Here in the great white north we had an ice storm and the power went out for five days. And I had no idea what was going on in the world. None whatsoever. Because I only really had the radio and that was just weirdly innocuous given the state of the world. Something was going on in Israel is all I heard. And that terrified me.
What if all we’re left with is mainstream media?
Good heavens! It is bad enough we have to go through all this revolutionary change, but to not know about it as it happens? That would be my hell. Mind you, that may happen anyway in Canada with Trudeau and the censorship bills. We will end up knowing only what our government wants us to know and they tend to not know much or they know a lot and do not want to tell us. Whatever which way you look at it, it will be very disconcerting, disquieting and disturbing.
Not only will we eventually own nothing but we’ll know nothing too. And something tells me that is not good. But then, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the natural state of human beings is simply to eat, sleep, drink and putter about until death without a thought. ChatGTP will do all that thought stuff anyway.
So I spent this last week learning nothing. I worked very hard at not researching a darn thing. So there were riots in France and Israel and Portugal and and… I did not verify it. I thought to myself, why do I need to know why? More than half the people I know don’t realize these things are even happening let alone why and apparently they still get up everyday and eat breakfast and go on about their day. Why can’t I be like them? Why can’t most of us here in the written world be like them? Maybe we’re the idiots?
We have to self-reflect sometimes so I chose to do that by learning nothing for the week, so much so that I literally have nothing to write about except knowing nothing. I observed that the cat had done her bi-weekly swat at the dog to put him in his place and he would now live in cowardice and fear for awhile until he forgets what he learned. I observed this without researching canine/feline psycho-social relations in a closed environment.
I observed that municipal workers were happily using their tree-eating machine to gather up and chip broken branches along the side of the road and I did not need to know what happened to those chips and if anyone was profiting from it and wouldn’t just leaving them there to degrade be better for the environment? I observed the crows shifting from one pine tree to another without cawing as if they were in predatory stealth mode and I did not then start thinking about predatory drones and the war in Ukraine. I observed that I did not use the word “the” in front of Ukraine because I learned last week not to do that and I observed that I have not learned a thing about pronouns all week. This actually made me almost happy.
The height of my non-learning experience I believe arrived with the delivery guy. The bastard delivered my new shelf modular thing. And it came with instructions. The question then became—was it possible to put together six modular things without learning anything new? So I opened the box hopefully because at least I knew how to do that without having to learn it. I got rid of all the packaging and plastic and stuff, another old thing I’d long ago learned including what was and wasn’t recyclable. Then I was faced with the panels and the screws and the-thingies-I’d-never-seen-in-my-life-before and the 12 page instruction booklet. And I knew I had been defeated. It was the-thingies-I’d-never-seen-in-my-life-before that did me in. I would be forced to learn which side was up and what they were. They would defeat me.
So I went to bed and cried for three hours… well… not really but that sounded dramatic and gawdonlyknows this piece needs some kind of drama. The point was and is, there is not a day we don’t learn something, inadvertently or vertently (which is not a word but I kinda think it should be.)
So the great question is: why do all these generations under the old people not listen to the old people at all? Old people have learned every day for a lot longer than they have. What are they supposed to do with all that learning? It’s not like there is a recycling bin for their learning or even a garbage bin.
All the things old people have learned are left to flutter foolishly in the breeze hoping someone will listen. But few do. And so all this argument about knowing history in order not to repeat it really is a meaningless thing now. Nobody wants to know. We are to arrive in the rushing-down-on-us future like little children, babies even, knowing nothing or knowing all sorts of things that no one cares about. That is life. Now.
Somebody must have wanted it that way because it wasn’t always that way. I should look up why that is now that I’ve given up on not learning anything. But I won’t. For a day or two. I am relishing the quiet.
This week’s earworm for the sake of nothing (well, it has the word nothing in it anyway). Ain’t it always the way it is, there’s always money for nothing and no money for anything:
Or maybe this:
Syl Shawcross lives in Canada. Subscribe to her sub stack: syl.shawcross@substack.com
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