There Is Nothing On The Internet

I’d just traveled across Kazakhstan, went out to the remote border region with China, went down to Tajikistan and back. Each stop of the way, just about every day, was packed with interviews, site visits, all that stuff that I find fun and fascinating.

But I was beat. I sat in a cafe and order a coffee. It arrived. I pulled out my phone and began browsing for something recreational to read. I read the Bills news, there wasn’t much going on besides some bloggers musing about how good we ain’t. I didn’t feel like reading the real news and I definitely didn’t want to read anything that was at all associated with my work.

“There’s nothing on,” I said to myself as I sheathed my phone.

I then caught myself, somewhat startled by my own cerebral statement. That was exactly what people used to say back in the day when network TV ruled. We’d say, “There’s nothing on,” when the programing on the three stations we could tune in with our rabbit ears all sucked. I haven’t heard anyone say that in a decade.

The internet is an infinitely expanding universe, of course there had to be something “on.” But I sat there and couldn’t think of anything.

What I wanted was a story. Just a contiguous narrative that I could follow and check in on — something that wasn’t too heavy but may nonetheless teach me about something or get me thinking about something remote from anything that I was doing. What I wanted was an old-time blog, like the kind that we were making in the mid-2000s, when the internet was uncharted territory to explore. What I wanted was the kind of blog where someone you found kind of interesting or odd just talked about what they were doing and thinking. Something that you could easily follow day to day — a temporary escape.

I’m not sure where those writers have gone.