Dear diary,

Well, effectively, I suppose, that is what this has become. I write in it now only very occasionally as my attention is taken elsewhere.

Where else, you ask, diary? Well I have been visiting the Democratic National Convention, courtesy of my friends at CNN. I've grown to feel rather affectionate about them. For all the talk that they are biased liberals, unable to hide their prejudices, I think CNN has been doing rather well in that regard. I flipped to NBC one night and what came through the reporter, to me at least, was a definite leftish point of view. CNN has been working hard to appear down the middle, somewhere between Fox and other Big Boys. This at least is my somewhat uninformed opinion, though if you can believe the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, I may be on the money. (Gladwell documents ways that gut, first impressions are correct.)

And the other thing I do--well one other thing--is a bit of Facebooking. I'm tryin' to get it, tryin' to make it happen, but here's the deal. Facebook, as we all know, is a young person's thing. Middle-aged people, as a rule, find it baffling, boring, annoying. It's not unlike how middle-aged people would experience a social occasion for young people. Basically, they would find it baffling, boring, annoying. And that, of course, is how young people feel in a room full of Baby Boomers who talking endlessly about Baby Boomer stuff. Boring, baffling, annoying.

Now there are ways these gaps can be bridged. Primitive cultures don't have generation gaps. Young people sit around fires and listen raptly to old people tell stories, tribal history and stuff. As a matter of fact over the years I've seen it happen in our own day and time, in a remote cabin in New York. There I observed young people listening rather raptly, I thought, to old people telling stories about their own family, tribal history. Special requests were even made by the young for stories by the old...

So what's my point? I really don't know, but what I do know is that I'm going to have to get in gear and walk 2.3 km (a mile and a half) to work in a few minutes. I'm really just writing here to amuse myself along with my Dear Diary, that kind and listening friend who's currently hunkered down right here on Steffin Hill Extension.