Who was it who asked “what is the point of the point?”  That point, the sharp element that pricks my attention and to which I cannot but think of that point, even when all the surrounding information is gone to my memory?  I believe that point of the point is all that I remember from a much longer work that I believe was about critical writing or thinking, or perhaps some explode the narrative thingy before Aqua Teen Hunger Force democratized the meaninglessness of Post Modern thought and just after Heidegger wrote his last Big Book of Nouns (DiegrossbookenderNounen, 1928) whereupon mankind made an elevation from an ape who believed only in the straight arrow narrative of G/g/o/_/d/des/es and golden fleeces and understood that we were apes with the power over our own lives and that by owning some “narrative” we both constrained our own and invented others’ stories.  Or that’s what I remember from the one English class I took before running screaming across the quad to the History Department who upon the retirement of their vested and venerated heads of yore started hiring adjuncts who also spouted the same deconstructivistic bullshit [citation needed].

So what is the point?  The point appears that we have some disagreement as to how we will come to pass, all billions of us, into O/o/blivion or R/r/apture.  For one thing, this stinks for my generation – which comprises either the X, the Y or the Z and which I refer to as the Doom Generation since we’re the ones who are young enough to live to Der Tag but old enough that we’ll be cut down, our food storages pillaged, our guns taken but we’ll be well up in years enough to just pull Der Pin on Der Fershuggada Granaden and take out a few [your favorite declension of ‘fuck’ here] [your feared group here].

The world seems to just plod along into a morass of dry springs and gray summers.  The little village of Fort Mudge has woken up from the “winter” to some slight changes to Main Street.  I can still buy drugs on the weekend but can’t find a cup of coffee.  It is quiet at night.  The restaurant that came closest to making actual food is being replaced by a Chinese restaurant…. And by restaurant think more those bullet proof call-em-out by number places with nary a table let alone non-plastic utensils.   We have long been missing the lumber yard, but now it isn’t even a boat storage shed but for sale entirely and, since the flood of 2011, rather battered.  The condo conversion of the last remaining factory standing in the village that went bankrupt was auctioned off for the second time and for the second time no one came to the auction even thought the Main Street facing part of the property is three times the size of my place and going for the same amount as I paid so and so many years ago.  We lost the hardware store from 1875 some time ago, but the stationary store from 1847 has gone as has the clothes shop (1960s) next to it.  We also lost a bank, which is now for sale.  And so goes one foundational business after another, replaced by:

1. A magic the gathering gaming store
2. A very strange bakery that sells cupcakes made on an electric stove
3. The candy store that used to be down the block moved, and is now somehow counted by the cheerleaders as a new business
4. A junk/antique store that seems to have been taking shape for five months or more but has yet to be open
5. A eatery considered “Spanish” (One local “his wife is Spanish but he’s some kind of Mexican from New York City” so I think it’s Mexican or Spanish food).
6. Occupy Wall Street art

That latter one has been an interesting development.  Truly, Wall Street to Main Street.  As if the metaphor of drooping for sale posters in the windows was not enough, we have been reduced to donating our storefronts to art…. Occupy Wall Street art.

And what is the point?  As the spring moves along, the call for social justice has fallen to the wayside, the imagination of the nation once again moved on to Tribbles, or Furbies, or Pet Rocks or whatever.  Yet, these few protestors continue to tinker and talk, meet and occasionally riot for some kind of change to a system where we seem locked into not a struggle unless it is that struggle of the mouse being flushed down the toilet and we are able to see us, the mouse, swimming against the falling water, the shit, and that other thing mom always said not to flush.  We are close upon our carrying capacity, if not for the planet, then perhaps for the middle-class existence that has been some 400 or so years in so-and-so many billion/5689 years since the dawn/creation of wo/her/ma/phrodite/n.    That is not a long existence, and perhaps the middle class is but an aberration of Darwin’s theory, unfit to be more than a mere set of so many mutations that then, ran extinct, the world returning to the natural balance of those who have and the masses who have not.

In the years since the New Normal started (the year zero), now, more than ever, there is a chance that those disappointed with the Hopie Changie that did not bring in actual hope and change may return to small spaces and again take them in protest.  There is a very small chance that this will take hold and return the national conversation to income inequality, environmental issues, and our loss of civil rights.  I have not experienced anything other than a further erosion of any stability – a further loss of savings and worth.  However, I have become more determined to work less, party more, and ask myself each morning WWMPD?…. What Would My Penis Do?  Desire, Celine said oh so long ago, was the last weapon of the lower classes had and the only thing the wealthy could not take away.  And as he said, and is soon to be true in this country, every desire a poor man has is a criminal offense.

A few nerds shuffle up and down Main Street as they run away from our current world as so many young men do today because what do you want to be – a Elf Warrior with a cloak of 3 a throw of 7 and shield of 4 or give up your youth to trade it for a Ph.D. and wind up collecting foodstamps or as someone’s adjunct bitch with a student loan debt of $75,000, a car insurance of $125, and a rent (for a share with three others) of $850?  The keystone businesses are all but gone now, but there is a Walmart so perhaps the cycle of life is complete and the ashes of Main Street have given birth to the innovation of local tax abatement and foreign slave labour.  The Occupy Wall Street art stands silently in the windows, the few Poor People who make their way to and from the projects to the beer store pay little attention.  A few elderly from the local Hippie town of West Berkstock come pay respect.  Will it have any impact?  Can years of being discontent actually grow a solution, or just more bitching?

And so, to what is the point, if not something like a prick?