The world is built on problems
that resist resolution
where the more singular
our strivings to correct the wrong
the more our corrections look like
playground argument spouted by adults,
in other words 'politics',
or some other half-arsed effort
at marrying humanity with humility.
We under-estimate the limits of our will,
as our errors take on a life of their own
making us responsible for results
we don't want to own, but have to.
The future comes from us accepting where we are.
When with their apologies
the rich and famous feel better
about their second apology
than felt about their first
where they knowingly crafted the first
with a knowing and thoughtless crassness?
Certainly not the public,
when the media
give the sloppiness a free pass
an quote and requote it verbatim....
Everyone who has an online life,
however secure their computer,
endures the adverts that are carried
by the popular programming of their choice.
Adverts are to programmes
what tics and fleas are a dog,
stuff their owner to deal with.
So if you want to deal with your advertisers,
then in the search engine of your choice
put in the name of a company whose adverts
you don't mind and your computer world
will be set for you to receive regular adverts
from that company; because you chose the company
and you never wanted their product, just adverts for them, job done.
The baggage the adverts leave on your computer,
the trackers and the cookies etc, can be dealt with later.
When ever I am advised
that I 'should update my life',
or repent of my past - the better
to absorb the latest version of virtue -
I don't know how to respond.
I know my past, it's rights and wrongs,
and what of it that I should not repeat
-most of my childhood/being parented
the conditions of which I am now glad
were unique to those times anyway.
So why should I change what I say
about myself and my past, when change
becomes one cheap lie after another
to fit around the latest in consumerism
I am who I am whether I want to lump it,
like it, or live in a past where I know I belong.
Paywalls were put up by newspapers
to fund the future of journalism, online
after the bottom dropped out the analogue
advertising market and far fewer folk
bought printed newspapers.
Digital print relies on fixed subscription
where reliance on adverts often hides
behind pleas for paid memberships,
where the newspaper proprietor says
'you can't take this print away from behind the pay wall'.
That advertising has pushed print news
to this defensiveness place is old old news,
and many who are interviewed can't help
but go along with the media of the day,
to get publicity for their latest project.
But when money and power colour information
don't expect a press free at the point
of it being easily read any time soon,
much less in the future.
divides into so many specialist subjects
that don't/won't reference each other
that where wealth creates knowledge
whatever we learn isolates us from each other,
as, like poor Alice in Alice in Wonderland,
we each go down different rabbit holes
of isolation and misunderstanding.
I have no antidote, or any way of making
the scientific rabbit holes meet t up
with each other, all I try to look after,
the better to limit it, is my sense of isolation
And never is it more easily unsettled
than in the media schedules we follow,
where as long as the schedules remain fixed;
as long one programme follows another
in the right order as printed in the magazines
that list everything, then listeners and viewers
know where they are. The print represents reality.
But when a broadcaster decides that radio
and television should be a multiple movable feast,
a smorgasbord of programming where any programme
can be available at any time, when it is first broadcast,
in the week, no longer matters then also the order
of the listener's life no longer matters either.
Trying to listen to new editions of the programme
when it used to be broadcast, or according to when
the listener regularly likes to listen is one answer.
But what to do when the programme, or presenter,
is 'retired' and strangers take over your listening experience?
Then you are the stranger, to yourself and the past
which is no longer sustained, or sustainable.
Time has become truly flexible and temporary.
