We’ve got here a culture of voyeurism, a hyperactive, interactive, culture of watching. We’ve all got superstar envy. We all want it big and we all want it now and we all want it bad. We’ve got high definition plasma screen 250-channel TV where, after a day of quiet desperation, we can watch the unnaturally beautiful, the unnaturally rich, the unnaturally famous with their unnaturally white teeth. We’re plugged into the world where everything is bigger, louder, faster, newer. There are no individuals anymore, there are only brands, selling their smiles, selling their names on their drivers licenses. For $2 we, all of us consigned to the ordinary, can buy a shot at our new lives, we can tell our bosses off and buy cottages for our family. Just my spam today promises bigger rounder tits and a bigger harder more satisfying knob.

Alexander was the conqueror of the known world. We conquer now not with swords, not with warfare; we conquer with publicity and marketing. Success is measured in syndication and in bling.

Stop. Get me off this crazy thing. I’ve had enough. I think we need a day to stop it. An antidote. I hereby propose we have a day, let’s pick November 18th, where we celebrate mediocrity, where we observe and respect the ordinary. No celebrity TV. No celebrities on talk shows. We don’t go to movies or casinos, we don’t buy music, DVDs, bling, or lottery tickets, we don’t get plastic surgery or botox injections.

But I suppose observing mediocrity has its pitfalls. We can’t celebrate individuals on any grand scale. We couldn’t pluck out the enduring long-suffering and unemployed, or the dedicated secretary, or the earnest trash collector; we couldn’t take that person and put him on TV and thank him because that would raise him out of the ordinary. Also we couldn’t market the day of observation; there could be no Hallmark card. No: “I love you, you’re perfectly mediocre.” No: “Thank you for the thousands of perfectly ordinary things you do.”

Mediocre, meanwhile, literally means halfway up the mountain which is really cool, perhaps too cool for the definition of the word.

Here’s some packaged boredom celebrating the mediocre and the mundane:

• The self-called Official Watching Paint Dry website
• Watch corn grow with this Corn Cam
• The Dullmen’s Club
• The Dullest Blog in the World
• Subscribe to the Mundane News at the Journal of Mundane Behavior
• Watch a street in a town just outside of Glasgow, Scotland on the Neilston Webcam
• Update someone else’s screensaver on The People’s Cam

SS