Random Thoughts Upon Completing My 3,000 Week on Earth

It’s April. Say something!

Do you know what day of the week you were born? There are calculators online that count units of time from certain dates. You can get as personal as the very time you emerged from your mother’s womb if you need to know how many minutes you’ve been around.

Anyway, recently I learned I completed my 3,000 week on Earth the other day. As I remarked on Facebook, this would be a delightfully creepy and/or motivational counter to have on one’s computer monitor, ticking off how many minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months you’ve been alive. Not that I’d want such a thing. I’ve all the help I need harshing my bliss. But maybe you would.

The wild red plastic flamingos of spring have arrived.

Maybe it was the brush with cancer last year (my prostate, R.I.P.), the sudden illness and unexpected death of one of my closest friends the year before that, the unnerving coincidence of reading about so many 57 and 58 year olds who have died, but I’ve been obsessed with passings and passages as of late.

So many things that used to be a Big Deal are now just something that happens because it always has happened and no one has the heart to shut it down. Consider the numbers of how many comic books are sold—mere thousands, and to whom?—versus movie tickets for films featuring the same characters. Consider how many people in a country of 325 million actually bother with late night TV shows, the long-since legendarily unfunny Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons, etc. If they’re lucky, it’s close to one percent of that 325 million.

Many of these skewed numbers are a result of the mix in demographics. If The Ed Sullivan Show was on today, and The Beatles were playing...well, it would be very “niche,” to put it politely. It wouldn’t be the unifying cultural event the original February 1964 broadcast is remembered for today—if people can even imagine such a thing.

I know I’ve covered this before, so here’s a new one you might not have thought of: ever notice how TV shows just go on for so many seasons now? Although I don’t watch television outside of the occasional episode of Supernatural, social media does much to keep me filled in on what’s out there and what’s popular. Still, every now and then I come across a television show I’ve never heard of that’s already starting its fifth season or thereabouts.

Talk about your niche markets. There was a time when either everyone knew about your TV show, or no one did, because it was already canceled for lack of viewership numbers.

I suppose now you need just enough.

I live in a sort of “niche” town. I just drop the “h” and say it isn’t for everyone, because it isn’t.

A passing that no one else but me seems to notice is Google Plus, or G+. Admittedly, the only time I posted on there was when I had a blog post to promote, but it was still fun to browse the feed from time to time. 

I suppose the Internet is the new 1960s-1970s prime-time TV, because this show got pulled for low ratings. People used it, but it wasn’t the new Facebook as Google had quixotically hoped. Some would say it went on for years longer than it needed to. They’d have a case. It was started in June 2011, so it did have a fairly long run before the 2018 data breach and the decision by the brass that it was more trouble than it was worth to maintain.

Say whatever, it’s gone. Google Plus, R.I.P. I’ll miss it, but that’s probably just me.

What else is there? Nothing, really. I think of all the people and things I know that are gone and sometimes, in my darker moments, I wonder what I’m still doing around. Aside from that final book in my zombie series people are waiting on me for, it’s really quite simple. 

I want to see what happens next.

Note to self.