Reddit smack-down

Horse, junk, smack, scag, H. Papaver somniferum (Opium Poppy) has been used for over 6000 years to get people loaded up and feeling good. The british fought a few wars over it, John Jacob Astor’s fur empire took a dive and he got into the smuggling it, eating an entire opium poppy flower is enough to get you good and zooted for a good long time (by contrast it takes a garbage bag of coca leaves and some nasty chemicals to make a miniscule amount of cocaine). The opium poppy contains almost 50 different alkaloids that have some pretty significant effects on the nervous system, but in 1897 Bayer Pharmaceutical figured out how to distill just the really crazy one as cure for the scourge of morphine addiction. Heroin was here to stay.

There are a few movies and books that describe that junkie lifestyle. It’s not all sleeping in alleys, begging for change, getting sick because you can’t get your fix. I’ve read that heroin itself isn’t even harmful. It’s the impurities, overdoses and generally filthy conditions of hard core addicts that gets them in the end. The general story goes something like this: you try it once, there’s this amazing, life-altering feeling of bliss and calmness. The warmth and good feelings can last for hours. You will probably fall asleep and wake up feeling incredible. But that’s just the first time. Your brain gets such a huge hit of dopamine that it pretty much stops making it on it’s own. Then you start to feel crappy because you don’t have any natural dopamine. You don’t necessarily feel the need for more heroin, but you don’t feel great, so you go get some more. After a while you stop feeling excellent when you get some in you and you’re just sort of doing it because that’s all you have left. Your whole life is structured around getting more heroin and doing it. And then 5 years later you’re broke or in jail or the hospital and life is terrible. Or something like that.

It’s not something I’d ever want to be a part of, but I think I’m experiencing something similar. About 8 years ago I used to read a blog by someone about my age. He had this wild and crazy lifestyle and wrote pretty freely about it. He made a lot of gross jokes. It was cool. One day he mentioned that he had an exponentially higher than usual number of hits on his blog because someone had linked to it from another site. The site was called Digg.com. I thought I’d check it out. It was awesome. Instead of randomly surfing the internet for cool stuff, here was a single point of aggregation for interesting and funny articles. Instead of finding new and interesting sites to experience the internet with, I only went to Digg. Eventually, I noticed Digg was dominated by a handful of users who had so much power to promote certain stories that links on the site almost became a single person’s surfing history, and it wasn’t all that interesting anymore. The comments sections started to mention a new site, a better site. This new place was called Reddit. Reddit was crude, it was a single white page with plain text links. Nothing was organized. It was anarchy. It was incredible. It was dominated by younger people. The ranking algorithm was pure democracy. The articles linked were fascinating and relevant to me. There were interviews (AMA’s – Ask Me Anything) where Jerry Springer-esque life experiences were described by regular old people. I got to see memes and jokes way before anyone else. Whenever people forwarded me links, I had to pretend to think it was funny because I’d already seen it 2 days ago. I hid it from everyone. I didn’t want anyone to know I spent so much time lurking on a single web page populated with geeks and shut-ins. Around this time Facebook was really blowing up. Everyone was doing Facebook. I wasn’t really a Facebook guy. Everyone tried to get me to try Facebook. I had Reddit and I liked it. I didn’t need two addictions. Digg was still around, getting all sorts of big publicity, valued at over $200m. Then it all fell apart. There was a user rebellion, the format changed, there were fewer user submitted links and a lot more sponsored links. Everyone fled. Digg died. (it was sold this week for a bag of old baseballs and some coffee grounds that didn’t quite add up to $200m). All the Digg users (it seemed at the time) came over to Reddit. There was all sorts of hand wringing and worrying about this wave of new users, they didn’t know the etiquette, they didn’t know the rules. At first I didn’t notice the change. Maybe there were a few more trolls out there and there started to be a few more posts dedicated to cat pictures, but the quality was still pretty good and I was having a good time. Lately though, I’m starting to feel like a junkie. It’s just not as interesting as it once was. I’m going on there because I don’t know where else to go. It’s been so long since I had a really good random web surfing experience that I almost don’t know where to go anymore. I check in at work, in the bathroom, when E is sleeping, when I’m bored. It’s pathetic. M isn’t interested in anything I have to show her from that site because it’s devolved into in-jokes and screenshots making fun of facebook (woo meta…). That joke itself is a sort of bizarre synopsis of where my sense of humor has gone. Making fun of ‘meta’ jokes in a rant about website that analogizes drug use in a ‘meta’ sort of way, using ‘meta’.. what has happened to me? I am such a bad bad hipster. ANYWAY… I am making my public statement here that I am going to try and wean myself off of reddit. This is going to be really, really hard. My attention span is limited to how quickly imgur.com can load up a picture of someone coloring in a passed out friend’s face that was posted on reddit. If it takes more than 6 seconds, I’m done. Lost interest. Moving on. What else is there to see? Don’t think this is a real addiction? Last night I was up at 12:30, hiding under my pillow with my phone, looking at ‘rage comics’ (look it up) because I had just spent the previous 2.5 hours looking at all the links I hadn’t seen between Friday morning and midnight. Why wasn’t I sleeping? I wasn’t having fun. I felt ashamed. DARPA and Al Gore gave me this wonderful internet and I was screwing off with ‘cake day’ posts, ‘karma whores’ and pictures of giant anteaters’ front legs (did you know they sort of look like pandas? Neither did I - isn’t that awesome?) . Go ahead, look it up. If you think that’s the type of thing you need to learn more about, spend some time on Reddit. There aren’t too many alternatives. I know how ridiculous that sounds. On the entire internet, there isn’t anything else to see? Let’s see.. Sports? ESPN is pretty dominant and it’s not Football season, so I don’t really care. Celebrity gossip? If Reddit is herion and Facebook is cocaine, gossip sites are crystal meth – everyone makes fun of those guys and it ALWAYS ends badly. I’ve dabbled and come running back to Reddit screaming. Wikipedia – this is probably where I’m going to land. When I was young, I read the Golden Book encyclopedia in bed. I’d just pick a letter for the evening and read the book until I passed out. I’d learn everything about California, cattle, chromium, chrysanthemums, Colombia, cyanide and Czechoslovakia (hey it was written in the 70s). I felt smart, it was a useful thing to do. I’m looking forward to it.

Can you smell that smell?

Lots of summer vacations invariably mean fewer people at work. As a result, fewer people are commuting to work. As a result of that, I usually drop my T pass in July and August and take advantage of mostly breezy drive to/from Boston. This also means I can take E to school in the morning. Win/sort of win for everyone. So it was this week that Monday morning I drove E to school. Monday afternoon I got in my car, baking in the sun in the southie parking lots and noticed a distinct funk. That in and of itself is not unusual. I have old socks, golf shoes, and maybe even a wet umbrella somewhere in the back of the subie. I rolled down the windows and drove on home. Tuesday morning the funk was there but it was a different funk, more potent, juicier. Another few minutes with the windows open and the smell was mostly gone. When I got to the parking lot, I peeked in the windows to see if there really were old shoes and socks in the cargo area. No such luck. Mystery smell out of sight, out of mind. Tuesday afternoon was a different story. Definitely riper. Heavier, stickier. I dug around in the back seat – maybe an old milk cup of E’s was back there. Nothing. Wednesday morning, same deal. Some unpleasantness but the night’s cool seemed to keep things down somewhat. Wednesday afternoon was so bad, I could smell it before I got to the car. But how was this possible? No way a car could smell so bad that it could be detected from 5 feet away. This had to be a low tide and a dead whale out in the harbor, an ill wind blowing dumpster rot in my direction. The subie was not the culprit, it just couldn’t be. The inside kicked like a billy goat, a wet filthy billy goat smoking a dung cigar and wearing dirty diapers for shoes. It was eye watering. I got out of the car, opened all the doors, got on my hands and knees searching for roadkill in the wheel wells. Nothing. Another drive home with the windows mostly open. Thursday morning, I could once again smell the car before I got to it. I put E in his car seat and he started crying, which is not unusual, but the stank. Good god the stink. It was exponentially worse. The stink of a thousand squashed squirrels baking in the sun, the reek of a medieval sewer, the pungent tang of the hippie commune outhouse. I couldn’t take it.  Then something caught my eye. A plastic bag, like you get with groceries, winked at me from behind a storage tote I keep in the back of the car. Hmm. I don’t know what could be in that bag. Wait a minute, we went grocery shopping Sunday. We got ground turkey for tacos. The cashier asked if I wanted it in plastic. I said yes. I unloaded the car and put away the groceries. I do not recall seeing the ground turkey in the fridge these past 4 days. Oh no. I have had a pound of ground turkey festering in the back of the car, in the heat of summer, for 4 days. Has it leaked everywhere like an abandoned mafia execution? No it hasn’t. It was heat sealed in a nice Styrofoam box. There was no seepage. I considered taking a picture. The possibility of a projective reversal of cinnamon toast crunch was high. I thought better of it. I just grabbed it, ran for the dumpster and chucked it in. Problem solved. E stopped crying. Thursday afternoon the stink was gone. Good times.