Bliggity, blogity, blog blog blog

I just got back from a long weekend trip. My daughter Lauren is coming home from school next weekend. My wife and I took the truck up to Chicago on Saturday to help pack her stuff and bring it home. We stayed at the lovely Palmer House hotel and I made a point to drink a $7 beer while my wife enjoyed a lovely $12 glass of wine which helped wash down our elegant $13 mini-hamburger appetizer. Having spent almost $40 for two drinks and a snack, and fondling my $51 overnight parking pass, I knew, finally, I was truly in the lap of luxury.

Lauren found this incredible website which offers theater tickets at a 50% discount if you buy them on the same day of an event. For the low, low, price of only $50 a ticket we were able to sit in the orchestra section last evening and experience the incredible Joffrey Ballet.

There are things in life you imagine are quite elegant and full of culture to experience, like the symphony for example. I find that, often times, I would just as well listen to the symphony on my headphones in the luxury of my own home. That isn't always the case, of course, and hearing Beethoven's 9th live, or any kind of music which can impact you physically, is always going to be so much more impressive in person than at home.

The art form that has surprised me just how much I am affected by it is dance. The first piece (Los Noches) performed last evening by the Joffrey Ballet was something absolutely and truly remarkable. It was so powerful as it engaged the entire company in a cascade of motion that I only wish I could recollect more clearly after the fact.

So, I had one great cultural experience to compensate for roughly 12 hours of driving in the truck there and back again.

Along the way I devoted the time to listening to numerous podcasts of Paratopia and the Paracast. I enjoy both shows, but I by far prefer Paratopia. Jeremy Vaeni and Jeff Ritzmann, both 'experiencers or high strangeness (TM)' have been running this show for the past few months.

Each episode is about two hours long, with the first hour devoted to interviewing a guest and the second hour is a one on one personal discussion as they try to dissect the meaning behind the topics being explored.

Jeremy is extremely humorous and self deprecating while Jeff, who definitely has a sense of humor as well, is more thoughtful and exact as he dissects the strange topics they explore.

This weekend my daughter Lauren, clearly in a moment of frustration, asked me why I keep following this UFO topic and these UFO people. I think she is just mystified why I waste my time with such nonsense. My answer was simple and succinct. It is because people who are being abducted by aliens are much more interesting than people who are not.

Let's face it. If you are at a garden party and must strike up conversation amongst a group of strangers, and the topics range from the weather to local sports teams, just how much more interesting is it going to be when you find a party guest who, honest to God, gets abducted by aliens on a regular basis!?

Man, I live for this kind of shit.

If the world were filled with far more people who get abducted by aliens on a regular basis, it would be a far more interesting place. Now, that said, my baseball team is currently in first place and I am hopeful they will stay that way well into September of this year, nevertheless if an alien abductee has something to share with me I'm probably going to turn off the game. After all, it's a long season and you may only get to hear this story once.

I really enjoy listening to Jeremy and Jeff on Paratopia. I do get a little frustrated at times, while listening, that I can't chime into the conversation and answer their aching questions. On my way back today something I heard on the podcast so amazed me I just had to talk to them about it. Since I was in the car at the time, I decided that the best thing that I could do was ping them on Facebook. Texting while I drove, almost for certain a felony crime in the state I was driving in (even though it is legal to drive a motorcycle there without a helmet) I asked either Jeff or Jeremy to give me a call.

Just about an hour later, into a six hour drive, Jeremy called me on my cell phone and I filled his mind with so many strange ideas that it is my only hope that I was able to introduce just a little bit of ontological shock. That's what I live for. To mess with the minds of alien adbuctees and podcast personalities. It's really rather redundant to say you are going to 'mess with the mind' of someone who's mind is already being messed with by the greatest mind f***kers in the world; the trickster archetype that is hell bent on reprogramming the psycho-social construct we exist in.

Thankfully the trip finally ended and I was able to luxuriate in my very own home, consuming several delicious beers of relaxation at low, low, non-Palmer house prices. I sent a follow up email to Jeremy and Jeff which was not received nearly as well, I think, as my telephone conversation was.

This all got me thinking about how we are communicating as a species of late. I quite like this whole blogging thing, even though I haven't been feeding this particular beast nearly enough as of late. I like blogging because it lives on as a record over time. It does not fade away like a twitter, or tweat, or whatever the f**k that twatesque fad is supposed to be.

This week I explored the twitter experience and promptly found it lacking. It is not thoughtful like a blog. No one is writing intelligent or thoughtful dialogue. At it's best it is a way to share links, which is not in and of itself an evil thing.

After rapidly following, cyerstalking if you will, over a thousand twats I found that, in a matter of only 48 hours I had over 300 people willing to follow me; yes complete strangers willing to hang on every word (up to a 140 character limit) that I might have to say.

I've tried to figure out just where Twittering fits into my life as a form of communication.

Well, let's see. I subscribe to the daily newspaper which, coincidentally enough, I read every single day as I have done so since I was 14 years old. I subscribe to numerous magazines, Entertainment Weekly, Discover, Scientific American, and New Scientist among others. Heck, I even subscribe to UFO Magazine which arrives sporadically and with a renewal notice about a week after I mailed my first check in.

I have the set of blogs that I read, now mostly via a newsreader. I check out the major news sites and, of course, I watch 'The Daily Show' and 'The Colbert Report' every day.

With all of that media consumption I think I have finally figured out just about where the Twitterscape fits into the grand scheme of things.

After I have read my last magazine, after I have read my last news feed, after I have caught up on email, snail mail, text messages, and reviewed week old grocery store receipts in my wallet, and when I find that I have had to spend an extended period of time in the bathroom waiting for a particularly stubborn dump to dump, I can resort to reading my twitter feed to find out who ate corn flakes for breakfast this morning. It's especially exciting for me when a celebrity reports that they are taking a dump at the same time that I am. It's like my very own ouroborus forming a perfect little circle of life.