Little Thoughts

The trouble with vacations is - no, not the work that piles up while you're gone - that's a trouble, but not the trouble. No, the trouble with vacations is that they give some perspective on the blah blah blah that makes up your daily life when you're not on vacation. The kind of perspective that leads one to characterize their daily life as 'blah blah blah'.

Maybe there are people who don't get this feeling. People who are eager to return from vacation to resume all the meaningful and fulfilling things they were doing before they were interrupted. Or maybe this never happens, because the people who would feel that way don't (need to) take vacations.

I don't know. But being back 'in touch', I find that all the disparate irritants - the U.S. government in solemn debate over whether to effectively declare the Geneva Conventions obsolete, tragi-comic newspaper headlines like today's National Post's, "Mother of killer says she feels sorry" and for some reason most irritating of all, the endless stream of banal advertising and television - like the alcohol ad from the 'rebellious' company which take its name from piracy (technically privateering), where someone thought it would be clever to take the already beaten-harder-than-the-proverbial-dead-horse 'What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas' phrase and translate it into a pirate setting ('what happens below decks stays below decks' - with the exception of cannon-fire, and defecation one presumes). Yeah, you're right, I didn't finish that last sentence, it was getting long. Anyway, you can probably guess how I find all that stuff.

Maybe it's because I can't tune it out that I find advertising so irritating. Or maybe what The Beautiful South sang is true:

"The answers fall easier from the barrel of a gun
Then it does from the lips of the beautiful and the dumb
The world won't end in darkness, it will end in family fun
With Coca-Cola clouds behind a Big Mac Sun"

Maybe I'm just in a bad mood, chemicals in the brain a little off, as they readjust from a diet of weisswurst and giant pretzels back to the regular burgers and chicken nuggets, or maybe I just need to wait a little until the preoccupying hum of the daily 'blah blah blah' re-envelopes me in the fog of bore or maybe something else again.

For the moment, I feel like making things a bit more introspective around here, but moments can be small - especially in comparison to the distance between posts, so I guess we'll see. Maybe the current of blogging logic is inexorable and will bring me back to a comfortable downstream heading of mocking, fisking, linking, and one line commentaries before too long. Or maybe it will seem easier just to go ashore for a while, rather than blog upstream. Or maybe this is just a little thought that will seem foolish in the morning light - prompting an internal debate between 'blogger ethics' (what goes on the blog stays on the blog) and just sweeping it under the digital rug.

Maybe I'll leave it at that, for the moment.