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Tuesday, January 21, 2020

The father, the son and the holy ghost


I was always confused by the phrase, "holy ghost" as a kid. I couldn't get the image of Casper the friendly ghost out of my head. Coincidentally, Caspar was the name of one of the wise men or kings who stalked Jesus when he was born.

But I digress.

The disturbing image above is from a filter on Snapchat. There was another one that showed you what you would look like as an elderly person. But I didn't look much different, so I passed. I found this one creepy enough. Again, I can't get over how much I look like my great, great grandfather with a full beard. The spooky little kid me is just wrong. My eyes didn't look that hard when I was a boy. That came with age.

I don't really understand Snapchat or the whole filter thing. They are fun to mess with, but I don't get how people use the app as a social media tool. Why would you send a friend the above image?

But then again, I am a boomer and the mysteries of the younger generations are shrouded in a fog that will never lift in my aged brain.

Though I wonder what barriers were put up between generations before someone came up with Baby Boomers, Gen X-ers, Millennials and Gen Z-ers. I suppose it was just a battle of wills between old coots and young whippersnappers.

The thing that strikes me about the above photo is how much it looks like a portrait done in a photo studio back in the 1960s. Now that is an art that has died...fortunately.

And I do look like a holy ghost. Or at least a ghost.

The image haunts me anyway.


Wednesday, January 15, 2020

Let it go


There are certain topics I have struggled with letting go of over the years: the loss of followers of my blog, being invisible, not being funny and repeating myself. I've tried rationalizing. I've tried bargaining with myself. And I've tried going into denial. But the damned things keep rising up like the undead in an episode of the Walking Dead.

And speaking of the Walking Dead, don't you think after all of these years the zombies would have rotted away? They have been decomposing for years and there shouldn't be much left of them.

But I digress.

The thing that has been bugging me most lately is the lack of comments and the lack of readers period. I know I try and just write for myself, but occasionally having feedback used to motivate me if not inspire me.

The hardest part for me is that the people who used to read my blog and comment just seemed to stop without any indication of why. The Gen Z word for it is "ghosting." It's when you completely cut someone out of your life without warning or explanation. Normally it is used when you ghost someone you were dating. But it applies here.

The thing is, it leaves you without closure. Was it something I said or didn't say? Were they bored? Busy? Dealing with there own stuff? You see how easy it is to internalize stuff when people just disappear?

I realize that much of what I blog about lacks relevance to many of the people online. My demographic is Boomers and there doesn't seem to be many of them represented online anymore. The Millennials and Gen Z-ers just can't relate to a past middle aged white man with an odd sense of humor and a tendency to repeat himself about the past.

But it is the ten or so people who used to read my blog and leave these funny comments that I don't understand.

Oh, I know some people just got burned out on blogging and reading blogs. And social media came along and made it easier to engage without too much effort. Plus attention spans have shrunk substantially. And it's not like I read any blogs myself. But that's mainly because the people I used to read stopped blogging.

I'd like to say I can just let it go, but I know it will always bug me until I post my last post and slip off into whatever there is after you ghost yourself.  But hey, since I've been invisible for years, being a ghost should be an easy transition.

Tuesday, January 14, 2020

And I oop


VSCO girl is a term, generally used as an insult, for a young, usually white woman who posts trendy pictures of herself edited on the app VSCO. Stereotypes of the VSCO girl include wearing scrunchies and Birkenstock sandals, drinking out of Hydro Flask reusable water canisters, saying sksksk and I oop, and generally seeking attention online.
--dictionary.com

Although I don't think there are many redeeming qualities found in TikTok, it has introduced me to some Gen Z terms that probably would have otherwise flown way under my radar.

Not that that would have been a bad thing.

However, when my teenage daughter started "sksksk..ing" the other day I joined her and freaked her out that I knew what a VSCO girl was. It's like I cracked her code.

Granted I have picked up other Gen Z terms while listening to my son while we play Fortnite. These include, "yeet," "salty," "triggered," "bruh," "chill," and "iconic." Oh yeah, and "ok boomer." Not that they originated all of these terms, they just co-opted them.

I've been trying to think of terms we had when I was a teenager. We said, "cool" a lot. Before something was "cool" it was "tough." "Far out" was popular, but mainly with John Denver. I don't think I ever said, "feeling groovy." In junior high, I remember a not so flattering term was to call someone a "fish." I'm not even sure what that meant. I still say, "dude" more than I should.

The thing I need to remember is that just because you know the terms the Gen Z-ers use doesn't mean you should use them. I tried "and I oop" on my daughter and she just rolled her eyes. But there is power in at least understanding what they are talking about without using the words yourself.

I'm cool with that.

Monday, January 13, 2020

And miles to snow before I sleep...


In the land of rain, snow is an anomaly.  It confuses people who are used to a liquid sky and not a frozen one. Ironically, Seattle is the gateway to Alaska, a place where snow just is.

Pretty as it may be, I don't really like snow. It stresses me out because it creates uncertainty and a feeling of being trapped. Schools close. Cars slide. And here, store shelves are emptied at the mention of snow. People in the Pacific Northwest are snow flakes.

Sure, when I was a kid, I loved snow. I loved building snow men and sledding and snowball fights. But our schools never closed because we all lived within walking distance of school. So there were no school buses to slide around on icy streets. And growing up, there weren't a lot of hills to make driving a challenge anyway.

I find it ironic that, even with all of our technology, we still can't control or predict the weather with a lot of certainty. So the weather is like death. You know it is coming, you just don't really know when.

Meanwhile, I stare out my office window at the flakes drifting down and melting as they hit the dark pavement. I am glad it is melting.I have yet to be stuck at work because of snow. My wife and children are home enjoying an extra day off. My dog is there too, probably disconcerted that she has nowhere in the snow covered back yard to pee or poop without getting her butt cold and wet.

And there are miles to snow before I sleep.

Wednesday, January 08, 2020

They say it's Elvis' birthday...

If Elvis hadn't died in 1977, he would have been 85 today. And it is hard to imagine what the King of Rock and Roll would have looked like at 85. But in honor of his birthday I'm posting some photos of my Elvis holiday ornament collection as they looked after I took down the Elvis tree on New Year's Day.







Lady's and gentlemen, Elvis has left the building. Happy birthday Elvis!

Thursday, January 02, 2020

Measuring time


And so it is the year 2020. It doesn't feel much different than 2019...or 2018 for that matter. It's all arbitrary anyway. The calendar is an artificial construct we can blame on the Catholic church to try and give Christianity some credibility by artificially pinpointing when Jesus lived.If the calendar was real, the countdown would have begun when the earth was spit out of whatever star it came from.

Or the countdown would have begun when man's ancestors crawled out of the primeval ooze and started thinking.

But no, we are stuck with a couple of a thousand years plus two decades. And there is still bickering about this being the start of the second decade because there was no year "0." Give me a fucking break. Is that all people have to worry about?

I wonder, if the calendar had never been invented, would we age?

I imagine, though, that people would have just come up with other ways to parse out time. They would probably refer to events rather than years, like, "Yeah, Johnnie was born in the time cousin Ed got kicked in the head by a mule."

Regardless, now we are stuck with the calendar and clocks and aging. I am still startled every time I look in the mirror. My inside self isn't aging as fast as my outside self. My daughter was going through old photographs yesterday. There were the few photos taken during my childhood. I was struck by the black and white moments captured by my mother, primarily on holidays and when were camping. There were also the school pictures that highlighted the gradual transition from childhood to young adulthood.

Since it was more complex to take photos back then, the moments captured were further apart. Today, it seems like every moment is captured. So it is harder to see the impact of the calendar.

Facebook fucks with your brain by periodically dredging up memories of things you posted two, three or five years before. Since I mainly post photos of my kids, it tugs at my heart to see how quickly we lost the years when they were excited when Daddy was home. Now I am lucky to get a grunt of acknowledgement when I walk in the door.

But I suppose that is what measuring time is all about, acknowledging what is past and can never be again. Or acknowledging how much of time we repeat.

Over and over again.