In an attempt to move my blog away from incessant whining about boys, I've decided to try something remarkably daring (at least for me.) I'm going to address the daily featured article on Wikipedia, whatever it may be, and see where my rambling thoughts on the article may take me. Some place witty and fancy, I hope, but I think it's going to end up remarkably masturbatory. Then again, this IS a personal blog we're talking about - these things are almost all about pleasuring yourself in one way or another.
So today's topic is...the Red River Trails. Ooooooookay. Already I can tell that time and fate and the cosmos at large are ready to do a big BM all over this pet project. On a random tangent - people often say that it's arrogant to consider that time and fate and the cosmos at large are at all concerned about us. We are, after all, less than blips on the radar when you consider the universe at large - spatially, temporally, and influentially, we teeter right at the edge of being a complete null sum. I, however, like to think that concepts and influences as large as time and fate and the cosmos at large have no choice but to be concerned with the very small AS WELL as the very grand in scale. As with God, only the truly grand can ascribe an importance to the very tiny that matches the importance of the unimaginably astronomical.
I'm not sure I communicated that concept very clearly, but I don't particularly want to go into it right now. Maybe I'll attempt to refine my argument at a later date.
Anyway, the Red River Trails. According to the glance I had off Wikipedia, they were a series of ox-cart routes that extended from what is now Winnipeg down to areas of Minnesota and North Dakota. I know nothing about them, and...that fact does not fill me with chagrin. People close to me will know that I had almost no interest in social studies back in school - I was only vaguely interested in geography and the only kind of history I liked was ancient history. Something about the far-flung pharaohs of Egypt, the antediluvian gods of Mesopotamia, and (yes) the cruel mysticism of China held an air of mystery, of mythology, and the of the exotic that, I do confess, the ox-cart routes of the Mississippi rather fails to achieve. In fact, American history generally seems so...banal...to me that despite my best efforts I could never develop more than a cursory interest in it. Mind you, I've wanted to become interested in it - for someone like me, not knowing very much about American history has been a constant gall. Summoning up the will to actually learn anything about it always feels like the thirteenth labor of Heracles, however. (Ha! You shall not redeem yourself, Heracles, until you can tell me the exact dates and locations of major battles during the Civil War, and who won each one!)
That said, I actually browsed through a book called "A People's History of the United States" during the run of "Wild Party" maybe a year ago and found it fascinating. I never quite got back to it after the run ended, but I HAVE been on sort of a nonfiction kick lately. Maybe this would be the perfect time to pick up that book again and pound some modern history into my rebellious skull.
I teeter between vaguely excited by the notion, and that feeling you might get if you realized you have to spend the next week cleaning up a men's lavatory in a major high-security prison with your own toothbrush. And then actually use that toothbrush afterward. Maybe I'll get through some other books before I get to expanding my history.
Like War and Peace, for example.
(Only one person will actually understand the meaning behind that last one, and only for him with it have the full impact that it's meant to.)
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