One thought I’ve had is that sound travels farther at night due to a lack of interfering noise. The difference between night and day is especially noticeable in the city, where the constant traffic provides a white noise during the day that we tune out because our brains are used to hearing it. In fact, 35W runs through South Minneapolis, and even if you can’t differentiate the sounds of individual cars, it’s always there in the background. At night, when there is almost no traffic, there is almost no interfering noise and sound can travel farther. Besides that, the cooler and denser air at night is a better medium for sound to travel in–something you can read more about here.

To my ear, the sound is almost like that of two large pieces of metal hitting each other, which led me initially to think that maybe it was a river barge docking, or hitting another barge–something that makes sense given the what the first blogger said about the sound occurring at regular times. Or maybe it’s train cars coupling and decoupling, as suggested by someone on the Twin Cities Daily Planet blog.

Or, maybe, it’s none of the above.

When I was a college student, the internet played a minimal role in my life. I still remember my first email account. We got assigned them as students during Week One of my freshman year at St. Olaf College. My friends and I didn’t know what to do with them. Our assignments were given to us via the paper syllabus the professor handed out at the beginning of the semester, a paper we guarded with our lives for the next three months–we three hole punched them, slipped them into plastic sleeves, kept them safely tucked away in three-ring binders to avoid the embarrassment of asking the professor for a new one. To turn in our assignments, we printed them on the dot-matrix printers in the computer labs and handed them in during class. Our social calendars were kept in our heads–usually we made plans over meals in the cafeteria or at the smoking spots outside the classrooms, dorms, and student center or, failing that, over the phone–not cell phones, mind you, but the beige telephones with spiral cords affixed to the walls of our dorm rooms. Occasionally we used the internet for research, but this was strongly discouraged by the professors because the sources couldn’t be verified; sometimes a forward-thinking professor would use email as a discussion tool between classes, but that was as far as it usually went. My friends and I eventually found a use for email–we used it for an endless series of inane banter in a discussion group we called “The Menage,” which we gradually abandoned as a waste of time; and it proved useful, perhaps overly so, for long, torrid emails between lovers so dripping with adolescent amour they would have made Emily Brontë swoon. I made a few friends on a bulletin-board system, or BBS, called ISCA, that served all the Midwestern colleges, but tried not to spend too much time on it, as people who spent too much time with their virtual friends instead of their real-life friends were generally considered a little unbalanced and were much worried-over behind their backs.

So when I hear that a long-term study of college students states that a 40% drop in students’ abilities to feel empathy can be traced to their use of the internet, it gives me pause and makes me wonder about how much things have changed in the ten years since I graduated from college.

I’m not a luddite. I have a blog, obviously. I have a Facebook account that I check often, probably too often. Of my 200 or so friends on Facebook, I’ve met around 95% of them in real life and have spent time with them in person. They’re friends from college, previous jobs and gigs, our local summer theater festival, shows my bands have played, friends I’ve met through other friends, and friends I’ve known for the majority of my life. And of these friends I know well, I know that what is true for me is also true for most of them. Nearly all of us are in our thirties–meaning that we were in high school in 1995 when those commercials appeared on TV announcing that something called “The Internet” was coming. But what is true for my friends and I is not true for those just a couple of years younger than me. In fact, demographers will place my friends and me in an entirely different generation from people who are now twenty-eight or twenty-nine –as though they are as different from my friends and I as we are from our parents. People under thirty are called Millenials, and their internet habits, including the habits of the people currently in college, are radically different from those of today’s thirty-somethings.

A study conducted by the Pew Charitable Trusts in February of this year claims that Millenials consider their internet use to be the distinguishing characteristic of their generation, in spite of the fact that the internet first came into existence when Gen X was still in high school. The Millenials spend more hours each day on the internet, and conduct more of their socializing through the internet, than any other generation. They have a better understanding of social media and mobile device apps than anyone in their thirties does—except, maybe, for marketers and media professionals who are bending over backwards to make their products seem relevant to Millenials. Witness the explosion of Twitter usage by every media outlet from Democracy Now to Fox News, and by every journalist from Perez Hilton to Bill Moyers. It’s not the Baby Boomers they’re trying to win over by tweeting OMG BP SPILL FML, or even my Gen X-ers who, according to the demographers, are supposedly too cynical to care. Or is it?

These same media outlets that are kissing the, em, feet of the Millenials are also the first to trumpet the results of the studies like the empathy study I mentioned previously as soon as they come out. The New York Times, which has added social media icons left and right in an attempt to woo the younger audiences, posted this article the day after the empathy study came out, entitled “The Culture of Narcissism.” The author laments the self-centeredness of today’s youth, but wonders how this new data jives with that other data that came out in February, the Pew study—how could the young be narcissistic if they’re spending more time volunteering than any previous generation? I think a better question might be how they can spend so much time volunteering if they don’t understand why they’re doing it. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that school guidance counselors have been terrorizing young people for years with the prospect that they’ll never be able to enter a crowded and competitive job market if they don’t have something on their resumes that distinguishes them from their peers and shows that they have some kind of relevant work experience…hence, volunteering. Nonprofits are always in need of volunteers; corporations, not so much.  A self-serving and society-serving generation is born.

The question no one ever seems to ask when faced with a single petulant and misbehaving youth, let alone an entire generation full of them, is how they got to be so spoiled rotten in the first place. But that question makes the older generations uncomfortable, because it turns their own argument around and puts the focus squarely on them. It has never ceased to astonish me that parents don’t understand that spoiling their children—giving them everything they want—is not selfless generosity, but rather a form of narcissism. You do your child no favors by setting them up with the expectation that the world owes them something. And yet parents do it all the time—having beautiful children with everything they want is another visible yet socially acceptable sign of affluence in mainstream America, like owning a palatial suburban home (or multiple homes), an SUV, and season tickets to all the local sporting teams’ games. It’s not conspicuous consumption, say the parents—it’s family values. And given what I’ve learned from the handful of Millenials I’ve had the opportunity to really get to know, when I’ve been able to tear them away from the internet for a few hours, I would say that their time on blogs and chatrooms, or playing video games, or Twittering away on their iPhones, has less to do with narcissistic self-worship than it does a basic fear of the real world—one instilled in them, perhaps, by narcissistic helicopter parents who’ve sheltered them from the evils of the world that the media are ceaselessly repeating on a 24-hour cycle. Maybe it’s time we look at some of those other studies—such as this one from several years ago that said the perception of kidnapping is at an all-time high while the incidence of kidnapping is at an all-time low, and the result is that children are treated as prisoners in their own homes, kept happy and compliant with an endless stream of toys to occupy their time. Perhaps they’ve had to resort to the virtual world as a way to escape from their prisons, as a last and desperate resort to form some bonds of attachment to other people besides their parents and the few real-life friends they are permitted to have. Perhaps the internet is the one thing that’s saved these shut-in youths from becoming total sociopaths or psychopaths—a generation of clean-cut, outwardly obedient Norman Bates types whose capacity for empathy is zero.

On a warm Friday afternoon a couple of weeks ago, I met with Tabatha at her home in Golden Valley. I first saw UZZA perform back in April at Ricochet Kitchen and was impressed by her commanding presence at the head of a six-piece outfit of male rock musicians with notably catchy guitar hooks and a tight rhythm section. As the focal point, she brings order and clarity to the chaos with her persona and her voice. Even off stage she embodies an element of the larger-than-life—over six feet tall and willowy, when she met me at the door of her suburban bungalow in a tank top and jeans and hugged me, I was struck with the notion that this is what it would be like to meet a modern-day Greek goddess for an afternoon chat at home. Amid energetic puppies and surrounded by surreal bric-a-brac that ranged from orange Christmas lights and witchy ornaments to framed portraits of gray aliens, we drank ice water and talked about music.

Green Glass Door: When did you first discover that music was something you wanted to do with your life?

Tabatha: Let’s see. I was a kid, around six or seven, and I used to walk my dog and make up little songs when I was walking my dog. And being kind of shy and weird, and not having a lot of friends at the time, I used to walk around by myself, making up dumb little songs. Then I discovered I could actually sing. I joined choir, my parents gave me voice lessons, I did all the talent shows in the malls, and I had a karaoke machine. Then I turned eleven and wanted to be a race horse trainer, so I got away from the singing for a while, until I turned fifteen. I was in my first band then, called Yana. We did a lot of Duran Duran covers, but I wrote one song for the band. Then I went to MacPhail’s and took opera lessons, and that was really good, because I learned how to sing properly, using my diaphragm, and it’s helped as a rock singer, so that I’m not killing my voice when I  sing.

GGD: You lived in Chicago for a while, so tell me about some of the other bands you were in before. Tell me about the path to UZZA.

Tabatha: I wasn’t very happy in Chicago. I was with a boyfriend who was in a band, and he was on tour all the time, so I was left alone in our apartment with all his recording equipment. I needed to do something creative, so I learned how to use the mixing board and would come up with stuff on my own using keyboards. Sometimes I would use the file cabinet like a drum—I’d take a drum stick and wrap it with tape, and then I’d use it to pound the file cabinet. Eventually I got into drum machines, and that was my project Velvet Rat, which was all improv—weird, freaky stuff that wasn’t really musical; it was more like performance art. Then I moved from Chicago to Minneapolis. There was an ad in the City Pages from an English guitarist looking for a singer, and he named all the people that I like, so I met with him and we formed a band called Elysium. It started out like British pop but it evolved into techno music towards the end. Eventually he got offered a job in England and he asked me to go with him. So we did the band over in England for a couple of years, and it was the best time of my life. I loved England, I felt right at home, and it’s an experience I will always look back on and say, “Those were the good old days.” It was beautiful there. But I had a boyfriend back in Detroit when I was in England, and he wanted me to come for Christmas, so I went to Detroit for Christmas and ended up staying for about ten years. It was not my plan, and while I was there I was depressed for about four years and didn’t do anything musical. Then somehow I got out of the depression and formed a band called Radium, a goth rock band, and that’s how I met my husband Rich. I ended up firing all my band members and asking my friends if they played music. Rich is a guitarist, so he and I reformed Radium together and played for a couple of years. Then I wanted to get the hell out of Detroit, so we moved up here to Minneapolis and formed UZZA in 2009. We’re very happy with the people in our band now; we’re all different, our guitarist is kind of a conservative Tea Party guy, I consider myself a conspiracy theorist, and then we have a Democrat drummer, and my freaky husband Rich, and then Charles Sadler just joined our band, from Stellar Vector, and we’re very happy to have him with us; he’s added quite a bit. But in between all these different bands, I was sick. For a period of about ten years my kidneys were slowly failing over time, and that prevented me from really getting a career with music going. Eventually I had to get a transplant, and luckily my father stepped in and gave me his kidney and saved my life. That was where part two of my life started, and that was a whole new beginning. That’s when I met Rich, my husband, and I had Radium and everything was great, and we moved here in 2004 and got married by Count Dracula in Vegas. We worked on a project for a while with Christopher Shillock, an anarchist poet and spoken word artist, an older gentleman, I think he’s 70 now, and Rich and I turned his poetry into music and performed with him, all while trying to get UZZA on the ground. But then in 2006 I got cancer, Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, because of the drugs I take for my kidney transplant. So that was another year pretty much wasted, not being able to do music because I couldn’t sing, because I was so weak. Then I kicked cancer’s ass, and then we bought this house and formed UZZA and now everything’s cool, finally. So I’m just waiting for the next part of my life, for what’s going to happen next.

GGD: That’s an amazing story and I’m glad that you talked about your illness and the way it’s affected your life and music because it’s the next thing I was going to ask you about.

Tabatha: Yeah, I like people to know. Some people are afraid to admit that they’ve been sick, but I think it’s good to talk about it because ultimately things turned out well for me and I want people to be inspired by that if they’re sick. There’s a lot of people that I talk to that have cancer and I’m trying to help them through it. It’s not a death sentence; you can overcome these things and become a better, stronger person and appreciate life more, so I like people to know.

GGD: So tell me about UZZA—the name, what inspires you as a band in the songs that you write and perform, and about your songwriting process.

Tabatha: I got a puppy in 1996, a little black and white Husky pit bull, and I was trying to find a name for her, so I looked in one of my UFO books in the index, and found the name UZZA. Supposedly UZZA is a chariot of fire, a god in a chariot of fire over Egypt, which could be a UFO. So I named her UZZA, and UZZA just passed away last August. I loved her so much—she was like my best friend—so I wanted to name a band after my friend who’s been with me through a lot of hard times.

When I was in my teens, when my parents got divorced, I started writing songs about the divorce, and they’re pretty silly when I look back on them now, because I was just a kid, but that’s where I started really writing structured songs. But now, in my creative process, I typically enjoy improv—not planning ahead and just seeing what comes out. There’s some songs that I’ve written for UZZA that really came out of nowhere, and they turned out to be pretty decent songs. I’m pretty proud of myself for being able to do whatever comes out. It’s a weird sort of thing; I’m not sure where it comes from. I just started working with Samwell Rowan, and he asked me to sing and come up with lyrics, and that was cool, because Samwell’s music is pretty trippy. He gave me song titles, and this was the first time I decided to write using titles as inspiration. So I like improv; I tend to not like things planned out. My husband Rich is totally opposite of me. He’s totally structured, very anal retentive about things, where I’m like, oh, anything goes.

Rich and I write all the music for the band right now. He will record musical parts—guitar, bass, keyboards, drum machines—on our Macs, and then he’ll throw it my way, and then I will listen to it and see how it makes me feel and I’ll just start writing lyrics, and then pick them apart and create melodies with the words that fit. Sometimes it becomes a totally different song than when it first comes out. Then there are other times where I’ll write all the music, and then I’ll give it to Rich, and then Rich, being a true musician, will come up with guitar and bass parts. So it’s collaborating. And I usually write about darker things. For some reason it makes me feel better, it’s like therapy in a way for me. My mom and dad don’t quite understand me; they say, “Why can’t you write happy music?” But I see the world in a different way than they do. I think we have the potential to make it so much better than it is, but I’m a realist—I wish I were an idealist but I’m not—and I think my life experiences have made me write about darker subjects. When I listen to dark music it makes me feel good, because it’s like I’m listening to words I can relate to, and I can get something like a demon out, and then I feel better. The direction UZZA is going in now is that we’re trying to get our other band members more involved in the writing process, so we’re hoping to have some jam sessions coming up in the next couple months.

GGD: On your website and in other places you talk about UFOs and a spiritual energy in all beings. I was wondering, in what way does that philosophy contribute to your writing?

Tabatha: I guess it does contribute to it. I’ve had some weird, spiritual, freaky experiences, mostly in my teens and twenties, a lot of out of body experiences and just strange things that made me do a lot of research on life after death. I don’t necessarily believe in the Christian god, but I believe there’s something out there. I’ve had out of body experiences, where I’m going toward the light, going through a tunnel, and to me we’re made up of star matter, so whatever is in that light is God to me. I’m not sure what that is, maybe we go through a worm hole to another universe or something. I do write about that in a few of my songs, and people are thinking I’m just writing about death. But death is a new beginning—it’s being born again, not in a Christian sense of what “born again” means, but being physically reborn in another world after you die in this one. Or maybe we come back to this world in a better body and an improved personality. So I include topics like rebirth and reincarnation in some of our music.

GGD: What is your overall creative philosophy? Do you see art and life working together in some way, and if so, what is it?

Tabatha: Well, I know that if there weren’t art, there would be no life for me. They definitely go together. And thank God for artists of all kinds, because they make the world a better place. If it weren’t for us, the world would totally be going to hell, but I think we are the ones that make it more beautiful; we can reach out to people that might not be creative and make them see a different perspective about life and appreciate things that they wouldn’t have if they just went on with their nine to five jobs. They definitely go together: art and life.

Click here to visit the UZZA website, listen to some of their songs, and watch video excerpts of their live performances.

Photo credit: Carla Haglund, FairShadow Photography

A few intrepid urban spelunkers manage to get down into the caverns every year—and if you know the right people with the right set of keys, you could manage to get down there yourself…assuming you’re willing to accept the risk of being swept away by a river of raw sewage on the way there or becoming violently ill by inhaling bacteria. The largest, Schieks Cave, as it’s currently known, runs right under Fourth Street in downtown Minneapolis, beneath the gentlemen’s club after which it’s named. And you can get at least a mental picture of this stone cathedral the size of a city block by reading this blog. Local author and urban spelunker Greg Brick has journeyed into the bowels of the earth beneath Minneapolis, St. Paul, and other Midwestern cities, and has waded through the muck in search of this well-kept secret so that you don’t have to.

Personally, I love the idea of hurtling through a plexiglass subway tunnel surrounded by theatrically-lit stalactites and stalagmites, but I know others, especially anyone who’s seen one of those abysmal cave horror movies, might feel a bit differently than I do…

First, a bit of biography. Fifteen years ago, I stormed out of my parents’ house in suburban St. Paul wearing a black nightgown, black lipstick, and black pleather boots, and took the bus into Minneapolis to meet my male friend, wearing a similar outfit, for a tour of the Beat Generation art exhibit at the Walker Art Center. That was a definitive day in my life—the day I decided to defy my rigid Catholic upbringing and pursue a life of deviant aesthetics and relentless questioning of authorities, commonly accepted truisms about life, and my own memories and senses. I believed in rooting out the hidden truths, those inconvenient or uncomfortable facts most people would rather ignore, and exposing them to the world. While a lot of that was teen rebellion, there was a deeper drive at work that has remained with me all of my adult life. I was—and still am—drawn to esoteric spiritual traditions, philosophy, political activism, and dark music in which anguished people sing about the themes that plague them—love, death, and everything in between. The underground cultures were fertile ground for such drives back then—my friends and I would gather at coffee shops and talk long into the night about political scandals, sexual taboos and fetishes, the occult, and a youthful yearning for meaning reminiscent of any one of Holden Caulfield’s reveries. We would attend the loud rock shows of local bands and the gallery openings of local artists, spend hours poring over Nietzsche and Camus and Freud, trying to understand why people love one another, what forms such loves take, and how they shape our psyches. And we were angry about a lot of things—the hypocrisy of Those In Charge, the suffering of the have-nots, the greed of the haves, the needless cruelty toward animals, the abuse of helpless children, and the wasteful and mindless destruction of the planet. And driving all of these forms of inquiry was a desire to know the world and ourselves, to decide for ourselves who we wanted to be and how we wanted to live.

Music was a primary guide for us on this path to self-awareness. We were exposed to great music through institutions like Rev 105 and Danceteria and Ground Zero. Many of my friends chose identities for themselves based around a particular style of music, but I was one of the kids who could never identify with only one subculture because I loved just about everything I heard—industrial bands like KMFDM, Front 242, Type O Negative, RevCo, Ministry, My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult; punk music like The Dead Kennedys and Rancid, but especially riot grrrl bands like Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and Sleater-Kinney; ambient and darkwave music like Dead Can Dance, The Cranes, Lush, Ladytron, Bel Canto, and the Cocteau Twins; and dream-pop/shoegaze like Tortoise, Mojave 3, Yo La Tengo, and Slowdive. Locally we had goth bands like Autumn and Glass, dream-pop like February, shoegaze like Colfax Abbey, Low, and Dwindle—all deeply imbued with both thought and emotion. It was a great time to be a young musichead. And I rode these sound waves to minor notoriety as a DJ on my college radio station, sharing the music I loved with my community.

Now, fast forward about six or seven years. It’s 2000, a beautiful summer night in Minneapolis. Which band should you go and see? A lot is happening. There are many talented bands out there—The Fog, The Selby Tigers, The American Monsters, The Soviettes, and any one of the Rhyme Sayers Collective. We’ve already seen the rise of the Turf Club as the cool place in St. Paul to see a show. A lot of the music—from the local bands to the national acts coming through like the Hives, the White Stripes, Jet, The Strokes—is technically good, but I feel that it’s missing something.

During 2000-2002 I was a DJ on the underground airwaves—the Twin Cities pirate radio station. A lot of cool stuff happened during those years—we had people like Billy Bragg doing call signs for the station and the DJs did interviews, hosted live music, and gave updates about the latest goings-on in protest culture. But I couldn’t get into the new local music, and I couldn’t figure out why not—so instead I mostly played the old stuff from a few years back, along with an eclectic mix of other styles like funk and traditional Balinese music and Egyptian techno. After stumbling around for years and thinking back on it, I recently figured out what bothered me back then—most of the music of that time was lacking in what the great Bruce Lee called “emotional content,” something that for him made all the difference between the good and the great. He didn’t expand upon what the term meant, but I have always suspected that he meant a rarified state of mind that emerges from deep understanding of the self and allowing one’s innermost feelings to flow through their processes and color the work they are undertaking. The music of the early 2000s was groovy and fun, and some of it was angry, but most of it was deeply cynical and went out of its way to mock any genuine sentiment. Even in the little bit of music I heard in which I detected the presence of emotional content, the songwriter seemed to assume a great deal of apathy as a starting place in the minds of her or his listeners. As someone who grew up on New Wave as a child and went to finishing school with industrial, darkwave, and the like, I often felt alienated by what I saw at shows and heard on the radio. Of course there were bands and artists like Mason Jennings, Tulip Sweet, and All the Pretty Horses that kept on writing emotional music despite what everyone else was doing, and they were the bands I would seek out when I was feeling lost and alone, but back in the 2000s they were the exceptions rather than the rule. I had always felt wounded before by the shallow, sentiment-mocking scenesterism that sometimes came through in the bastions of Minneapolis music culture—Rev105, the music writing in the City Pages and The Onion, Cake Magazine, and the like—so my complaint is not that these ideas are new. It’s that these attitudes of cynicism and apathy had become normalized to such an extent in the local music scenes that it often felt like there was no longer any room for people with strong feelings.

At last our musical time machine jumps ahead to today. We’ve seen a resurgence of dark music in the Minneapolis music scene—music for people who don’t just want to party—they want to be transformed by what they hear. Artists and bands like UZZA, Poor Weather Club, Lookbook, Dearling Physique, and of course All the Pretty Horses are leading the charge. There’s even another blog out there where you can find out about the goings-on of this scene—www.darktwincities.com.  And I am excited to say that, for the first time in my life, I’m adding something to the mix. I’m in a band with a friend and trusted collaborator, Courie Bishop, and this musical partnership is one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done as an artist. (More on that later.)

I look forward to writing about everything I see, hear, and feel as the new times unfold. It seems as though there are once again hidden truths waiting for me to uncover them—and as they are revealed to me, so shall I reveal them to you, my dear reader. Onward into the unknown!

The sounds have been dormant since February. Then, last Sunday night, I heard another one—again coming from the river. If they continue throughout this summer the way they did last year, I’ll be doing some investigation of my own to see what I find…

A longing for an escape from the familiar masquerading as fear of the unknown. A desire to preserve the past while making way for the future. A need to know and understand the world, both within and beyond our own minds. These are some of the reasons why we write.

I wasn’t ever going to start a blog. I didn’t have the time, I said. And there are so many other blogs out there—what value could one more add to an already vast sea of ideas and information? Then I began to reconsider the idea last fall, in light of a conversation I began online with a blogger and writer I deeply respected and was beginning to consider a friend. An adventurous writer with a deep curiosity about the strangest aspects of existence (frontier science, cryptozoology, UFOlogy, parapsychology, and whatever other weirdness happened to tickle his fancy) and with several published books already under his belt, he considered his blog to be the staging ground for his ideas. It was an intriguing notion—using a blog as a starting point for conversation with others, to engage in meaningful dialogue with readers and consider their thoughts and interests before sinking a lot of time into a new major writing project. Tempting, yes…but still not reason enough to embark upon yet another creative endeavor with an uncertain future.

But when he passed away unexpectedly last year, his blog—and the act of blogging itself—took on an entirely new meaning for me. His last post—a story about artificial intelligence—seemed an apt metaphor for a life cut brutishly short: a story that ended in an utterly random place in the narrative, without resolution or a storybook ending that ties everything neatly together and forces it all to somehow make sense. And now that blog, which may very well be the crowning achievement of his brief life, resembles the very nature of modern existence. Haphazardly arranged, without a central purpose to guide it in a specific direction, fundamentally unsatisfying, it is nevertheless a thing of strange beauty and an object of endless curiosity, dangling inconclusively in cyberspace for as long as the pixels shall endure.

To say that I started this blog as homage to that writer is perhaps an overstatement. After all, who am I to believe that I could fill such shoes? I’m a Minneapolis-based writer with few publishing credits to my name and nothing notable at that, a producer of a few experimental short plays, and a musician with a low profile even on the local scene. What could I possibly have to add to the vast and infinite discourse taking place in the cybersphere—especially with so many other writers out there who’ve actually made important contributions to our culture and our lives? Nevertheless, I was inspired by what that other writer did—he carved out a little space for his unique perspective in the universe of human thought, became a particularly distinctive voice in the transnational postindustrial chorus, as a way of marking down a record for the ages of what our culture looked, felt, and even sounded at this point in its history. (Apparently Morrissey provides the perfect soundtrack to our alienated, podlike existence of internet solitude.)

There is a chance that writing on the web may live forever, or at least as long as our limited minds imagine “forever” to be. The web may become the most archival record of human culture to date, despite its brief twenty-year lifespan—about as old as the Millenial generation—because the web is dispersed, decentralized, and modular…that is to say, while its individual components may fall into disrepair and decay, the web itself, and all the sentient thought recorded therein, will continue on unmarred as long as our species (and whatever sentient species replaces us) continues to use it.

So that’s why I’m here. And now, on with the show…

Photo Credit: Abby Ladybug