Still Figurin' Out Who I Think I Am

This one's about the makin' stuff listicle.

BLOG CITY PROMPT: "If you could invent anything new, what would it be? (Thanks inky14dinky for this suggested prompt.)"

What's up folks? I'm gonna keep this short tonight because I've had along day and there's a football game on (priorities, y'all...respect).

Remember Y2K? The panic society was in during the onset of "the new millenium"...all the computers were gonna crash, food supplies would dry up, and the world was basically gonna end? What was that all about? I was almost 25 years old; I had nothing to be sad about! Thanks world...it was a good run, but now it's time to hand the reigns over to some other forms of intelligent life in the universe, since us humans were too stupid to ensure a future where computers would be able to read more than two digits in a year...even though we've had four-digit years for the last, oh, I dunno, maybe thousand years or so? We're so back-asswards as a people still that we can't get our own downfalls right even when they're custom-wrapped by IBM and Microsoft. Now we're just under the threat from some lunatic fringe religious cult every few years promising doomsday, and we just laugh at it because it comes (for most of us, at least) out of some left-field sect of a sect of a sect that's been convening in a basement taste-testing random batches of the Kool-aid for decades until they finally came up with all the "right" reasons to think the next apocalypse would be occurring on July 31, 1975 September 11, 2001 December 21, 2012 any particular date.

Where am I going with this? Well, while y'all were preparing to live in bunkers eating nothing but rice and drinking bottled water, I was sitting at a typewriter in the spare room of my first apartment at Briarcliff. I wrote a poem titled Y2K, and I typed it all out...only I didn't use any spaces or line breaks, so it looked pretty bizarre (and it's a bitch to read...I remember a few years later trying to decipher it in a more traditional sense, and I was actually cursing myself for typing it out that way). I used to have it in my port here on WDC, but I took it out awhile ago during one of the many restructurings my port's undergone throughout the years. In that item there was a line that went something like "What's left for my kids to invent? Maybe they'll invent trees and parks and grass."

Think about it...even if you're not very old today you can probably relate to the fact that perhaps one of your favorite places to play when you were a kid or even a teenager is now a mall, a parking lot, or a housing development. And all that urban sprawl comes with a price...parks get smaller, trees get cut down, and streets are widened because grass between the road and the sidewalk or the sidewalk and properties isn't as important as having another strip plaza on a road full of half-abandoned strip plazas.

Fortunately though, the world didn't implode when calendars turned over to 2000, and someone/someones took steps to sort of reclaim some of the greenspace being gobbled up by greedy corporationsby coming up with rooftop gardens...another step toward building a self-sustaining lifestyle. Basically, on the roofs of these mostly urban structures like apartment buildings and office complexes, people are growing vegetables and flowers, building communities through homegrown products rather than dealing with traveling to a bland,sterile supermarket for produce trucked in from god knows where that's been treated with pesticides and who knows what else. Do some research on it...you'll see that it's a pretty cool concept.

It's also more appropriate and cost-effective than the rooftop playground idea, which I haven't come close to perfecting yet...all these ramifications and stipulations and legal hurdles to overcome; how are kids supposed to have fun with other kids outdoors these days? Where can teenagers go to escape their thoughts of impending adulthood for awhile? Law enforcement officials frown upon underage drinking in parking lots a lot more than they do at parks (provided they actually care enough to catch you at a park). At least, that's what I've heard.

MUSICAL BREAK!!

And then there was this song, which I don't think was actually about a millenium at all. It was like "let's take a popular word for 'our times', write a chorus, say the word after the chorus, make a stupid video, and we'll have a hit song and everyone will be too stupid to care since they'll like the song so much that it won't matter if the song isn't about what the title actually means"...which I think that's how a lot of songs that were popular between 1993 and 2003 got made.

"We all enjoy the madness cause we know we're gonna fade away."
Lyrics and interpretations.  

THE LISTICLE 9.15

In conjunction with "BLOG CITY presents: The LIST" , I present to you 14 songs about making things.

1) "Feel Like Makin' Love" by Bad Company
2) "If I Had A Hammer" by Pete Seeger
3) "Steam Engenius" by Modest Mouse
4) "Make Me Bad" by Korn
5) "Pour Me Another" by Atmosphere
6) "You Make Loving Fun" by Fleetwood Mac
7) "Sextape" by Deftones
8) "Cry Me A River" by Justin Timberlake
9) "Do The Evolution" by Pearl Jam
10) "Welcome To The Machine" by Pink Floyd
11) "Sowing The Seeds Of Love" by Tears For Fears
12) "Kitchen Song" by The Sheila Divine
13) "Learn How To Knit" by Hawksley Workman
14) "Makin' Whoopee" by Frank Sinatra

I trust that you all know how to use YouTube if you're interested enough in any of these songs.

And in honor of our original creators, our parents, here's a list of parents who might be cooler than their kids  . Fair warning for the children I may never get to have: I'll probably be the responsible adult in #16...and by "responsible adult" I mean "I'll totally be taking pictures and video of that shit and calling as many people as I know before I get your clumsy ass down because you don't know how to watch where you're walking".

Well, that's all I've got for today...one more day of listing comin' up tomorrow! But for now, time to fall asleep to some football. Peace, it's not too late, and GOODNIGHT NOW!!