The Blurbles

 

 

As a whole, we are a society that reminds me of the scene from A Coalminer’s Daughter. At one point, Spacek/Loretta Lynn has a quiet nervous breakdown on stage in front of thousands of her fans. But she is depicted as such a big-hearted human being, so honest and vulnerable, that the conversation seemed to be a natural and beautiful thing.

She says to the hushed crowd, “Patsy used to say to me: ‘Little girl, you got to run your own life…But now my life’s running me...” She needed to stop and get off.  That is the sum of it. How often do we think that our lives are veering off course?

The other day on Social Media, one of the darlings of Instagram, Essena O’Neill, pulled the plug on her hamster wheel and jumped off.  O’Neill admitted that the hundreds of photos and supposedly spontaneous pictures were only achieved after hours of posing and dieting and suffering to reach perfection. She wanted no more of it, and decided to pull the plug.

These honest moments are things we can identify with. They are the things that stick with us. As a movie lover, I remember a scene from “Beyond Borders” with one of my favorite actors, Clive Owen, where he went into a packed ballroom of wealthy donors sitting through a Non-Profit event-one of those “Rubber-chicken circuit” dinners that politicians and the like often frequent.

 

Lab Rats of Madison Avenue

Owen breaks up the evening by walking up to the microphone and calling out the hypocrisy while dropping F-bombs left and right. I’ve often wondered if anyone has ever had the courage to do something like that in reality.  I think we all feel the need at times to just strip away the curtain and call out the hypocrisy and banality that we deal with every day. We sometimes feel like Lab Rats for Madison Avenue, especially as those of us chained to a desk see the world floating by through ads and e-mails.

It’s now a given that we, as writers, have about 2 to 3 seconds to capture your attention before you swipe right and move on to the next new thing. That’s why we feel like Lab Rats, the victims of a Madison Avenue Experiment gone dangerously wrong… McCluhan said it best, ‘The Word is the Blurb’.

The Word is the Blurb = The Blurb Blog

 That’s one of the reasons I decided to create “The Blurb Blog”. The Blurb Blog seeks to address not a single iota of these deep-rooted societal problems. However, in simply calling attention to the problem, we can begin to focus on those things which matter to us.

If only for a few minutes during the day, we may be able to take a breather from our duties and simply remember to just “be”. To be human, to be fallible, to be funny, to be sentimental and all those other things that make us who we are-those are the reasons to read “The Blurb Blog”.