When I was so much younger then (no, despite the lyrics, I'm not younger than that now) all my friends and I talked about was sex, music, sex, sex and occasionally sex.
But when you get to a certain age the dialogue suddenly takes a hard right and suddenly you find yourself exclusively sharing all the things that are physically wrong with you. Most conversations become the kind that you would hear during an intern's round of hospital patients. The check off list of ailments and conditons becomes THAT long.
Over the last 48 hours the discussion of Hillary's pneumonia has taken on the same shape and color of the discussions cited above---with one major difference.
Nothing is being shared. Nothing is being reported. It's basically a one line news story that is the equivalent of one of those endlessly repeating below the screen crawls that could say "The end of the world is coming on Tuesday, wear a hat!" After a while no one cares about those stories anymore and in fact most would rather hit themselves in the head with a large polo mallet than have to read that information AGAIN.
But the talking head news do go on and on and on and if the reporters are a little bit daffy like Chris Matthews it starts to feel like you're visiting your loopy Uncle Murray at the Happy Retirement Home who is telling his favorite joke for the ten millionth time with his pants somewhere around his ankles.
I have had pneumonia. Twice. The first time it was bilateral and I can tell you unequivocally that it sucks eggs. You feel like a fully drained balloon with the energy of a small rock. You got nothing. The only cure is a battalion of invading uantibiotics and bed rest.
Now if I repeated that story four hundred trillion more times, you might mistake this blog for an episode of Hardball.
We have now watched Hillary weeble wobble to the SUV from every conceivable angle and at every single speed imaginable with the exception of a satellite POV but trust me, it's coming. NASA AND TMZ are working round the clock to get you the feed. Suddenly it's this generation's Zapruder Film.
My real concern is the subtext of all this. The campaign, or Camp Pain as I call it, is nothing more than a Florida dinner theater version of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff?" It's basically watching an older abusive couple beat the living crap out of each other. For a year.
What troubles me deeply, is our collective empathy. I don't know about you, but my first reaction to hearing the news that Hillary was now Ill-ary was: "Oh God. I hope she'll be okay."
But it seems that rest of the world went right for the worst case scenario and suddenly everyone was running around like an arm flapping, frantic Butterly McQueen screaming, "I don't know nothin' bout birthin' babies!"
And you know what that makes all of us? Most of us? Half of us?
Deplorable.
And what did the Trump aka The Wannabe Commander and Mischief say? First silence and then some scripted Hallmark quote. He didn't go on the attack because all his buzzard aides around him told him that if he made a big deal out of it, they would go after his medical records with the brutal force of Ryan Lochte ripping down a gas station sign.
Here is the take away from all this.
We have become the equivalent of the bleacher section of the Colesium of Ancient Rome who have gathered for a sunny afternoon of blood sports and beer.
Reality Shows, the kind that gave birth to the character of Donald Trump (and in this case I have the birth certificate) are TV's version of the exact same kind of entertainment.
We want our entertainment's worth of hair pulling, face punching, red-faced cursing and humiliation
This is so the Age of No Enlightenment.
We jeer. We cheer when a victim is down. We lie. We blame. We attack. We shoot little children in a tony Conneticut school, do absolutely nothing about it and then hit the button on the remote control to see what else is playing on the limited attention span of our lives.
It's become so bad that when you actually scan the actual five thousand channel guide of your TV, it seems like there is nothing on. We have become that numb, that jaded. That empty.
We are, like Caligula, so bourgeois bored that the only thing that will get us through the day is some good ol' American deviant debauchery and a bowl Tostedos.
Information (as opposed to wisdom) has become nothing more or less than a notification blip that flashes in our brains just as fast as it disappears only to be replaced by the next one and the next and the one after that. You really do have to stop in order to feel something. Like caring. Like love.
You have to become your own traveling intern show check all your vitals in order to assess your true needs that will ultimately lead you to the discovery of who you really are.
Years ago during my baby writing days, a good friend said of my work, it was typical me. "All icing and no cake."
Well at least I had icing.
Today someone left the cake out in the rain.
And I don't think that I can take it.
Sent from my iPad