Our Newly Discovered Ability to Work Within the Preferred Limits

Crankiness and advancing age are almost always concurrent. Babies and old people. They’re cranky. Well, we’re getting older (and mellower and cooler) by the minute,

 

incessantly these days. What sets it off most is a nationwide ADD plague, a country of poorly developed adults who have the attention span of a squirrel in mating season

 

“syndrome” to go with it. The pharma and Medical Industry mafias have made fortunes off of befuddled man-children who are easily convinced that their shorter attenti

 

external forces more powerful than their willpower (and brain power). This is not to say that there aren’t some folks with faulty wiring, constructed errantly, with c

 

the ability to focus on whatever one chooses to focus on. But it’s easier to take a pill and be afflicted than to strengthen the weakened mind muscle. Thus we have a nation

 

college graduates who don’t read books or newspapers or long essays or short fiction or novels. But they have plenty of attention for their screens and texting and shar

 

generally pretending to be “connected” while broadcasting to the world their alienation from other humans and themselves. It’s no wonder that the preferred form of c

 

younger generation is through Twitter, a kind of public party line, where geographically separated souls can scream into an assuring vacuum and feel slightly less al

 

are limited to 140 characters or fewer. Say it fast and onto the next – or don’t bother saying it at all, because while you’re composing your thoughts into a cogent expres

 

planet has rotated and the attention has shifted to whatever comes next. Writing provocative, darkly satirical novels for a population of Twitter-obsessed thumb zo

 

foolhardy. Short (or no) attention-span “readers” want the pictures first and the headlines last. What used to be the in-between stuff no longer holds much interest,

 

cat video to comment on, or anoint with a magic Like if you’re in more of a hurry than the usual hurry. Life hasn’t gotten faster. People are living it faster, with less tim

 

simply slow down. Stay. Be. Breathe. In. Out. Choose where you want your mind to be. Choose what to focus on, not on what you’re constantly told to focus on by every form of

 

good. Our addiction to comfort and convenience has been repackaged successfully as the highest end for our technological means. But look around – if you can take your e

 

you’ll see fat and discontented Americans morosely waddling to their car, wondering why having more of everything hasn’t yet made them happier about anything. Surve

 

everyone is face down in their palms, making marvelous use of the opposable thumbs that God gave them and not the monkeys. For cranky old guys like us, the days of the eleg

 

over. We’re resigned to shouting into the ether, which, books or no books, is really what any written communication is. Get in, get out. Say it in fewer than 140 characte

 

irrelevant, which is a kind of modern shame, because it means you have no usefulness to thousands or millions of others who follow your utterances with the kind of atten

 

academic achievement. What they’re hoping to learn or know we can’t say. But we’re certain that in some ineffable way these brief messages make their life better. More

 

So thank you for your time (if you were able to make it this far). We surrender. No more loquaciousness, no intricately woven word hammocks to lay back in and luxuriate in

 

poetry. Instead, we’ll put our superior powers of attention on composing transcendent modern philosophy masquerading as a series of Tweets. Too bad about the limit w

#OMGamazing, #besttweetsever, #IdidNOTgetthis