when current pulls you under

(photo by matthew tammaro)


While I was procrastinating from doing school work via the internet, I said to my roommate (half-jokingly), "Facebook isn't fast enough!", referring to the lack of new things to 'creep', even though I had probably just checked it during my last procrastination break (which for someone with incessant, self-diagnosed ADD does quite often). My roommate and I had a chuckle, because I was clearly kidding. But was I?

On another evening, I was trying to show my friend a video of something on the internet. I kept searching and searching, and couldn't find it. Eventually we came to the (again half-joking) conclusion, that if you can't find something on the internet, it probably doesn't exist. But were we joking?

The internet is so damn fast with so much damn stuff on it it's pretty much its own universe or something. It's cool. But kind of creepy. You know how astronomers are always messed up because their brain is trying to comprehend the concept of infinity? (I don't actually know if that's true, but even if I think of space for a second I go nuts, so I think it's a fair assumption) Well, I feel like the internet is almost like star-gazing, you can be looking at websites that have technically been taken down but their 'traces' remain. Like looking at stars in the sky that actually don't exist anymore. The internet is like a massive reference library, that gets new stock, in every section, every second.


Here's a visualization of a portion of the internet. Looks like space to me.

People use the internet to connect with other people. But it seems really inefficient, and in a way it seems more isolating. You're now not just one in over 2.5 million people (if you live in Toronto), but you're one in however many billion people use the internet. It's like trying to communicate with a Martian rather than the person next door.

And yet just like a black hole the internet sucks you in and is ever so intriguing, especially to me. And I wish it wasn't. I envy those people who are more disconnected from it.

I'm not trying to harp on the internet. I clearly am fascinated by it. But I guess sometimes I scare myself when I think about my interaction with it. I've been really busy lately and haven't been able to be "current" with my blog postings and haven't had as much time to go through my daily reads online. And as I checked all of my favourite music blogs, I realized how behind I was, and what grosses me out, is that I was anxious about that.

In order to get people to stay intrigued in what you have to say on the internet, is being "current" the only way? I love how in a day I can 'discover' (the internet can also make you feel like an archaeologist) band after band that I had never heard of but I almost never have the time to listen to all of these bands' albums from start to end in that same day. The internet is too fast for music.

So dear readers, for those of you who haven't gone to another website by now (which has probably been updated 20 times already) I hereby vow that I will fall behind. But what I do post will be music that I've absolutely fallen for.

So in the spirit of posting things that aren't current, I'm posting a video from an Australian band called The Middle East, and this song "Blood" was released way back in 2009.