Life is hard. Here is someone.

Something funny I noticed, perhaps you have noticed it, too. You know what futurists and online-ists and cut-out-the-middle-man-ists and Davos-ists and deconstructionists of every stripe want for themselves?…They want white linen tablecloths on trestle tables in the middle of vineyards on soft blowy afternoons. (You can click your bottle of wine online. Cheaper.) They want to go shopping on Saturday afternoons on the Avenue Victor Hugo; they want the pages of their New York Times all kind of greasy from croissant crumbs and butter at a cafe table in Aspen; they want to see their names in hard copy in the “New Establishment” issue of Vanity Fair, they want a nineteenth-century bookshop; they want to see the plays in London, they want to float down the Nile in a felucca; they want five-star bricks and mortar and DO NOT DISTURB signs and views of the park.

—

Richard Rodriguez for Harper’s, “Twilight of the American Newspaper”

I was in the airport and really wanted to read this essay so I took the magazine to the counter and the lady said 7 dollars and I about DIED. And then I read this wonderful, wonderful essay that I adore and want all my blogfriends to read but YOU CAN’T ACCESS IT ONLINE. I know this a complicated choice which I have hardly even considered so who am i to whine but: UGH. Anyway, don’t worry, harper’s already sassed me about this.

Anyway I edited out the mean parts of this paragraph because 1. they are too close to home and 2. i think it diminishes the nuance and truth of which he is saying which I agree with wholeheartedly!

But isn’t that what everybody wants? That stuff? Why does that have to change? So we want to be in Vanity Fair or say, Harper’s!, but we also want to link to it on our blogs; we want to stay at that hotel but we want to find it online after reading a buttload of recommendations and asking our Internet friends where to get the best croissant. I want my iPhone to navigate me to the 19th century bookshop and I want to take pictures of it and squeal about it on Twitter. I want my five star brick and mortar to have free wifi and I want it to be good.

But a felucca? I don’t know what the fuck that is.