On the Piles.

A quiet and rambling week. Wrote some things about the whole Kirk–Kimmel–Carr–Trump–Sinclair–Nexstar–ABC–Disney debacle, but don’t feel like posting about that. Mainly because the law will be enforced in due course, including reevaluating past mergers if need-be. In the moment it’s often not worth talking, so I’ll write about that instead.

In the past week I’ve seen several stories proclaiming mega moments out of fresh news, and that’s not how it works most of the time. Some events, declarations of war, sure. But for most things that top any given news cycle, they will not have much staying power. They won’t be remarkable in a year, much less ten.

They’ll get piled on top for now, but before you know it the pile grows some more, and those top things are now in the middle of a big pile. Very few will continue to rise to the top.

And that goes for these media mergers, too. Or any companies in merger-happy industries. The first bank I had an account with is long gone, for example. The cable company we subscribed to when I was growing up has not-existed for longer than it existed. And even if you have a long-standing name of a movie studio, by now it’s gone through so many iterations that it’s not really recognizable as the original artistic vision.

The great piling up, at the edge between the black-hole and the non-black-hole—what’s called the event horizon, creates some kind of odd soup of what used to be. But so does our mundane existence here on earth. We watch the leaves wash down the gutter and into the storm drain. They clump and compact, and at some distant point from the tree they fell off of in a cool autumn breeze, they clot and compress, become soil.

It’s always fun to chase and to trace particles through time.

When you watch an old movie, before it starts, they have those little bumps to show the companies involved in making it or distributing it. And you take to Wikipedia to look them up, where did they go? Away. Into the pile.

I read somewhere a Polish proverb: “Only the future is certain. The past is always changing.” Which I think it’s a good proverb, but I question it now. Is it really true? Or is the past the pile, and the future is the pile? I’ve also heard newspaper writers say everything they write ends up lining a birdcage or in the dump or recycled or whatever pile they think is eloquent. But now the pile ends up being the heat of photons off a screen, maybe a few magnetic pulses or energy frozen in a transistor in some sort of storage device. Or, if they’re read, they also get imprinted on someone’s brain, another pile that’s at least as odd and amazing as the event horizon of a black hole.