Put a fork in me, I'm done.

They remade National Lampoon's Vacation.

This is what did it.  This is what sent me over the edge.  The straw that broke the consumer's back.

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You know, I spend inordinate amounts of time trying to come up with ideas to explain away this tendency of mine to drift further and further away from the online world. (Oh, what? Like you spend your time doing better things?)

Like, maybe I just rode the social media/blogging wave for a really long time and it just doesn't hold the thrill it once did.  (Theory 1)

Farewell to all decency in movie-making

Maybe I've become increasingly paranoid about talking about my life since unless you leave me a comment, I have no idea who does or does not read this blog.  (Theory 2)

Maybe Facebook depresses the ever-living fuck out of me and I'm concerned that I'm passing along that ever-living-fuck depression to other people by any show that my life is good (or bad, as it may be).  (In fairness, I can be a bit much.  I know this about myself.)  (Theory 3)

Maybe I'm old now.  (Theory 4)

But NO, my friends.  My online reticence stems from my deepest fear: that I am part of the problem.  That somehow I have helped create this, this world we live in where someone thought it was a good idea to remake National Lampoon's Vacation.  Not only remake it, but remake it with a bunch of meta references to how idiotic it was to remake the very movie that was being remade.

HOW DID WE GET HERE.

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We got here via the internet, man's disconcertingly successful attempt at making everyone's brain accessible to everyone else's brain.  Without the internet, would we now be having a national conversation about transgender rights?  Probably not.  Without the internet, would Donald Trump be as improbably high in the [meaningless] Republican polls as he is?  Equally unlikely.

People feed off of each other. They feed off of each other and breed tolerance, and they feed off of each other and breed intolerance.  This they have always done, but what's new is they no longer feed off of each other in isolation.  Whatever you want, whatever you believe, whatever you are looking for you can find.  It's there, in the noise.  A Google search away.

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I would imagine that when it was announced that National Lampoon's Vacation was being remade, a number of people vocalized their opposition to it.  Undoubtedly, there were social media posts and blog entries and probably even a news story or two thousand about the "remake" genre and Hollywood's stodgy reluctance to finance new ideas.  I missed it all.  Sorry.  That's another thing about the internet - it's made it so there are too damned many things going on at any one time for any one person to keep up with.  There's another version of this story where I don't find out about the Vacation remake until after it's out on rental.  There's a third version where I miss it entirely, and a decade from now I can't find a way to play my VHS original, so I look it up and only then make the discovery. In a fourth version, I die warm and peaceful in my sleep, Rose-from-Titanic style, having never discovered it at all.

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How can a person ever keep up?

They can't.  I can't keep up with my own life half the time.  I call my parents once a week and sometimes I have to make hard choices.  Do I invest the time in explaining who person X is in order to tell them a story with minimal payoff?  Or do I assume that person X, much like the "news" of National Lampoon's Vacation being remade, will fade in and out of importance, not worth the effort of expanding on?  Not worth my thought, not worth my explanation, not worth any emotional energy whatsoever, and certainly not the time to introduce the subject to a third party.

That's what concerns me.  That's what stops me and what I hate stops me, this feeling that I can never keep up and that by the time I form a coherent thought on anything - any piece of news, any piece of pop culture, any new character who pops into the novel of my life - that it will no longer be relevant by the time I've come to any conclusion.

There is no time, it seems, for me to say anything other than I think it's a shitty idea to remake yet another classic movie, because even now, as I am typing it, it is old news, even though the movie hasn't come out yet.  And you don't care, as you read this, because if you've stuck with me this long, you're not reading for my thoughts on pop culture anyway.

This is the way I used to feel about running.  No matter how hard I tried and how many miles I put in, I'd never be fast.  I'd never catch up.

I can't catch up to the internet.  I love the internet.  But I can't keep up with the internet, much less commenting about the world that it's created.

And that's why I only post a little, and that's why no one should shell over their hard-earned cash in support of the remake of National Lampoon's Vacation.

The end.