Time is on my side, yes it is…right?

As you may have noticed my updates seem to be growing sparser and for that I apologize…but not too fervently. While I miss flexing my mental muscles in front of all of you since I now get paid to flex those same muscles for hours and hours a day that – obviously – leaves me less time to flex ‘em in public.

Another funny thing I’ve noticed is how I now have to cram my news reading in whenever I can. Whilst unemployed I had hours a day to scan multiple news sources, digest and process what I came across. Now I have to rely mainly on my local paper, NPR and Reuters to get the majority of my information so I feel less entitled to spin out grand commentary when I know full well I may be responding to a news fragment rather than a news story.

It was this realization that brought me to my current point and that is; Just how the heck are we supposed to stay well-informed and involved with the world around us if there’s so little time to really learn about what’s going on out there?

Now I’m not going to follow the paranoid’s train of thought and say, “A-ha! That’s why the man keeps you working…so you can’t get a handle on things!” but I can see where that same paranoid’s coming from. I like the work I do and I know that’s pretty rare but even so I can feel its slightly narcotizing effect on me as a I rush headlong through a 40+ hour work week and then try to chill out and relax (which is nearly impossible given the number of music-related events I’m involved with) each weekend.

Is there a solution? Well, yeah, there is but it sort of assumes you’re ready to drop out of “polite” society in order to get your bearings well enough so you can…speak intelligently about the crises facing “polite” society? Yeah, it is a bit of a brain-bender ain’t it? If you want to improve the system you more or less have to drop out of it and that just doesn’t make much sense to me. How can anyone be expected to have a meaningful discourse when they are attacking the same problem from two completely different philosophical grounds with very little in the way of a common vocabulary? They can’t or at least they can’t be expected to ever actually understand each other long enough to be able to decide which parts of each person’s point of view to incorporate into any possible solutions.

Anyway this is just another one of those conundrums that I seem to be able to identify but lack the time to actually solve. I guess thousands of people try to solve this problem every day by creating labor saving devices that might allow us a little more free time and in that free time we could try to expand our knowledge of the world and our place in it and all that…but then since we have this extra free time provided by countless labor saving devices we seem pretty adept at filling said free time without even thinking about it.

Hmm…well that a twister, eh?