Hoping for a Standstill

 

I am using music as an escape of late.  I like live music and Portland is a hot locale for the funky offbeat stuff that I have come to treasure. 

But money and time and energy and too few friends have been taking their toll and slapping me back to reality.  Missing James McMurty this weekend.  Doing Gary Clark Jr. and Son Volt.  Probably missing Parliment.  Sigh.

Todays Screed

Overall, I am coming to the same conclusion that Charles Dickens outlined in the "Tale of Two Cities":

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

I sometimes look back at the evolution of my thinking and cringe.  I remember reading that fatuous paean to American Awesomeness by Fukiyama and thinking "Yes".  I remember lying in the bed in my dorm room in Austin Hall and thinking "Yes" when plowing through "Atlas Shrugged". 

To say that now such things are embarrassing is to overwork the obvious.  But to say that those works now appear to be the guiding principles of what drives this late stage empire would be equally obvious. 

I have no earthly clue what is going on today in the world.  Where before I would look to books for my understanding of the world today, I feel that the world has taken a different approach.  I think that maybe the world has opted for, in place of books, Hollywood movies.  "Wag the Dog", "Network News", "Wall Street", and network being the more obvious suspects (As a self-test: Readers should attempt to come up with three additional movies to relate).

I have been spending time going back, trying to find a written word mental model for the world that is happening to me and which I helped create.  So far it is a fail, and the models presented by the movies just depress me.