aw an interesting thing today (a Sunday) – the wife and I decided to walk over to a local eatery to have breakfast. We’ve done dinner there a couple of times – it’s a little pricy but very eclectic and trendy and rather fun. And it’s the only place I can get what is becoming my favorite drink, Arrogant Bastard Beer. Only not for breakfast.
This breakfast, we ordered our food and sat down, only to see two young guys sitting in the back corner with a bight light shining on them, bantering furiously away about StarWars, Jurassic Park, remakes, reboots, the entire American mythology thing. A small computer-linked camera was propped in front of them. Seems like one guy was the host, the other guy as sorta, I dunno, dinosaur fanboy. They were hard to ignore but fun to eavesdrop on, all this pointless stuff that passes as a media stream (hey, I’m doing it here, but this is slower and possibly more thoughtful).
There were all sorts of thoughtful elements of conversations like “I’d really love if the Jurassic Franchise had a Tyrannosaurus Rex fight a Triceratops (made me smile – I really ached to point out the new line of thinking, that Rex was nothing more than a scavenger who hunted by his nose and walked like a large sandpiper, and was only turned into a total screaming monster by American hucksterism. True – I mean, look at those little arms). But it wasn’t my place, wasn’t my show, my circus or my monkeys. I’m just an old guy with books, you know?
But the notable thing was at the end. They were all shoulder-punching, laugh-out-louding, nerd-jumping, hail-good-fellow overcompensating geekouts until they wrapped it up. The moment the camera stopped, the host turned to his laptop and started checking things, while the other guy gazed at his phone. Day and night. On. Off. Total animation to off-the-clock dead silence.
Makes me think of all the media we deal with, the reality TV, podcast, blogging ocean of useless crap that floats our bobbing culture about. Really, at the end of the day, what does it all matter?
For me, it comes down to one thing.