-Tube, computer addictions, porn and cellphone.  Maybe, just maybe, they’re really all one disease.  Ya think?

I guess the Facebook zombies actually stop to eat.  And it could even be argued that this social media is really social.  A new social, I guess, no face to face necessary, just tweets and instagrams, nothing too up-close and personal.  Tim Cook, the new warden at Apple, recently declared sitting at a computer terminal to be the new cancer.  Thanks, Tim, for asking the troops to stand up.  How about asking them to go outdoors and exercise?  Or quit their carcinogenic jobs?  Or get a life?

We’re rewiring our brains, no doubt about it.  B.F. Skinner and the Pavlovian dogs, peck a button and the bait, I mean the reward, comes tumbling out, time after time, predictable as an IV of opiods.  Try this experiment if you’re a doubter:  put away your cellphone, turn off your computer, unplug the TV and peripherals and devices, see how long you can last before the shakes and the fevers start.  I bet about an hour.  We might be missing important stuff.  You know, Trump, Beyonce, Oprah, the photo from a friend you rarely see, Trump, the latest movie star scandal, did I mention Trump?  If I did, let me add Trump again anyway.

This is our reality now.  We even made a reality show huckster our Leader.  We get what we deserve, the old adage goes in regard to a country and its rulers.  Times certainly change and now they’re changing in hyper-drive.  If anyone thinks, myself included, that there will be a cure for this disorder, we got another think coming.  In about two tweets.

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We all got such short little spans of attention these days, we’re like deer in the median strip of the 6 lane digital highway. Used to be we prized skills like concentration, stick-to-it-ness, focus, diligence, all those traits that are long lost to anyone unlucky enough to own a television or a computer. Now we admire Multi-Taskers, jugglers of e-mail, news crawls, Facebook, text messages and a cellphone conversation while whipping up a dinner for the family between commercials during Fox news. Call me Old School, put a dunce hat on me and make me sit in a corner, but I don’t buy this multi-tasking one little bit. I taught school awhile before I took an early retirement and I’ve tried to teach attention deficit kids whose sole operational mode was switching from one thought to six others in the space of a minute. Trust me —this is a prescription for not learning much of anything, plenty of little.

Deep thinking seems to be a Lost Art. Down at the South End even Shallow Thinking has taken a hike. We got computers, TV, You-Tube, Linked-In, all that stuff like you-all, meaning, we got 3 minute max attention spans. My pals can’t listen to a whole CD — they hit random play and make a radio station out of their CD players.

The world is on constant Channel Surf, snippets of one crummy show, check out the ball scores, click to the news crawlers, bounce through 37 channels of Nature/Food/CNN/chopped liver then start over. The internet should be banned unless we’re on Ritalin. I just hope there are people, few though they may be, living on some remote island of the Digital World, maybe its south tail end, who can still Concentrate, who can plan and build — from start to finish without checking their stock quotations — a nuclear reactor or a Boeing 747 or a skyscraper or a cure for brain cancer.

I had hoped to end this on some pithy, humorous, neatly bundled conclusion — I really had. But … damn if I can remember where we started. Something about crummy memory, I think. All I can say is Alzheimer’s should hold no fear for most of us. We’ve already programmed ourselves for it…..

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