IM: Re. That Prolonged Excursion to the Past

This is related to my most recent attempt to justify my -- well, I was going to say "existence," but that's too grand a stance. My most recent attempt to justify my laziness. After I wrote it, I thought "There was some other point to that . . . ."

And indeed - there is. It's not even just laziness so much as lack of interest. I can't get too excited about tuning into the food debate or following the discussion about COOL or the most recent effort to eliminate antibiotics because . . . .

I've heard it before. As I said in that previous internal memo, I just returned to the present from a seven-year excursion into the past and I've heard all of it before. Antibiotics? Check. Confinement? Check. What foods Americans ought to eat? Yawn.

That, my friends, is the curse of the historian. This current events stuff is only interesting to me as yet another example of the kind of stuff I've been reading up on for seven years. Only the dates have changed.

So I think perhaps, and this is only a guess on my part, that my brain is now seeking a way for me to return to the past because maybe, sob, the present isn't sufficiently interesting. Although I add (please!) that I'm fascinated by a whole lot of stuff in these here times in which we live: the future of print (or words), pot legalization, the uses and abuses of "journalism" and how opinions are made. Capitalism. That's a biggie for me. I'm reeeally interested in that. Or, uh, constructs of capitalism. Or something like that.

But meat and the debate over? Not, I'm sorry to say, so much. I do enjoy discussing it with informed folks, but on a day to day basis, I'm not inspired enough to say much. Unless something truly grabs me, some spectacular example of X. Then, yeah, I may emerge from the daze.

Otherwise . . . . hmmmm. And at this point, I'm asking myself: "Do I really wanna screw with this 'add images to everything' stuff or not?" Now THAT is something in which I'm interested: How we humans are exploiting this trove of "access" to the marketplace of ideas. The agora.

Never mind. I suspect I'm still too stupefied from the crash landing to think coherently about anything.