Granted, but all of my music at that age was second-hand from friends/girlfriends/friends-that-I-wished-were-girlfriends. I wasn’t given Portishead; I was given Dummy.

And you were still a teen then.

For a lot of people, life is high school writ large. Also, if I’m being honest, I do still get as obsessive about useless commercial culture every now and then. I’m on the verge of becoming completely intolerable to Emma, as I’ve listened to the same song probably somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty times in the last 48 hours. She’s very patient with me, but her patience is wearing thin.

Their second (self-titled) is such a better record, though.  And you were still a teen then.

You and me both, dude.  Being able to fit all those in-jokes about our misspent youth into one paragraph is legendary.  No one else will get it, but even so, I can think of only one arrestable offense in what you listed.  (You could have made the paragraph longer — people have, after all, bothered to explain to you the concept of “bigger” — but I might have walked away in my boots [which is what they were made for] which would have left you unsupervised to go drive through a hospital parking lot the wrong way in order to shoot Tori Amos’ husband in the head.  Via the KFC parking lot.  So: clever girl!)

Now if only you still had that effing picture documenting our excursion to that hardcore-rebellious-indie place in Santa Monica.  Awesome hobos, awesome Soviet surf rock; just avoid the Johnny Rocket’s.

I don’t have the time

Yeah you do.  You’d just have to take it away from your other, more worthwhile pursuits (WTF?)

I understand that the draw of mass media is mystifying.

And that is my point.  It’s because all the stuff we obsessed about as teens, no one had ever heard of — as illustrated by your list that includes Nirvana, The X-Files, Magic: The Gathering, James Cameron movies, Pearl Jam, and so on.  Wait, what?

But I remember the teenager who listened to Dummy in a dark room over and over and over

Portishead’s Dummy?

I know who Francis Bean Cobain is. I attended a memorial sing-along at Johnny Cash’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I smelled what The Rock was cookin’. I’ve moved zig (for great justice). I’ve dressed up as Brad Majors and been stripped down to my underwear. My roommate and I went through a period of several months where we would shout “THIRTEEN!” whenever we encountered one another. I’ve been dragged to more opening night showings of movies than I can count. I’ve memorized all the words to Rock Lobster, a song I don’t even like, just so I could sing it at inappropriate times. I was kicked out of a game store for loudly decrying a form of gaming that wasn’t my own. I threw things at the television when Crash won Best Picture. I mostly make movie references at night… Mostly. I was in a car that vastly exceeded the speed limit so that the person driving could be one of the first to listen to the new Pearl Jam album (alblum).

None of this, not one bit of it, is actually anything that is objectively worth the time and attention that I’ve given it. That’s ok. There’s nothing wrong with getting excited about things, even when those things are stupid.

I understand that the draw of mass media is mystifying. I watch a grand total of three hours of television a week, a full third of which is watched on DVD (which is to say, old TV with no commercials). I can’t remember the last time I listened to the radio. I don’t follow any celebrities on Twitter, or belong to any Facebook “fan” groups. I don’t have the time, and I don’t have the inclination.

But I remember the teenager who listened to Dummy in a dark room over and over and over, who called into a local radio show to ask Neil Gaiman about comic book characters, who spent countless hours trawling the internet in search of theories about the Cigarette Smoking Man. I remember him caring, even about things that didn’t really matter all that much.

There are days when I really miss that kid.

But here’s the question: Do tabloid mags exist in order to “make people care” about this garbage or do some (many?) care enough that it justifies the existence of tabloids?

My guess is that it’s the later.

The “why” eludes me, too.

Upon reflection, my subtext seems to be “… when there are so many more important things to care about?”  Isn’t everyone thrilled that I get to be the Grand Arbiter of what is worthy of attention and what is not?  (I think my argument kinda breaks down, at least on this axis.)

The thought process has been intermingling with reflections on Denis Leary that I’ve been having for the last 24 hours, and which deserves a longer, more-careful post.  My clarification began with a disclaimer that I know I like certain things, and think/write about them a lot.  I really do know that.

My true point is this:  The saturation of these memes is such that the “some people juggle geese” explanation seems insufficient.  So does the “meme-gone-viral” explanation.  Cannot the people involve see just how manufactured all of these are?  Like, “Here ya go, care about this!”

Am I wrong, factually (for instance, the nascence of the Bieber thing looks legitimately grassroots)?  Am I making a false dichotomy (as in, are the memes I propagate just as engineered)?  Again, this may deserve a whole essay about these topics.  Or a book characterizing the feedback loops that generate this runaway stuff, and the features that make them take off (gloss, schadenfreude, surprise value, contained conflict, whatever).  Or, you know, a Ph.D. thesis.  Not that I obsess much.