GeoCities will be gone forever as of Monday, October 26.

Sometimes my capacity for nostalgia surprises me. That's because I lie to myself, and the lie that I tell myself is that I'm not nostalgic. The impulse to tell that lie must be machismo, inscribed in my male DNA. Nostalgia seems soppy, feminine (or maybe too Irish?) and scatter-brained: A sign of physical and mental weakness.

See? I'm already babbling incoherently.

For people my age and possibly for other people the decade of the 1990s triggers our nostalgia reflex like no other. It seems like it was such an innocent and simple time. Only we Americans, who live in a condition of total culture industry-immersion, could possibly be self-indulgent enough to cast matters in that light.

Really, it wasn't a time of innocence at all, but rather, of myopia and wealth. If the myopia was the kind of myopia that accompanies great wealth, the wealth was the kind of wealth -- think "Dot-Com Bubble" -- that depended upon myopia for its sustenance: irrational exuberance, half-baked math and coke-addled entrepreneurs gaming venture capitalists for millions of dollars in order to get chihuahua-enthusiasts.com off the ground.

But then again, it was an innocent and simple time, and maybe its innocence was partly to do with its simplicity. To be sure, the Reagan 80s were an even simpler time that bombarded us to an unprecedented degree with big spectacles of consumer populism, products, images and myths that knew no class divisions, preferring to treat us all like idiots: the Magic Of Spielberg® ™, Family Ties, Reagan's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" shit, NASA, Eddie Murphy, when he got really really lame, New Coke, Sylvester Stallone, Flight of the Navigator, etc., etc.

No wonder everybody was in such a celebratory mood in the 1990s. By the end of the 80s, culture had basically gotten as bad as it could possibly get. So it was time for Big Capital to steal, to gut, to bastardize and to...erm...monetize* a fresh batch of attitudes, fashions and tropes. Remember My So-Called Life? And, uh, 120 Minutes (actually begun in the 80s, but whatever...). The "Seattle sound" stuff was kind of refreshing for a couple of seconds to those of us teenagers who hadn't previously been cool enough to know about Fugazi, The Minutemen and Big Black. And before long, we had amazing music to get into, like Stereolab (rest in peace, Mary Hansen), Lush, Gastr del Sol, Jim O'Rourke, Pavement and -- last but not least -- Oasis.

But I'll leave aside my sure-to-be-interminable observations about music for another day. the important thing to observe for now is that through the vast majority of that halcyon decade, that obnoxious "Pitchfork" bullshit had yet to rear its head and poison everything with its vile, vapid, retrograde shittiness.

No, in those days, the decade of Bill Clinton, we had GeoCities.

And the point of this post is to inform those of you who may not already know it that GeoCities -- the Yahoo corporation's once-ubiquitous, trusty, colorful, untrendy, gauche, un-ironic, un-self-reflexive, fun, free Web site-hosting service -- will be closing in just a couple of short days.

I'm going to miss GeoCities. Just having it around. It's been around for over 15 years! For some reason, it honestly just feels weird to contemplate a world without tons of decrepit old GeoCities Web pages that nobody ever looks at anymore. Isn't it in repositories such as this that is to be found proof of (the decline of) Western civilization?

Read Yahoo's lame non-reasons for euthanizing GeoCities. (I'll get over it. Some day....)

And click here or the image below to learn -- at this, the eleventh hour -- how to help the venerable Web site archive.org to save archives of your favorite GeoCities sites as a service to history and to humanity. In twenty years, when you write your two-volume History of the Internet, you'll thank yourself for having had the prescience to ensure the preservation of a deserving GeoCities site.

Am I the only one who's going to miss GeoCities?

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* I feel like I should say ten Hail Marys or something for having used that phrase, even in jest... You can take the Catholic out of the Church, but you can't etc., etc. Turns out this is true even when he takes himself out of the Church, crying tears of joy and toasting to his imminent liberation from his oppressors every step of the way.

The point about Sarah Palin is that she's amoral.

News about Sarah Palin: apparently she's blah blah blah blah blah.

Sarah Palin: theories as to why she apparently arouses hatred. I probably do hate her, and insofar as I do, I hate that I hate her. To inspire the hatred of others is to wield a peculiar kind of power. There's also a part of me that is in a sense unfazed by her personally, that sees in her a representation of many of contemporary America's most morally objectionable tendencies. It is these tendencies that I oppose with all my might, whether she's there to embody them or not. Right? ...

But, Sarah Palin: she's got to be a symptom of something rather than the other way around, right? Because what symptom could possibly be CAUSED by a Sarah Palin? No. She must be the symptom. The side effect.

Sarah Palin: a side effect. Like television commercials for various god-knows-what prescription medications marketed to Baby-Boomers, so that they don't have to poop at inopportune moments, or whatever it is. SIDE EFFECTS MAY INCLUDE SARAH PALIN. Sometimes these advertisements -- the funniest of them, to be sure -- devote, like, over half of their running-time to the announcer guy reading out laundry lists of scary-ass side effects, which MAY INCLUDE MUCUS, SEIZURE, BLOOD CLOT, LOSS OF HEARING, OR -- IN RARE CASES -- SARAH PALIN...

I don't hate Palin so much as I fear the consolidation of political power among those who love her.

Sarah Palin -- to paraphrase the Sex Pistols -- She ain't no human being!, but a constellation of images, allusions and gestures.

The mediated phenomenon "Sara Palin" evokes nostalgia among a large number of Americans -- although, as far as I can tell, not a majority of them -- for a past that does not exist/that never existed.

I am reminded of accounts I have read of what it was like to witness the ascendancy of National Socialism in the tempestuous final days of the Weimar Republic: the celebration of ignorance, of seething, unfocused resentments.

The final revenge of style over content.

Sarah Palin makes George W. Bush look like a civil libertarian. She makes Ronald Reagan look pro-education. Sarah Palin is worse than these men because, whereas their moral precepts were delusional, hers are non-existent.

She's amoral: she represents indifference toward morality, indifference toward the Constitution, indifference toward the quality of life -- and livelihoods -- of present and future generations, indifference toward science, indifference toward representative democracy, indifference toward the separation of the branches of government, indifference toward education, indifference toward art, toward culture, toward freedom, toward poverty, toward the pursuit of happiness, indifference toward the principles espoused by the Founding Fathers, indifference toward religion in its meaningful sense, indifference toward history, indifference toward ideas, and indifference toward suffering.

The only thing toward which she is not indifferent is Sarah Palin. She doesn't care about the people who celebrate her. The people who celebrate her do so in the sense that they live vicariously through her. She embodies a collective, incoherent and self-contradictory dream. This dream pines for the destruction of all things unfamiliar in the interest of preserving the self as the self construes itself.

We really should be explaining the Left objection to her in moral terms: Sarah Palin is amoral.