Biden’s most recent debate with That Guy, here in the summer of 2024, didn’t go over well. He’s looking his age. And why not? The dude’s 81 years old. I admit I wish Harris was taking over the ticket. But you know what? I’m close to wrapping this diary of woes and hopes, and if there’s someone who’s gonna chronicle more thoughts concerning whiteboyism after the ‘20-’21 era, it ain’t gonna be me. I’ve put in my time for queen and country in that regard. Yup, that is indeed a whiteboy platitude of syntax.
I will offer one final suggestion concerning That Guy and his pending bid for re-election, despite him being a convicted felon who can’t legally own a gun, yet somehow still qualifies for stewardship of the nuclear codes. Please, please, carefully examine the details of the GOP’s Project 2025 with a very critical eye, because what’s contained therein, should it be set into motion by That Guy and his lackeys, will most definitely put the United States on track to become a Christian nationalist militarized state straight out of Orwell’s signature book. I shit you not. Take a close look and see for yourselves.
Project 2025 includes ending no-fault divorce, a total ban on any kinds of abortions, a ban on contraceptives, higher taxes for the working classes, elimination of unions, cutting Social Security and Medicare, ending the Affordable Care Act and the Department of Education, teaching Christian religious beliefs in public schools and using public taxpayer money to fund private Christian schools, banning African American and gender studies at all levels, banning all books about slavery, ending climate change interventions, increasing Arctic drilling, deregulating big business and big oil, dismantling the FBI, the FDA, the EPA, and Homeland Security, increased sentences of capital punishment, using the military to quell civil rights protests, mass deportations of immigrants and incarcerated Americans, ending birth right citizenship, and banning all Muslims from the country.
I’m not kidding or exaggerating.
Read it. For your children’s sakes. And vote accordingly.
Anyway. Back on topic. In late 2021, a new QAnon movement rose, its believers somehow expecting JFK and JFK Junior to magically reanimate and resurrect at the same spot in Dallas at which the former was assassinated, whereupon they’d re-assume their ultimate destinies…reinstating That Guy to his natural place as the rightful leader of the free world. Because, you know, that’s what would be first on the list of dead Kennedy Democrats, should they rise from the grave. Not only did JFK fail to show up, a good portion of Q supporters who’d come to town and lined the roadsides of Dealey Plaza in expectation of JFK’s reemergence also had tickets to the Rolling Stones concert in Dallas that same evening (they made a weekend out of it!).
Upon realizing the latest prophecy wasn’t going to manifest, they quickly adjusted their sensational focus to the rather obvious conclusion JFK had decided to unveil his grand resurrection at the Stones gig that night, whereupon it was realized by Q concert attendees that Keith Richards was in fact JFK himself, and had been playing with Mick all these years in a ‘hide in plain sight’ sort of fashion. This Q thread, for me, took the Q cake, because as longtime readers already know, I’m a big Stones fan (Charlie Watts’ death earlier that year was another gutting blow in that Covid era of loss and cultural upheaval). And weirdly, I never once thought Keef was a former American president who’d faked his own death and managed to hoodwink the entire world for the last fifty years.
After my vaxx and booster, I managed to catch not one but two appearances of the Rolling Stones in Southern California. They played a couple of nights at Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium, the new home of the Rams and Chargers. I couldn’t care less about Los Angeles NFL, we’ve never had a decent team to back here, unless you count the ill-fated Raiders stint, which I didn’t because every pigskin fan knows damned well the Raiders belong in Oakland and nowhere else, including Las Vegas.
It was quite the unsettling experience, after two years of social distancing and relative isolation, to be packed shoulder to shoulder among seventy thousand rabid Stones fans in a stadium size venue. There were unquestionably a great number of un-vaxxed attendees, and despite the venue’s Covid entry mandates (proof of vaccination or recent negative test), a majority of attendees bypassed the wearing of masks entirely throughout the show. And sure, I understood why even those who were stalwart in their Covid protocols were throwing caution to the wind after their respective vaccinations, because it’d been a long two years, and it was time to rock. Obviously, I felt the same way. As I’ve said repeatedly, live music feeds the soul, and my soul was starved of it, same as everyone else. I wasn’t quite sure about attending a Stones show without Charlie there. He was the bedrock of the band. Every true Stones fan knows that. But it seemed somehow an honorarium to attend, as he gave his approval to Mick and Keith and Ronnie to play on before passing. His replacement Steve Jordan was a stellar choice, who’d already been jamming with Keith in his solo band for years, and Mick and Keith decided to dedicate the tour to Charlie’s memory.
Both shows kicked ass even without the Wembley Whammer, shocking as it was, and though me and my girl kept masks on throughout the pair of two-plus hour shows, though I occasionally was distracted by the mask-less masses, I managed to enjoy myself immensely, figuring if I contracted a Covid variant after triple-vaxxing and masking, perhaps there were worse ways to risk death than at a Rolling Stones show.
That was a conceit, I know. I took a risk, as everyone had been doing since the get-go, some to greater degrees, some to less. I understand it’s arbitrary. But I did little of that before being vaxxed.
In any case…nope, not only did JFK not reveal his vaunted presence, I failed to the resemblance. Keef’s transmogrified state from assassinated statesman to legendary, mummified rock star eluded my best efforts at seeing it. Maybe I needed better glasses.
I’m gonna close this penultimate entry by touching upon the continued saga of online horseshit, that bugaboo I’ve oft derided yet still haven’t forsaken entirely. I mean, here I am on Substack, right, which technically is in theory social media for writers. Social media and smart phones are alpha-omegas for Americans, no less so for me, though how I try to wean myself off of it, time and again, and again. That endorphin release we’ve crafted for ourselves in the immediate gratification of social media apps and personal telephones has driven us into lemming-like existences.
A number of new terms popped up in the last four years in regards to phone relationships and vicarious monitoring of social accounts: zombieing, submarining, breadcrumbing, and orbiting.
Everyone is now familiar with ghosting. Most everyone has done it, or had it done to them, in some manner or degree. These new methods of passive communication take that method and run with it.
Zombieing, termed by author Gabi Conti in the pages of Cosmo, is the practice of someone who, having ghosted you in the past, comes back out of nowhere and tries to reconnect, be it in a romantic or a platonic fashion, though they acknowledge that something did indeed occur to result in the original ghosting, whether it was a busy lifestyle (the usual culprit) or some personalized offense they didn’t bother to sort out.
Submarining, a term coined by U.K. author Rebecca Reid, involves using a similar tactic, but doesn’t bother to explain the ghosting whatsoever, feigning ignorance, or possible owning an outright lack of awareness regarding their original error. People forget their social maintenance far too easily these days. App dating has only worsened those practices, as has social media stalking.
Orbiting is a phrase from author Anna Iovine. It’s the practice of cyber stalking an ex-partner or ex-friend’s social media posts, interacting with their accounts without real life maintenance of the connection.
Finally, breadcrumbing is the method of passively flirting with someone by liking their posts or watching their videos, without any direct efforts to reach out or make actual contact via DM or email or what-have-you.
They’re all cutesy terms indicative of our spiraling depths of dependence on social media. I’m quite happy to report I’ve never ghosted a living soul in my life. It’s a dick-less move. I’m more than happy, usually at my own expense, to directly tell someone when we’re done. I have a reputation accordingly. But I’d rather people know where they stand from the horse’s mouth, and sure, ghosting by proxy kind of accomplishes that, but only if one prefers reading between lines. I don’t. I’m more of a direct kinda dude. It’s far better to end something succinctly, so that there’s no chance of confusion, nor wonderment about reparation, or lack thereof. Better to close the door, than to leave it perpetually open just in case you ever want to revisit an old option. Letting things go with clear, concise direction is an acquired adult skill. Sadly, I’m forced to concede I have, at some point or another, suffered derivatives of these cyber-social behaviors. It was frequently my old school, Gen X, seventies-by-the-pool ancient geezer ass that failed to recognize those new methods and cues of disconnection. To be fair, I don’t think they’re an improvement. They enable people to avoid handling confrontational issues head-on. Which I understand. But nobody ever said being an emotionally evolved adult was easy. It’s not.
Conversely, I’m not saying my method works any better. Quite the contrary. My efforts at bidding people farewell with clear tokens of final sentiment were uniformly met with antagonism and accusations of high drama and unnecessary fatalism. People don’t like it when a door is definitively shut, and it didn’t matter how much I soft-sold it, how much I glad-handed them, how much genteel verbiage I added to color it respectfully and honorably. They thought I was riding a high horse.
In a 2020 article for The Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance compared Facebook to a doomsday machine, relaying a number of tenets which identified the tech behemoth as a dire threat to humanity, something I touched upon in these pages as well. She compared the social web giant to actual doomsday machines and posed an array of unsettling truths about Facebook, including its social contagion experiments, its ability to influence elections and genocides across the world, and its platform allowiing for white supremacist outlets. She suggested its imperialist evolution of a kind of digital colonization was near absolute across the world, tagging it as a border-less nation-state with a population as large as China and India combined, governed by secret algorithms.
Social media is forging an inauthentic reality perpetuating the continuation of class warfare because of the massive scope of its scale, wherein policies of global society are decided more by social media over any Supreme Court, United Nations, or body politic.
We have to get off the ‘net.
We have to end our dependence on this thing.
Do I see the irony of asserting such even as I’m clearly utilizing the web? Of course I do. This is how we have to reach each other these days. But that doesn’t mean we can’t select a different tool in our tool belt.
Social media does not make us better, as originally intended.
It does not connect us.
It disconnects us.
We have to invest in something else.
At least until we evolve more, spiritually and emotionally.
Fall back on your 70s and 80s nostalgia, Gen X.
We didn’t have the ‘net or smart phones then.
And somehow, at the end of the day, we made it home all the same.
*Compiled from Decemberish, 2021