The Old World

I can’t stop listening to the Cure. Never thought I’d say that. Growing up, I couldn’t understand them. Robert Smith? The makeup? The glam? The eternal sadness? It’s cringeworthy, right? I mean, what the hell is so wrong with the modern world that this pale freak with his big hair and his red makeup would want to cry for nearly two hours on a soundstage in Somerset, England about “a forest?” But you get old enough and you watch enough Fox News and it starts to make sense. How much can one human ingest Greg Gutfeld’s “jokes” before their entire, self-inflicted BioDome ruptures?

I feel sincerely poisoned by the internet. There’s nothing to be done about it. Even talking about it is “fake and ghey.” It has completely and radically torn our lives to shreds. I guess I could ditch it, but what good would that do? Tried it once: got a flip phone at the height of social media. Didn’t last two months. When I visited Naples in 2017 there was a beautiful, old pizzeria carved right into the city’s walls. Its oven was a hundred years old. Sitting across from our table was an Italian family—glued to their phones. The small child was zoned in on an iPad. Here, across all the oceans, in the buried city I was instructed to avoid while sightseeing in the North. Zombies. Stuck. Watching. Eating. Consuming. No different than any other place. No different from me. And I realized in that moment, there’s no getting away. 

So, thanks, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and Steve Ballmer. Speaking of Ballmer, are the Clippers just meant to lose? Eternally? I think so. That’s their narrative, right? F***ing loser Clippers. That doesn’t mean the rest of the NBA sucks. Quite the opposite, in fact. The NBA playoffs were high drama this spring; sorry if Charlie Kirk convinced you otherwise. Small-market teams cutting down the big giants. Jalen Brunson single-handedly revived the Knicks. LeBron passed the torch (unwillingly). Tyrese Halliburton led his Indiana team to improbable comeback after improbable comeback only to tear his achilles in the Game 7 finals. Poetry. The NBA playoffs this year were poetry. Or in the words of Kirk, “unwatchable.”  

I’ve been thinking about Donald J. Trump a lot lately. Haven’t we all? My favorite Trump is the OG Trump when he told Coca-Cola to eat s*** and then said he’d still drink their “garbage Coca-Cola.” Isn’t that America? Isn’t that my America? Can’t you feel it? No president has ever been so abruptly singular. So dreadfully I-40. All west. Power train. Sunsetting. Sleepless Texas. Forever Oklahoma. Et al. Forever. 

Almost 40 now and I still believe in myself. It’s fractured, and it’s far, but sure, I think the life was (mostly) worth living and the people were (mostly) worth meeting and some of it, especially the simple things, like trees and family and deer and God and apples, make it all worthwhile. But the rest? The rest has been a real flat circle, if you know what I mean. War everywhere. It’s how the money gets made. The big money. It’s really that simple. Do you think the people who run the New World care about life? Your life? My life? About Miles Davis? About soft-serve ice cream? About Manhattan in the fall? About the aliens who built Chaco Canyon? No. It’s all just about money. The people who run this world only care about their blood-stained money. The long stretches of prairie land that fan out like warm, glowing comets across Middle America means nothing for these people. It’s just war, and money, and war. Ghouls. Our war-loving, American ghouls. 

I don’t want to be such a downer, so let’s change the topic. The Cure played two encores at Glastonbury Music Festival in 1990. No cell phones back then. A grainy, VHS tape of the event is all we have to prove it happened. Everyone, from the band to the thousands of fans below, lost in a complete, delirious, sincere, destined trance. It’s getting harder to meet people. To know them, too. Pretty sure it was designed that way. Lonely, black boxes swirling in the night. There was a fierce debate on the internet the other day about fireflies. The dopamine hounds were all in agreement—they’ve vanished. But then I was driving out in the country the other night, listening to a Merle Haggard CD with the windows down. The sun had just set and as I rounded a bend a whole group of fireflies were pulsing in the night. Not unlike us, but they were together. 

A couple stories from this week in our America. Kohberger won. He took a plea. Sure, he’ll have to spend the rest of his miserable, psychotic life in a cell, but he was spared the needle (or bullet, if the state couldn’t get the chemicals). Judge Hippler only required him to admit his guilt for the slaughter of four innocent college students: Xana, Ethan, Madison, and Kaylee. What happened to the murder weapon? We’ll never know. Kohberger’s intent? Probably released in a tell-all book in the years to come. The mystery continues. The answers, fleeting. In the end, Kohberger got exactly what he wanted: control. In New York, Diddy got off. Black women danced outside the court on Wednesday as men armed with baby oil doused their bodies with the fluid. The group surrounding the pair chanted “It’s not RICO, it’s FREAKO.” Classy country we’ve got going on. 

When I think about the Old World, the one from before, I can’t help but wonder what exactly we did. We played outside. A lot. We remembered a few important phone numbers and looked forward to an evening chat. When we finally did get the internet, it was dial-up and sporadic. There was nothing to do on it. Chat? With whom? We already had friends. We had cousins and brothers and sisters too. The internet was a bizarre place, something for wonks and nerds and weirdos. For a while there, real people in the real world just shrugged. And then the wonks took over. Now they run everything. You can feel it. The New World is adrift. It’s completely off axis. The great internal crisis of faith in the Old World was Heaven and Hell. In the New World, Trump gets mad and Apple scrambles shiploads of aluminum and screens across the big sea.

Before I forget: It’s July 4th weekend. I bought a couple ribeyes for me and the family. Gonna listen to “Friday I’m in Love.” Should be fun. Hope you have something planned for the day as well. Here’s to the New World, warts and all. Cheers.

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