HEAVY LITTLE OBJECTS

#159 :: Quartz crystals

The gift shop of every U.S. National Park in the southwest seems to have a bin full of these - 3 for a dollar, right next to the pyrite (fool's gold) and the feldspar chunks, beneath the rack full of yarn-webbed God's eyes, and a few yards away from the graven image of Kokopelli the mythical Hopi figure appropriated by hippies and Hacky-Sack makers as a symbol of "fun ...." Sudden change of gears. This blog is an indulgence of my deepest vices. Collecting small, weighty things. Shooting photos. Writing interminable, adjective-laden run-on sentences. Building web sites. In its way, every blog is the manifestation of its author's deepest desires and basest tendencies. My other blog feeds the pedant in me, the truth-seeker who beats his breast and invites raw opinions, hoping more for agreement than argument. There's a post there right now breaking down the differences between blogging and journalism, as if it matters in the long run. No, in fact, the lines between truth and opinion are too carefully drawn by most. Perhaps HLO represents a more direct bid for TRVTH than does LAVoice, which wears its curious, indignant, bleeding heart on its crisply-pressed sleeve. In the end, these are all just digits projected onto phosphorescent screens - raw information that may spark thoughts in other people, but likely that will fade quickly, leaving no trace when the plug is pulled. The quartz crystals will outlive all of it - every internet user alive today, probably the entire human race, at the rate evolution is going. But who'll be around to pick them up? Or take a picture of them? Or click on that picture and snicker at the pompous, unself-aware ass who posted it?