CHAOS THEORY - ONGOING  (or... Is it just me?)

I honestly don't know if this new breed of ant just does things differently from how we have always proceeded, or if the species is finally in such a downhill decline that its days on Earth are limited, at best.  They truly cannot drive - the jaunt to LA on Wednesday was horrific due to the sheer volume of drivers who think "passing" on the freeway means coming up to within 1 inch of your rear bumper, jerking the wheel violently to the right, accelerating to over 100MPH, zipping around on the side OPPOSITE from the direction of the turn signal (signal optional, btw), and then cutting as close as inhumanly possible to the front bumper - resulting in you having to slam on your brakes and hopefully avoid getting rear-ended by the jackass coming up behind you to engage in the same trick.  And, of course, all of this occurs when you are already driving at 85 mph (literally), but it isn't fast enough for the rudesters who perform these insane feats of foolishness while yapping on a cell phone, stuffing a big mac in their face with one hand, and jerking off with the other.

Are we just turning into our old grannies who were cranky and set in their ways, or are things really getting worse?  Personally, I sure don't see things getting any BETTER, so I don't think it's just me.  The twit at the local print shop yesterday literally stood there and said, "When I try to run your manuscript, the page on the back is coming out upside down."

Well... ahem & a hearty DURRRRHHH!... doesn't that fall under the heading of operator error?  To which she replied, "What does that mean?" She wasn't even blonde and genuinely had no clue how to run a simple 2-sided manuscript even though she has worked at the shop for more than 5 years.  Makes me wonder what she is REALLY doing to keep her job, because obviously "work" has nothing to do with it, and "must have 2 brain cells to rub together" was never part of the job description.  I ended up having to go to another do-it-yerself copy shop and did it myself in less than an hour, though the frustration seeps in with the realization that this appears just one more way in which the consensus reality demands our attention and keeps us chained to the trivialities and minutiae.

And so, as I was saying in an old entry entitled CHAOS THEORY REWRITTEN, I find myself asking if we have become slaves to the technology which was "supposta" make our lives easier.  In order to create a manuscript which The Little Twit would have been able to easily use, I would have had to spend literally hours on the computer designing a mock-up, when it would take literally 1/10th the time to simply print two-sided copies on the copy machine.  In order to make the printer of my book (Diary of a Nagual Woman) TRULY happy, even after the manuscript was turned in, he wanted me to go out and buy or rent a postscript printer, learn an entirely new program which is actually quite complex, and all just so that the rounded letters wouldn't have "jags" which are visible - to his own admission - "only under a microscope."

Way I figger it... if anybody wants to read my book under a microscope, they can damn well put up with the jiggers and jaggers.

I am not exaggerating here.  This is all very real and therefore very amusing or frightening, depending on the set of one's assemblage point at any given moment.  And as mentioned elsewhere in this blog o' mine, the battle over the cover graphics was also utterly insane.  Used to be that I could take an oil painting or a post card or even a toilet paper wrapper into the printer and tell them to make it appear on the cover of the book - and, indeed, this could all be done without the aid of computer or postscript printer... and would come out looking exactly the way I wanted it to look in half the time it now takes, and never once did I hear the words, "I can't do that on the computer."

So... is it just me?  Or is the world sliding backward into the armpits of technological entropy which appears to be progress, but is really de-evolution into servitude of the very technology which was "supposta" free us, but has done precisely the opposite?  The printer kept insisting that it would "look better", and yet when I really nailed him with questions, he had to admit it would only look better "under a microscope".

Does anybody else out there realize how absolutely nuts that is?  If I thought it was an isolated incident, I'd put it down to isolated nuttiness, but it seems to be in every walk of life, everywhere I go.  Was at a wholesale shop in LA a few days ago, where I normally hand the nice gentleman $20., take my bag, and keep moving.  This time, I was asked to wait (and wait... and wait some more) because his new computer wouldn't print out my receipt, and he has somehow decided, "Must give you receipt!"  At the 15 minute mark of waiting, I finally tossed the $20 on the counter, took the package, and literally ran, while he stood behind the counter cursing in Chinese and following after me, shouting, "Must rait!  Must give receipt!  Must rait!  Prease rait!"  I was done raiting. 

So what does any of this have to do with the path of heart?  Basically, it just keeps serving as a reminder to me that the world will make every effort to hook our attention into the downward spiral of minutiae and meaningless semantics and details.  The technology can become our master instead of our servant if we let it, and without a constant vigil of unbending awareness and Intent, we don't even realize we are being sucked into the maelstrom.  I had a physics teacher way back in high school who said something to the effect, "The only defense against the natural pull of entropy is to exert constant forward motion against the force of its gravity."

Recent events have certainly served as a reminder to that old lesson.  Constant forward motion.  Right-click mouse to proceed to the next level of lunacy.  Engage hard drive.  Warp speed.  Straight on till mourning.

*****

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