Keeping Me Regular

The Misses tells me that it's no good having a blog if I don't regularly post anything.  "No one will ever read it," she says.  I didn't bother to point out that there would be nothing to read so of course no one would ever read it, kinda like trees succumbing to gravity in vacant wooded areas.  But that line of argument would only have gotten me in trouble for being obtuse, so I bit my tongue (but I didn't bite my typing fingers...hmmm...is it possible to get in trouble after the fact?  I bet I can.  I hope I'm wrong).

In order to improve readership, even though I have no way of knowing who reads this anyway, I will endeavor to post at least one blog a week.  Not enough interesting things happen to me to fill a once-a-week void, but I’m good at making things up.  So sometimes I’ll just pretend interesting things happened.  For instance, did I mention that I was recently elected the country’s first black President?  My parents are so proud…

A Blog About Nothing

I was thinking about nothing the other day.  For those of you who know me well, you probably believe this is not noteworthy, and certainly not blog-worthy.  Most of you believe I do nothing most of the time, so I should probably be thinking of nothing while I’m doing it (or is it more accurate to say “not doing it”)?  Anyway that’s not the “nothing” I’m talking about.  I’m talking about actual nothingness, not just the absence of thinking.

What started me on this line of thought was drinking a beer.  After I finished my brew, I took a look at the mug.  It was a good mug, and it lead me think about cups in general.  Cups, bowls, and empty vessels, they are pretty important things.  But the important part of a cup lies not in what the cup is, but what it is not.  Without the empty spot in the middle a cup the cup isn’t much use.  The bowl would be a plate, a platter, or a Frisbee, or something, all of those are a far cry from a bowl.  So I though about the nothing in my poor empty beer mug and decided I need a refill.  BARKEEP…

A few days later I came back to nothing and thought I’d write this blog about it.  Maybe it’s interesting, then again maybe it isn’t.  Either way something about nothing is what this blog is mostly about.

I never realized how important nothing is to our every day living.  First of all we need lots of empty things to get us through the day.  We fill things up all the time as we get on with our daily minutiae.   Empty backpacks get stuffed, empty chairs get sat in, empty brains get filled (in some cases), empty gas tanks get filled and drained, empty lots get houses, empty closets get packed to the brim with accumulated junk, the list goes on.    We use nothing all the time and never think twice.  And it’s not just us.

On a larger, cosmic scale, nothing dominates the universe.  Not getting deep here, I’ll probably never do that (Gnarls Barkley was talking about me in Who Cares? when he sang, “It’s deep how you can be so shallow.”).  I’m talking about the actual nothingness of space.  Most of the universe consists of nothing.  Big Empty Nothing, in capitol letters.  The nothing to something ratio heavily favors the nothing side of the equation.  This is probably a good thing for us sense it keeps Earth from bumping into inconvenient asteroids, and the Sun from rubbing metaphoric elbows with other stars and in general nothing keeps us safe from galactic turf battles that would create an apocalyptic bad hair day on a cosmic scale. 

But ok, I mean space is a big place so there’s lots of room for nothing, kinda makes sense.  On the complete opposite end of the scale we still find a lot of nothing.  The atomic universe is also filled with nothing.  The space between the nucleus and the orbiting electron(s) of an atom is vacuum, nothingness.  (Before I get an e-mail from you do-it-yourself quantum physicists, I do understand the wave function of the s-orbit of these electrons may be thought of as “filling” the whole space, and the area may also be filled with weak force exchanging bosons/photons between the electron and nucleus. But for the sake of this blog we’ll call that nothing, since it’s still vacuum.)  And outside the atom there’s still nothing; nothing between the atoms themselves.  Admittedly a little less nothing in my granite counter top compared to Number One Son’s inhaler, but still nothing inside everything we think of as something.  That’s a lot of nothing floating around out there not just in the bottom of my beer mug.

Not only is nothing important on a physical level, we need nothing on an emotional level.  How often do we look forward to doing nothing?  When the chance arrives people will set aside a weekend to do nothing.  It’s almost like scheduling an anti-vacation.  We set aside the time in advance, plan what we will not do, and look forward to the big, empty weekend.  Then we return to work on Monday and tell our coworkers about “wasting” two straight days.  The exploits attract envious stares that almost rival descriptions of fantastic Caribbean getaways (that feature doing nothing just in a more exotic location, with suntan lotion, and frozen drinks).  Doing nothing provides us a moment to recharge the batteries for the 90% of the time we are doing something.  If you have kids that percentage may be 110% of the time.

This Thanksgiving when you take your annual minute recite the list of things we’re supposed to appreciate every day (but still don’t) things that fall in some form of “health”, “wealth”, and “family” add “nothing” to this year’s list.  You may get a funny look for saying it out loud around the table, but who cares?  You may also get a funny look for accidently sloping pumpkin pie on your shirt, but it won’t stop you from eating it anyway.

Voting for Perks

The ability to vote in [mostly] free and fair elections is something we Americans have been [mostly] blessed since the day we declared independence and sent King George III’s men packing back to England.  (Skipping over the details of women’s sufferage and the whole 3/5 thing, don’t get bent out of shape, it’s just not the point of this blog.)

 

For the last couple of hundred years the perks of voting have remained the same.  Now they are good perks, don’t get me wrong.  We get to promote our best and brightest individuals to the highest office in the Free World.  They then work tirelessly for the betterment of every citizen and sometimes even manage to make lives better in far off countries that most of us cannot find on a map.  Places we’ve never heard of like Iraq or Tripoli or Viet Nam or somewhere.  That’s a pretty nice perk to voting.  Make our lives better and help the third-world children to boot, that’s a good deal.

 

Some perks are not quite as altruistic, but still nice.  Take for instance the entertainment value of Presidential Elections.  This must be a perk because it keeps expanding.  Ever since the Lincoln/Douglass debate sold out train stations across the US, Americans have been clamoring for Presidential Election theater.  Newspapers used the Adams/Jefferson election to hock fish wrap all the way back in 1796.  Every year the perk of election entertainment gets a little more expanded.  Modern times have seen televised debates and lavish conventions/pep-rallies.  This year a few examples of the theater perk include a 24-hour election radio channel (P.O.T.U.S. ’08 on XM radio), more televised debates than I can count, a primetime Pres-o-mercial, and daily fodder for 24-hour talk shows and news broadcasts.  We like Presidential theater so much we can’t even wait four years for it to start.  This year a few states helped out and moved the caucuses up a few months so we could extend the entertainment season to over a year of presidential intrigue. 

 

Another perk comes in the form of cold hard cash.  This must be a perk, I’m just not sure how it works.  I mean when you spend this much money on something someone, somewhere has to be cashing in.  This year the candidates spent over a BILLION bucks on the race.  This perk is a little trickier to understand then the last one, but someone, somewhere is making out like gangbusters every four years.  Maybe there’s something for me in here…I think I’ll spend the next four years figuring out the proper way to print signs and buttons and bumper–stickers and stuff.  That’s where the money is getting spent right…?

 

The last perk is entirely new.  How’s this grab ya, vote for someone and get free stuff.  You heard me right they’re giving away free stuff to voters.  “Oh, you voted today?  Good job, don’t worry about feeling good having exercized your civic duty and all that ethereal stuff, here have a taco.”  Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea, and I like encouraging people to vote.  It’s just that this seems awfully close to bribery.  Here are a few of the voting giveaways:

Starbucks – get a free coffee for voting.

Krispy Kreme – get a free doughnut for voting.

Ben & Jerry’s – get a free scoop of ice cream for voting.

California Taco – get a free taco for voting (and tacos aren’t even American Food!)

Various Bars – get a free beer for voting (you’ll have to find your own bar, I don’t want all of you crowding my haunts).

There are more, but I got tired of looking for them.  I think you get the picture.

 

Has anyone noticed the regression of perks?  They go from the original idea of making the world a better place to focusing on frivolous entertainment to virtual bribery.  I’ll think more about that as I stumble into the third Starbucks within a square mile of my house, licking sugar off of fingers trying to figure out how to work a cage-match into the primaries and worrying about how our next president will help the poor deprived people of Country-Not-Yet-Determined.