I was reading today that the Federal Aviation Administration is
thinking of allowing passengers to make phone calls during flights. Not just play Words with Friends or read some
spreadsheet, but to actually call your bros and tell them you are 6 miles above
them. And with as quiet as the last
plane cabin I was in, callers will be yelling more loudly than if they were
Texas A & M’s 12th man.
Why can’t this one moment be a place where we aren’t obsessed with
living our reality show in front of everyone else? Flying has already become something that
wouldn’t be recognized by passengers 50 years ago. Flying was something that you may not do in
your life, and if you did, you were big shit.
Lots of room (because fewer passengers means fewer seats), delicious
libations: hell, you could even smoke. It
was Mad Men in the sky. Now you pay for
the privilege of having TSA look up your ass with a flashlight, throw half your
valuables away like you are boot camp, and then crowd yourself onto an overcrowded
plane where people can yak without mercy.
Planes, ladies and gentlemen, have become buses.
There is not one person walking this earth that fathoms that they
won’t be here forever, even when they know they won’t. I said earlier that everyone is starring in
their own reality show, and I truly believe we are. Most people can’t get a show on television
(although they green light some real detritus), but with Facebook, Twitter,
Vine, Instagram and whatever else just was invented by a 19 year old while I wrote that sentence,
every person with Internet access can create multiple platforms to show their
lives to their audience. And that is
what everyone else is becoming: our audiences.
You have followers on Twitter, a ’la Jim Jones. People you have never met are your friends on
Facebook. Everyone has an outlet to show what is unique about you, and why
others should join in and program the DVR of their life to tape your show. Even this site, it is a platform for me to shout
out my angst into the cold winds of the internets.
For a good long time, I refused to be involved in social
media. I acquiesced and wrote on a blog
with my friends, and then after we had to do adult things I stopped. I got on Twitter because it seemed like an
ongoing conversation, and as someone who works in politics, it is also a
newsfeed. And I started this site
because I wanted to find like-minded souls (who may be able to employ me when I
was out of work). I had to create a
brand, because we are all brands. You don’t
get jobs; you sell an employer on your brand.
And a single person, trying to be a brand, is utterly fucking
exhausting.
Again, I am not against progress.
I am not a luddite (and besides, the sales of turntables and vinyl I am
attributing to people loving my speed of music, not hipsters), but I am someone
who does not want to spend every precious second trapped in the screen,
worrying about my responses to questions, having to through every move in life
because it will not play well in the final cutting room version of my life.
I want to love hard, work hard, sleep hard, dream hard (hat tip to
Webb Wilder). I want to know how something/someone
smells. I want the easiness that comes
with being comfortable in your skin. I want
tangible experiences, and I think at the heart of everyone, they do, too.
When someone has a vice, it is almost always because something is
too large and scary to deal with or we want to be something we aren’t, so we
mask it with drinking, drugs, sleeping around, slashing and burning on the Internet-anything
that will keep us from looking inside at the movie that is actually continually
running in our soul-the documentary of your experiences and your feelings. I believe in a heaven, and I picture that
heaven as a huge sun dappled field next to a lazy river. And we all just hang out in the field,
talking and hanging out, like the largest picnic in the galaxy. In that heaven, we look at each other-and
this is a possibly for us all-no savings of money required.
I will end this rant (get off my lawn!). Just for the love of all that is decent, let’s
reserve something that is not assholed up, even if it’s just a plane ride.
AND TELL EVERY FRIEND YOU KNOW ABOUT THIS SITE AND THE
LIFE-CHANGING EXPERIENCE OF READING MY WORK SO MY AUDIENCE EXPANDS-YOU COULD
CALL ME BUT I WOULDN’T BE ABLE TO HEAR YOU OVER THE SOUNDS OF MY AWESOME.
