My Mystery Time — Mysteries and More by Bruce Wetterau

                                                                              Digital Weeds in the Lawns of Our Lives

It's happened. Spring has arrived and the dark green blades sprouting in my browned out yard were the first signs of life after winter. You'd think that, as a writer, I'd be excited to see it, maybe even wax poetic about the rite of spring.
     Not me. I'm the guy who will spend the next eight months cutting that grass. And the annual March of the Weeds will be in full flower too, dandelions, wild garlic, clover, and crabgrass. Invariably I think I'm going to do something about those darn weeds, one of these years.
     Through it all there's the discouraging inevitability of weeds. They grow, well, like weeds. Like many of life's little problems, stopping them seems all but impossible.

                                                                                                  Digital Weeds

You may already know that I've published my book of humorous stories, What My Refrigerator Said to Me: Misadventures in the Digital Age. It's a preposterously funny take on where we are and where a futuristic Digital Age might just be leading us.
     There's no denying the Digital Age has brought much that is truly wondrous and world-changing. And also no denying that I've been around for a long time, long enough to remember the days before computers and the internet came to rule our lives. So I've seen a lot of world-shaking ideas and dire events come and go, which made me think I might have some perspective on this business of living in the Digital Age.
     That computers and their interconnectivity are capable of intruding on every aspect of our lives and broadcasting it the world over won't come as a surprised to anyone. But cyberspace also exists as a giant, algorithmic amplifier of who we are--and might want to be. That's power. By indulging us so solicitously, cyberspace makes our wants and needs seem so important to us we can't live without them. Sadly, all that indulgence can distort us and pander to our inhumanity too. Which is to say we have new weeds to contend with in the lawns of our lives.
     We can retreat to the safe harbor of it's not the fault of cyberspace, it's the people who are abusing it. True enough, as far as that goes. But let's face it, the internet's intrinsic hackability and incessant interconnectivity with our lives have magnified by many, many times the ease with which almost anybody can influence--or just plain scam--millions of unsuspecting cyberfolks like us. And that's aside from newly minted internet megacrimes like ransomware, where it's possible to steal billions of dollars without so much as pulling a gun. It's a weedy wild west out there, seemingly beyond anything we can change or fix.
     If I've learned anything from my decades on this earth, it's the simple truth that laughter is the best medicine for maintaining one's sanity in our out-of-kilter world. That if we are to survive in this era of indulgent pandering, spin doctoring, polarization, and outright scams, from time to time we need to stop and see the humor in this chaotic, weedy world of ours. Learn from the chaos, try to change it, sure. But don't forget we need humor--laughter at the world and ourselves--to give ourselves a break. To realize just how transient the world, and life is.
     So I wrote What My Refrigerator Said. Your are sure to find plenty in those pages that's so amazingly preposterous you have to stop and laugh. If it also makes you step back and think about where we are going, all the better. That and laughter are the best weed killers I know.
     Till next time,
                         Bruce