Tilling the soil

 "In the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin." --Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964

  I remember being like eight years old and having a tea party with some of my neighborhood's grannies.  It was going well until a next door teenager got home from school and propped a stereo speaker in the window sill, stripped to "Daisy Duke" shorts even though he was a boy, and one of the grannie-dad's hearing aids did that thing that causes a person to fling such electronica AWAY.  It smacked against a set of Brittanica and bounced in front of a napping dog who sniffed it, then gave it a few licks.  For me, the whole contraption of events, a few seconds of culture unfolding, spurred my inner-campaigner.  Something in me rose up out of my mini-mama-rocking-chair, didn't even think about what confrontation could bring, and propelled me to stomp over to that teenager and yell

How long before every grandmother has been exposed to the Rolling Stones?????

  The boundary of wires for a long time forestalled the forces of moral decline and entropy.  The notion of "crusade" seemed to have been what was steeped into us even as the Baptism sprinkles evaporated.  Although we couldn't always speak plainly or clearly about what was going on, we sensed the epic proportions of balance and imbalance; we knew, even as children, maybe especially as children, that the ancient fights of good versus evil; conviction v vacated; sinner v sin were roiling around us.  And we were just little in these Seas.

  Years and years later; some of us were covering various aspects of the wars, two of us were sleeping for about five days.  Sleeping only to wake clutching eachother, acjnowledging that, stuffing wads of white bread into mouths, gulping water, rearranging blankets between us, sleeping.  I checked, two Good Morning America's ago, we've only had three days off.  And what's his face sent in that note, he didn't lift arm off pillow, just pointed toward what seemed a hundred miles away for the exhaustion.

  Luke 11:17 But he, knowing their thoughts, said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and a house divided against a house falleth.

  The note read: 

  in messy writing, but real big

  U got to stand for something

Or YOU will fall for anything

  Is it for the magazine?  I asked.

  He snore-sound garbled, think its for me.

  Often happens in a surge, America's workforce is a mix of the preoccupied and the professional.  Sometimes even business-owners pitch fits about deadlines, grown-looking-people have tantrums and meltdowns, someone issues a "time out".

  It's part of what is making the cease fire negotiations in the Middle East "delicate" right now.  Exhaustion v entropy.

  Back when Nascar was just starting up, Mohammed Ali was still boxing, health crazes were beginning to rival real estate as investment, and elements of generic "counter-culture" were trapsing around the country, all in a tidal pool between boomandbust, some journalists endeavored to better capture what's going on in newswriting.

  The arguments then were bound by literary tradition and Press licensing.  As in the college-age arts and in fashion, those first style-innovations and envelope-pushings were temporarily stickered: new

  Some critics clucked and waggled a finger.  Braids of writing took place in category-proper.  While culture, ours

  Repeatedly gets defined as having been one thing

  Repeatedly gets accused of changes, detected

  Tom Wolfe blew breath out between lips trying to spell the roar of an engine.  Had spent longer than usual under the editors' microscope, his talentDNA almost crushed between glass on the slide.  While newspapers have audience, it's editorial which must be pleased or the billygoats getcha and no crossing that bridge to byline.

  He later wrote an intro for a book about that iteration of new journalism.  Then in the later 1980's or early '90's a person named Kramer put out a similar collection with the more academic term literary journalism employed.  There'd been a wave of David Lee Roth's going into "journalism" academically.  It was still the Cold War.  While academic institutions could train that age people who showed up, historically "print media" was already post-apocalyptic.  As with a lot of topics and categories for files, sometimes buzzwords are avant garde, the carrot for the workhorse; sometimes just a sound amongst sounds in the static; and sometimes just an echo like a bunny running hole to hole re-iterating.