mallorys_camera | Resolved: The Internet Is Even More Boring Than Minnesota

Jump: Hugo, MN → Zimmerman, MN – Lions Park: 50 miles
RIGHT out of the lot where we came in… arrows to RIGHT onto CO ROAD 8 WEST
After crossing I-35E, this becomes CO ROAD 14 and then HWY 242
RIGHT onto HWY 10 WEST and then RIGHT onto HWY 169 NORTH… arrows to lot
Shows at 2pm/4:30pm

And then we were in the ‘burbs.

Bit of a shock.

One moment we were squatting in an old fairground surrounded by standing water, endless fields of soybeans and alfalfa, a decaying little town named after some guy who used to work for some railroad.

Next we were practically inside St. Paul’s city limits where the only things the ground sprouts are endless rows of sleek, look-alike condo’s and strip malls blasting the theme song from The Hills: No one else can feel it for you…

(But we can offer you that feeling in an amazing assortment of sizes, colors and prices to fit every budget!)

Civilization. Who knew?

The problem with Minnesota, I’ve decided, is that history never took place here. Only thing that happened was that lots of Swedes and Norwegians emigrated, imposed the singsong inflections of their native tongues on to the local speech patterns, founded about fifteen thousand Immanuel Lutheran churches. The result? Today Minnesota is socially progressive and very boring (unless you like ice fishing. Which I don’t.) Plus everybody sounds like Marge Gunderson.

Hugo, Minnesota was once a real live town. City center was all but destroyed by a powerful tornado in 2008, and there’s really no reason to rebuild since in these parts all culture is mall culture, and mall culture is interchangeable.

“It was named after Victor Hugo!” Ben marveled – main thoroughfare is called Victor Hugo Boulevard.

Personally, I doubt it. More likely it was named after Hugo Bumfuck, assistant to the assistant to the head of the local railroad and the city founders kind of groped around for other famous Hugos they could add to the letterhead.

In the Festival Foods at the local mall, I found this machine:

Made me so-o-o-o nostalgic for my brilliant pal L’il Eddie who had the idea for DVD machines seven years ago but couldn’t raise the capital to start a company and is now a regional manager for The Men’s Warehouse.

Also found out that my old pal ______ ________ finally got booted out of [Studio That Financed Its Art Films From Slasher Movies Before the Hobbits] in the wake of massive restructurings following Bloated Media Company's massive recessionary hemorrhaging, and founded a marketing firm that will act as [Auckland Directorial Enfant Terrible]'s interactive online boutique.

______ was the nicest person in Hollywood. Which meant he had a lot of enemies.

This was back when the Internet was exciting.

Now the Internet is very, very boring. It’s just another distribution channel for the same old content. It’s cable. Boring, boring, boring.

Reminds me more and more of the nebulous mechanical matrix in that old E.M. Forster story, The Machine Breaks.

Sigh.

And harmful in a way as the platform migrates to the portable phone: what does Twitter – the Killer Ap of the moment – do anyway beyond promoting the culture of Attention Deficit Disorder? (I think part of Twitter’s appeal must be that it renamed the ubiquitous “friends list” followers. I mean who doesn’t engage in South American dictator fantasies from time to time, huh?) Sure, NPR and the 24/7 news cycle are all over Twitter: it cuts down on their operating budgets, saves them spending money on real live reporters in dangerous third world locations.

I must be getting old and cantankerous. I don’t really give a fuck about protests in Iran. And all I can think about the build-up in Afghanistan is that Obama (the peace candidate! snort!) is a fucking liar, that Russia and Great Britain before her went down in flames there, that there’s no reason to assume the US won’t too; that the only reason the US is in Afghanistan is because Obama’s figured out his stimulus package is a bomb and that the only way out of Depression 2.0 is to rev up that ol’ Military Industrial Complex. (Somewhere the ghost of Ike is standing on a deserted golf course wailing.)

And I wonder too whether that nice blonde barista who handed me my latte with a smiling, “Well, all right-ie!”, tapping her foot in time to the music – Open up the dirty window, let the sun illuminate the words – will one day thirty years from now catch the sounds on an Oldies station with the same sense of profound aching loss that I feel, say, when the Talking Heads tell me this is not my beautiful wife.