On Trying To Find Other Tennis Blogs, and Attention Flowing Upstream

I have been looking for other blogs that are similar to mine. That is, where people are chronicling their play as they muddle through games that are...well, let's say...less than professional quality. And they are awfully hard to find. I'm sure they are out there, but I don't know how to find them. Every time I search for "tennis blog," I find tons of blogs in which people talk about professional tennis players, but no amateurs and hardly any philosophy. And I can find an occasional blog in which there may be a post about someone's amateur tennis experiences, but the blog itself is more general. And then there's the video about how to unlock your car using a tennis ball. That seems to pop up everywhere.

I can't even find my own blog in searches unless I put in a term that will guarantee I find it, like "irreverent," "frivolous" or "Stuart," which are all in the title and unique enough to bring up my blog in a search. This seems to be a symptom of a bigger problem on the Internet, and our society in general. Everything is geared around making a buck. It doesn't matter how heinous or offensive whatever is done is, as long as it brings in cash, it's valid. So porn and big-box retailers are the ideal. Drug dealers are kings (and in some countries, have even replaced social welfare programs). Politics is not about what benefits the people, it is about where the waterfalls of moolah lead the current of the river.

The way it looks to me, society is built on enormous rivers of cash. If someone builds a canal on the side to divert this river, the cash flows their way. Nothing else matters, not integrity, or human relationships, or a sense of historical community, or anything else that has traditionally been important among people. Our mythologies have all been replaced by television and Disneyland, in other words, fed to us by large corporate entities. Nobody has any sense of kinship with anyone else in this society, we are all just Mouseketeers on a real-life version of the Mickey Mouse Club. Try this. I dare you to try to find a radio station where the DJ says things like, "Hey, Sarah down the street brought in this CD of her song, and we all thought it sounded pretty good, so here it is--hope you all like it too." Yeah, right. Not even on public or community radio. Maybe in some corners of the Internet that hardly anyone looks at.

And as there are rivers of cash, there are rivers of attention. And these have all been diverted in ways that are exceedingly more and more perverse. The attention is all running uphill. We as a people are all giving our attention to movie stars, to sports figures, to pop icons and even celebrities who are celebrated for nothing else other than being celebrities. And in the background, the rich get richer, the middle class evaporates, the homeless and hungry grow but must be hidden out of sight, and nobody cares. It's all because the rivers of attention have been diverted. We are all sending our cash and attention to the people who need it the least, and building bigger castles for those who already have castles. And at the same time, the people at the bottom can just sort of die and/or disappear. But please be sure to make it pleasant for the rest of us. Because we won't do anything about anything unless it involves our cable TV being turned off. Then we just might open our eyes.

OK, so I got a little off track. I was just talking about my difficulties in finding other blogs run by the little guy. I have a hard time because the money and attention runs the other way. Maybe I can't swim fast enough to beat the current, so I'll just have to find massive flippers. So I'll keep on wading through hundreds of misfires to find one or two voices crying out in the wilderness. I'll keep panning the acres of sand to find tiny nuggets of gold.