Gorge until you Puke

Life was a lot easier back when I thought I knew everything, or at least, everything one needed to know.

I try to visualize the info-blast, and its impact on the brain.

I got the idea just now, after checking my emails, and finding a deluge of information and opinion, and suddenly,

I felt totally overwhelmed.

Books I had read as a teenager by Alvin Toffler and Marshall McLuhan, though I NEVER understood McLuhan, other than to deduce that the medium is, somehow, the message, that the thought of Western Man is linear and sequential (White Supremacy?) and that the impact of electronic media was going to be GIGANTIC.

The wheel is an extension of the foot.

The hammer is an extension of the hand.

Electronic media is an extension of the nervous system.

"Global Village."

And just now, after deleting all of those emails, I thought of this:

So much tantalizing material, yet so little energy and time.

Back in the day, as we Boomers like to say, you had to really dig for information.

Oh, yeah, you could buy a newspaper for "information" for a quarter and get some "information."

It was good for some things, like the classified ads, if you were looking for a job or an apartment, or an available product you were sure to find what you needed.

But if you had an interest in politics or economics, you would have to look elsewhere. Of course, most newspaper readers never realized that.

Though I didn't realize it at the time, I had developed a taste for "alternate news" way back in the 1970s. I had to buy money orders and mail my subscriptions into the U.S. to get subscriptions to publications like "The Freeman" from FEE and Liberty and Reason magazines.

I was always hungry for the news behind the "news." And I still am but WOW! I think it is coming to a point where I am starting to get sick of it.

Like the time my parents had a bag full of mini Oh Henry bars left over after Halloween. That was back when wearing masks was a kind of a joke, (get it?) So they left it on the top shelf in the kitchen cupboard, thinking it was too high for us kids to get at them. Parents are so dumb sometimes.

So, of course, I pilfered a whole shitload of them. And I got so fucking sick that I couldn't eat another Oh Henry for the next forty years, and I think I have not had more than one since then.

And now I am starting to, well, think of that experience, and associate it with the deluge of information now in front of me, and feel a little bit sick.

I can't honestly say, right at this moment, whether a sudden nauseating reaction to more information would be a good thing or a bad thing.

But knowing myself as I do, I will probably ignore my own advice and continue to gorge, until I puke, as I did this evening.