Monday, March 14, 2011

My Own (un)Reality show

Sometimes, I get concerned about myself. I'm trying to consider whether or not I'm really beginning to lose my mind. Or maybe time is playing tricks on me for playing with it yesterday. It could be I've already had the breakdown and am sitting here in my ill-fitting but comfy green terrycloth robe in the common room at Shadey Rest instead of at home. That would explain the nurse with the 'Mildred Ratched' name tag who is approaching while prepping a needle.

When I woke up this morning, I was feeling all nice, warm and comfy snuggled all in with my 3 1/2 foot, white silk top hatted, teddy bear. Maybe there really is something to this "life is good" attitude. The top hat, by the way, was used in a Broadway show called "But Never Jam Today", a musical version of  'Alice in Wonderland'. Story for another day. Anyway, I made a quick trip to the bathroom and back, jumped under the covers, and thought how nice it would be to sleep, sleep my pretty, sleep. The clock displayed 7:06. I had woken up, so I knew everything was basically okay. I slowly got up, but doing so managed to be a significant victory for the day. I started the coffee making and moved on to the bathroom. I sat down and after a minute looked at the clock. It was 7:58. Wait. What? Where had almost an hour gone? Oh, no. No no no no no. That was yesterday. Was this a delayed reaction? Some trick? Was that the deja vu cat from the matrix?  Did I get abducted and returned? I didn't feel probed, psychologically or otherwise. A flash back to Blue Sunshine?? I know I didn't fall asleep. Where did the hour go?

About a half hour later, reading the online almanac: it turns out that today is Einstein's birthday, which I suppose is only really useful to know as an example of the synchronicity of events.

At any rate, time's been parsing in linear mode just now, and I see that my email account is suddenly getting a much better class of spammers. I think it started after I got those "Browse foreclosed homes in the area" notices. I don't know how they got the idea that I was going to suddenly move up in financial standing from the underclass to join the extreme poor and have a little spending money. Then I started getting email from Canterbury Who's Who to update my listing. Now, for the last couple of days, I've been seeing emails from Rachel Ray, Jessica Alba, Ellen DeGenerous (oh, I do hope so baby, I do hope so please send money) and now -just now - Salma Hayak! I delete them all without reading them, of course. It's not hard to figure out.

So I'm not sure what time zone or plane of relativity I'm on, but things are starting to get a lot more interesting in a fun sort of way. I think I can handle it.

Okay. I've been listening to the community radio, a jazz program called Soundscape, while web researchurfing. Just as 10am arrived and the morning news show was starting, the theme music morphed into something a little more familiar to the listeners of my own show (Recycled Radio - Sat's 6-8pm). It was the opening of "Uncle Sam Presents : I Sustain the Wings". The announcer then introduced Major Glenn Miller who started talking. Okay, its 1944 all over the airwaves and I'm at home doing other things. Something somewhere seems to be off kilter. You know, they do keep saying that the earthquake in Japan moved the Earth's Axis. But no one has discussed that little item any further. And to make everything worse, one of those "alert" words just got used : 'Axis'. I don't know what to think. Did one of my old radio show recordings somehow make it into the station's automation software MegaSeg? Had the producers of Free Speech Radio News used a clip from my show as their opening? I mean that would be been nice, and I'd really like to believe it, but I doubt it, ya know? Then the sound stopped. 1944 played again and stopped in the same place. Then there was a sound like a needle at the end bump of a record - for what seemed like 20 minutes. 11am arrived, the station switched to playing Chamber Music, but there were no WVEW 107.7 call letters, no public service spots. Now, could this all be some strange track in MegaSeg, or it could be that at long last I have finally lost my mind? Just now, as I was wondering why this couldn't have happened in my early 40's when it would have been a lot more fun, Maxwell Lawyer's voice suddenly greeted everyone and announced that the station would play more chamber music.

I just found out that somewhere between major network NBC and the Hulu site (of which they are part owner), someone seems to have censored the ending of Zac Galaifianakis' Saturday Night Live opening monologue. I'm not overly familiar with Mr. Galaifianakis and his sense of humour, so out of possible respect for a performer, and my dislike of riddiculous uses of censorship, I'm going to post the whole damn routine.



See, the way jokes, monologues, plot lines, and so forth used to be presented, there used to be a build up (exposition) and finale, joke, payoff, major tune in next year plot finale, et-cet-er-a. But you wouldn't get the payoff, the joke if you hadn't had the build up that set it up. That all changed with a tv show, "Laugh-In", which simply quick cut from punchline to punchline and/or finale. People still laughed. The set ups were all commonly known clues and the pattern for what was to come. But without them, those clues faded away from meaning and use. All you had was the laugh without reason, cut to the next line. And as sure as herd instinct gets everyone to the check out line at the same time, people still laughed, just without meaning. Action without understadning. By using the quick cut logic of if a,b, c (obvious pattern assumes cut right to) z, linear time changed slightly, or our perception of how we use it did. If those suseptible to it all mentally think a,b,c quick cut to z, then all have dropped maybe a billionth or two of a second in the mental process of perception. Where did that time go?  If you add it all up does it reach an hour twice a year? And if I missed something and am a billionth-millionth of a second off from the perception time of others, am I then in the world of the shadow people? Am I evolutionly superior or inferior? Maybe I'm just doin the Billy Pilgrim thing. I did answer that ad about becoming a time traveller several posts back. Oh, before I forget it, thanks and Happy Birthday Al.


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