North South East West

An old girl am I
Wear my grandmother's pearls girl, am I
Been all over the world kind of girl
Looked in every nook and cranny,
been down the winding streets only
lonely

In the South,
was a Mexican mistress
she awaited my return
to hear my stories of gold

through the gulleys, children roared
while machines played ring-around-the-rosey.
Not a pocket full of posies, had I
Only a handful of sorrows
and now it was all told.

So I hitched my sack and bid farewell,
kissed my mistress to make it last.
Turned my eyes against the sun
I heard, overhead
the call of
The North -
what more to be said?

Such a varied landscape,
The North:
from East to West
or East, West?
or West. East.
all of nature seems the same to me
and for some silence in mind,
I forsake society.

Travel the road,
the craggly rocks,
kindly now, like an old man's smile,
plenty of tooth, but
no life and I whisper,
grateful, grateful even...
to be alive.

- Remnants of the essence and wisps of a poem I dreamt

Re-Evolution; Re-Vo-Lution

Somehow we got Barack Obama, first African American president in the history of America, elected to office in the same month that we had the word entry for "meh", an apathetic expression, entered in the dictionary.

Does anyone else see the irony of this?
Now I will say something: LOL (and this is ironic, idiots; let's enter this in the dictionary too!)

Is it just me or is there something very strange about these two, clearly opposite, events? Even just in the wording of them.

Barack Obama, America's first African American leader, elected to office by a nation struggling, rumored in hushed circles to be a civilization finally reaching its peak and falling, whose people are suddenly aware and tired of Republican follies, whose youth are taking a stand for once, actively participating, dancing in the streets, celebrating victory, carefully weighing their options between candidates.

"Meh", an expression to indicate apathy and uncaring, a general 'I cant be bothered' attitude, born of MSN language, which is really just an application for people to "chat". It's not about informality or slang. Colloquial language changes all the time and if it were not for the cataloguing of these changes, we might still be speaking Victorian English (some of us still do, scarily enough). It's only right to be tracking the change in language.

But, suddenly, apathy is indicated by a sound. We are apathetic, reluctant, to even assign an actual word to the feeling of indifference so rife in our society. We can't be bothered. It's not even onomatopeiac. It's just three letters strung together, from the sound of someone shrugging their shoulders in indifference. That's what we just catalogued.

The sound of indifference. The shrugging of shoulders today's youth seems to be doing.

Clearly, these two events are indicative of something bigger. The irony of meh and Obama hits me hard. There is something going on, going down, that is missing in this generation. I don't know what it is and I don't know where it begins, where it ends and whom to assign fault, blame, cause and effect to.

All I know is, its there. Watch me not shrug my shoulders and actually take the time to figure it out.

Society is going absolutely mental.