IF YOU ASK ME TO BLOG, THIS IS WHAT YOU GET.

Well, today I was chastised for not blogging often enough.  I am heartily sorry, by Tender Lumplings, for not providing enough of my cutting insight into the human condition which I deliver with my unique brand of wit and style.  I have said before it isn't easy to do this everyday.  So I don't even try.  But, yes, going months between posts is a bit extreme also.

So I will offer up this brief entry to appease my throngs of fans world wide (yes, that is directed at you person in Latvia).

Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury and Iain Banks are dead.  That is a fact that, unfortunately, cannot be changed.  There are no replacements for them.  And given that we as a species are quickly forgetting how to write and read, thanks in no small way to the Internet, TV and cell phones (I will never text anyone), I'm starting to think that there never will be any more great authors.  While I mourn my fallen idols, I don't really feel that bad about there being no one to take their places.  Why should anyone try to write a masterpiece if no one is going to be able to read it?

Most of the bookstores and music store are closed or will be soon.  In a while the only place to get an actual book or a CD will be in some dusty little shop stuck in a rundown strip mall.  A place that smells of old paper and mold where you have to move the fat old cat off the stack of paperbacks you want to go through.  Sitting behind the counter with a tatty sweater vest and bifocals will be a grey man listening to a flat black disc with grooves in it that makes noise when you set a needle on it.  You'll know his name, my Dearies.  He is me.

Maybe I'm just getting old.  I don't like new TV shows.  I don't get the new style of comedy that passes for hip these days.  Most new music I find boring and lacking in originality, style, focus and, most of all, musicianship.  People don't even play instruments anymore, they don't even try.

But, you know, it's OK.  I don't need new music or TV or "books".  Because although they may no longer be among us, the so called living, I still have Kurt and Ray and Iain.  And all the other great authors, artists and musicians who are gone.   I have their books and albums and therefore part of their souls.  I can feel my soul is richer for it.