The other day I decided to do something really different at work. After listening to another podcast about why I am dying at slow death every day from sitting too much, I stood up, and walked away from my desk. It wasn’t for very long, of course, but enough to actually make a journey to the outerlands (some people call it the outdoors). It didn’t feel very safe there, because there was cold air that might have killed me, and there was no water source, so I could have dehydrated myself to death. I didn’t even see any food on the ground, so I was wondering when my next meal was going to happen. I saw this bizzare non-blue light coming from the sky, and I was trying to tell Alexa to dim the yellow orb light, but she was too far away to hear. I knew I couldn’t survive out there for much longer, so I retreated back to the safety of the much less dangerous indoors, where the less harsh, life-giving fluorescents gave me comfort. It’s clear I was not ready for that journey and vowed not to do that much again without much planning.

In that 5-minute excursion to the harsh Outerlands, I observed quite a few things. I saw some mountains in the distance, I breathed in some outdoor air (which is Utah, isn’t fresh air) and saw some buildings that I don’t normally see. Doing that taught me a few lessons. First, don’t do it. Second, we think we live on this giant world called Earth, which is a funny name, because that’s also what we call dirt. Should Saturn just be called Rings? Or Mars be called Dusty Red Crust? We couldn’t come up with a better name for this place? Mars at least decided to be named after a decent candy bar. Let’s come back down to earth for a second though (see what I did there?). We might live on this earth, but I think we really live in a bunch of different realities or worlds.

The Matrix was pretty spot on. We might not be physically plugged into some machine that harvests us for battery life, but we are plugged in the machine most of the time. I spend 8 hours a day at a job, most of it staring at a screen with my headphones on. I’m not physically plugged in, because of wireless headphones, but I might as well be. Every once in a while, someone will be rude enough to interrupt me and make me take my headphones off, but for the most part, everything I do is related to computers, internets and wires. I often say that the end of the world will be when the internet and computers go offline, because most people’s jobs are related to those things. What are we going to do, harvest wheat?

That’s just our work world. If we work at an office, we have our commuting world, where we routinely do stuff like listen to the radio, or podcasts, or play games while our car drives us to work. We have our home world, where we might interact with humans, and we have our phone world, which is our brain, our Social Media feeds, our games, and our texting. Phones aren’t really used for calling people anymore, but occasionally boomers (my parents) call us on them. Then, we have our TV worlds, characters we know better than our co-workers from our office (for instance, Michael Scott, Jim Halpert, Pam Beesly and Dwight Shrute, from THE Office).

We have our music worlds, our podcast worlds, our book worlds, or our video game worlds. Some of us have friend worlds, where we hang out with people outside our families, but I don’t visit that world very often. One third of our lives isn’t even spent awake. We enter the enchanting and fascinating dreamland 5-12 hours a day, and we don’t even know if it will be an awesome dream or a living nightmare. Flip of a coin from night to night.

Some people may talk about living in a world, but I think are in a Matrix world, or some sort of World Wide Web. where we live in dozens of worlds and our lives are just about floating from one world to to the next. There is a brief commute time, or something like moving from wire to wire to get from one hub to the next. We collide with other 1’s and 0’s (I mostly deal with the zero’s) that disrupt us from time to time, but we mostly just float from one world to the next.

As such, welcome to Bitter Blog World. It is harsh planet, full of bitterness and sand that gets in your eyes and shoes and irritates you to no end. You may just take a brief tour of this world by viewing this post, or just looking at the gifs, because they are funny. If you are bored, you may spend some time here and actually read the post. If it makes you bitter enough, you might want to spend all day here, reading all 1,341 posts, and liking, comment, and clicking on things, but then you might start liking it here too much and want to live here. There is only so much space around here, so my suggestion, come and visit often, but don’t expect free Wi-Fi, free warm cookies or turn up service in the morning. And definitely don’t expect concierge service.

Here are the Bitter Friday Giftures you came for…

I decided to go for a walk, but it had been so long…

When I entered the Outerlands…

I wondered why…

I couldn’t find…

We decided to name the earth…

I’m definitely NOT…

What are we going to do when the internet goes down…

We’re just a bunch of data…

Occasionally we collide…

Which causes network…

Welcome to Ben’s Bitter Blog Planet…

Don’t expect…

Ben’s Bitter Blog World doesn’t have any amusement parks, but we do have a lot of roller coasters…of bitterness. So strap in, because it will be a bumpy ride.

ARRRGGHHHHH

Bitter Enter the Matrix Ben