Do you remember The Twilight Zone and Outerlimits?  Probably not, and if you do you won’t admit to it because it will show your age.  You know,  somewhere between Paleolithic and Neolithic. I’m not sure what these words mean but they have something to do with fossils and that’s appropriate.  I don’t care anymore.  I’m an old fart and denial ain’t going to change that.  If it would I’d be denying already.  I miss The Twilight Zone from my childhood.  It kept short story writers alive. I miss the dulcet tobacco stained voice of  Rod Serling’s intro.   I miss Rocky and Bullwinkle too and the lovely lyrical nonsense of Fractured Fairytales.

I can’t stand reality television.  I mean The Twilight Zone, Outerlimits, Rocky and Bullwinkle, the Banana Splits, et al never pretended to be real.  We watched them to escape the real world of school bullies, boss bullies, nagging parents, the Cold War and the threat of Nuclear Annihilation and just plain feelings of  disempowerment and inadequacy…whatever.   Somewhere along the line I feel I’m now living in the Serling’s Twilight Zone where nothing is real and we descend into the banalities of  reality television and mainstream news in an attempt to escape the overpowering obtuseness of our everyday existence.  How many drooled over the Royal Wedding?  I think of Mr Creosote from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life , “Get me a bucket.  I gotta puke.”  I mean, who gives a flying fornication about Charlie Sheen’s latest hedonistic misogynistic rant or how well Bristol Palin did in Dancing with the Stars. Bristol?  Willow?  Rumplstitskin?…forget about it.  I mean the real problem is that The Twilight Zone, Rocky and Bullwinkle, The Outerlimits, hell even the Mickey Mouse Club are more realistic than Reality Television.   At least there was some sort of moral and ethical context.

Celebrity Apprentice?  Jesus wept.  Get me a bucket.

I take daily sojourns into a land of diversity.  Where rednecks use the “n” word, proudly misspell, defy political correctness, deny climate change, scream about communism and actually believe we won the American Revolution without the aid of the Cheese Sucking Surrender Monkies, that Socialism and Fascism are one in the same and Medicare, Public Health Care and Social Security are the beginnings of a socialist take over.  That Jesus was there to assist in the framing of the Constitution, that  Christine “I’m not a witch I’m you” O Donnell actually read and understood the Constitution and that Climate Change is a Marxists’ Plot.   I see these guys at their computers screens pounding their swelling man-boobs and raging about how they will ward off  a Government take over with their guns…but I can’t take it seriously.  In my mind’s eye…I see flab hanging over belt buckles, I see Krispy Kreme Donut boxes opened to reveal the glittering sugared surface of colossal carbohydrate delights…I see happy meal packets strewn across the floor…I see heart attacks and diabetes in the making.  So much for our freedom fighters.

Yes…I’ve become a YouTube addict where I enter debate and fool myself into thinking that I’m making a difference and leading others to epiphanies. Yeah, I know.  Get you a bucket.

I write this because I’m bracing myself for the next volley of conspiracies.  Now that the President has produced a birth certificate…and Osama bin Laden has been killed I’m waiting in dread to hear the next barrage of conspiracy theories and foil hat diatribes.  I know…a bucket.  I should pull my head in and read a book.  YouTube is taking me nowhere, but it’s excellent horror…scarier than Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Innersanctum. In some places it’s like a melding of  To Kill a Mockingbird, Deliverance and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I do wish, somewhere at sometime we’d address the real issues and stick to them.  You know the ones we can actually campaign to do something about…Bradley Manning is in Jail for telling the truth.  Climate Change is a real issue and I will side with science rather than those on the Petroleum Companies Pay Roll or those who read the entrails of chickens or recite the latest Papal Edict.  We still need decent health care.  We still need to stand with the teaching profession and address the inequities in education.  And somewhere looming is the real issue of population, the towering elephant in the room that no one wants to touch.

So I guess to put it simply, with all this going on why do we need to make shit up?  Maybe it’s time to stop the pretend reality and deal with the reality.