Dan Mooney

I spent most of Monday morning not really wanting to go to work. I got to work Monday as tired and cranky and food tired as I thought I would be. I did my bit of work. I spent Monday afternoon itching to leave. At 5pm, I sorely wanted to forgo my dark commute entirely and teleport home. At 6pm, I was happy.

All of these were aftereffects of the Super Bowl, of course. Knocking wood, most of my Mondays fall between slightly and somewhat dreary, but seldom is one Super dreary.

To this end, I’ve thrown my support behind the Super Bowl Monday idea by signing the petition at the cleverly named Super Bowl Monday website that I did not make up, accessible here: http://www.superbowlmonday.com/

I also looked into a facebook group of the same ilk. For a split second I thought I’d be the first to have this brainstorm and actually have the honor of creating a group to spearhead this process. Unbelievably, no dice – several people had already stolen my awesome idea and put it into practice some time ago. In fact, I searched “Super Bowl Monday” and found 26 different groups and organizations gathering people along those same lines.

I was struck by two bits of sadness.

The first bit of sadness was that few of these groups had any more than a couple of dozen members. The Campaign has a long way to go on the facebook.

The second, bigger bit of sadness is that 25 people created groups in support of an idea that was already on facebook.

Why? Why not just join the first one?

It has to be because each of the followers created a group not suspecting that someone else might have had the same, fairly obvious bright idea, doesn’t it?

There’s certainly some ego involved in creating and presiding over your own group, but it just seems against any reasonable point to create tiny splinter cells of revolution when one larger group would make a whole lot more sense. To funnel energy into a collective mass, that’s revolution. Otherwise all you have is pockets of virtual protest, a choir preaching to itself.

Maybe they’ll come together someday.  Or maybe it doesn’t matter anyway – maybe the powers that be don’t give a rat’s ass how many groups of how many people think a certain way on facebook.

Did they bring back the old layout yet?

Wake up, walk in, turn on, tune in, sign on, log in.  Check email, facebook, reddit.

Ride the subway.  Read my magazine.

Stand up, shuffle over, sit down, lean under, depress.  Type.  Check email, facebook, reddit.

Reddit, email, facebook, blog, facebook, reddit, email, blog, reddit, reddit, blog, facebook.

Stumble.  Stumble.  Stumble…stumbl-stum-st-stum-stumble-stumble.  Stumble.  Stumble.

Check email, facebook, reddit.  Blog.

Turn off, get up, put on, walk out.

Ride the subway.  Chat my chat.  Read my magazine.

Stand, amble, hike, lumber.  Collapse.  Turn on.  Check email, facebook, reddit, blog.

Blink.

Click.

Stare.

Click.

Stare.

Shut down.

Think.

Sleep.

I finally signed up for Facebook – so now the credit card companies have me by the balls, the Internet has my eyes, the new fancy couch my ass, the little red-haired girl my heart, this keyboard my hands, and Facebook what’s left of my soul.  My mind, though, remains mine, until it becomes yours when I write that novel I was damn well born to write.

Facebook just made me laugh with its indifference: “You have one friend.”

I find it hilarious that the very week I decide to read 1984 is the same week I seriously consider joining Facebook.

Why not celebrate the redecorating that’s gone on here with a token post?

I don’t have a MySpace account, or a Facebook account, or a Friendster account (what?). My pat answer to those who ask is something along the lines of, “I find it hard enough to create an engaging personality in real life. Why would I spend time creating one online…?”

And yet here we go again, again and again, my third blog and my fourth hiatus from this one alone – I’ve been off being interesting in reality, of course, leaving no time for this. Which is all crap, because it’s just that I just got cable TV and I consume that rather than producing something else.

Norman Mailer, rest him, didn’t become who he was by accident. He wrote thousands of words a day, all the time. Nor did the Beatles become who they were by accident – they played 300 shows in Germany before stumbling into overnight success. Talent is one thing, but accomplishment is another. It’s the different between potential and kinetic energy. A pendulum at one of its twin resting points has all the potential in the world but ZERO kinetic energy. It’s not moving. At the bottom of its swing, it has ZERO potential energy – not that it had no potential to begin with – but all that stored energy is gleefully expressed to the point of being entirely spent.

Aside: So my middle name is KENT – and the word KINETIC – is an anagram of I, KENT, I C. Or, pour les francais, KENT, ICI. No fucking joke, my grandparents’ license plate, the one on the 1983 Buick that I drove for a time had the initials of my grandparents: E C KENT. ICI KENT. KINETIC. SANG REAL. SAN GREAL. HOLY GRAIL. Holy shit, dude…