It has been a bit since I’ve sat down for a Friday report. This one actually qualifies as Saturday morning, I suppose. And then a bit later as Saturday afternoon. So I guess that streak continues, technically.
I can’t say for certain there would have been a Saturday report for that matter, but there are moments when I feel so compelled by something I see that I have to stop what I’m doing and write about it, try to organize some ephemeral impression into bumps and crevasses, some landscape of proper non-dream, nonsense-quality, effective thought that can be expressed to a hierarchy of brain states that are, or at least appear to be, fully formed, properly structured and not binging on the back of a dog-assed tired sorta day that leaves your typical sleep state wrought with figurative, literal Transformers made out of ideas. Talking about dreams Jack. God, the Devil! Luckily, I have a handy dandy electronic brain or I’d be carrying around a lotta receipts with scrawl and illegible marginalia.
I had one of those moments just now. Just then. Now and then. Whatever. But hence the being compelled to write. This old man is eating with his family. Probably four generations sitting at this table across from me. He talks about the old times. Not in a hackneyed way like that sentence implies, but in something closer to living color. Real video of the kitsch photographs you’ve seen a thousand times. I can hear snatches whenever I take out my headphones to scratch my ear. And that’s what got me, that was the existential epicenter of this thought splashed on page. Sitting here in front of this computer, tied together by brilliant technology that not only was non-existent when he was my age, but hardly conceived in anything but the fancies of a Da Vinci-themed notebook somewhere, some place. It is the neon glow in a brick and wood building thrice my own age – which ain’t exactly youthful – summarily linked in the same way this man is with the world around him. It’s like that weird timelapse Madonna video only as real life.
This place I sit, it feels of old and modern, it has strings that stretch back a hundred years, so much longer than me, yet it still feels like this cross-section of its history sits perfectly within the conceptual scheme where it currently lies, where I’m chillin’ too. There’s something humbling about that, the scope of it all, and more than that really, the connectedness. It’s a small slice of a really big pie of a world. Stupid metaphor, that one, but it speaks to one of the philosophical dilemmas that I struggle with daily, aside from that other one I’m always rambling on about, the one about the thoughts in everyone else’s brains.
But they do share several scatter points (the dilemmas, not the brains) in their Venn diagram existence. One is their ability to make you feel completely alone in your head even when the sights and sound of life are screaming by around you. A sort of disconnectedness. Which is a very ironic notion, that those links, the chains, that bind it all together can create such a sense of isolation and removal. Maybe it’s just the rainy music saying that. It’s not even raining. It should be.
One memory that constantly refreshes itself in my own well of thought is one that has drifted through those many long nights I’ve spent in New Orleans, a memory that always seemed to recreate itself around 3 a.m. somewhere on some block on Decatur. It’s amazing how alive that city is on any given morning at any given place, people will say. Which people? The ones I created for my counterpoint. It’s not any given place. It’s not even a lot of places, or essential places. In fact it’s very few places,and oh boy are they far between. There are these…pockets in 3 a.m. New Orleans, pockets of light washed by old lampposts, like something out of a Victorian facsimile of the end of the world. Outside of those pockets though, it’s like the void between the stars; it becomes every other small town shut down and in bed by 9 p.m. That life, that vibrancy, it’s only with you as long as you’re standing in the halo. Then it’s snuffed out, and you’re set free, your links to humanity and civilization and existence blown away, and you’re just floating through the dark, disconnected.
This is a very vague, abstract, roundabout way to discuss what it is about that feeling that I had that caused me to write this, the one about the old man living in a modern world. At heart I think there’s this fundamental terror (if you wanna get right at the idea) but more like some type of tense unease, if you’re in your waking mind, at the grandiose scope of it all. It makes it feel like it isn’t quite your world, that you’re a passerby, a watcher of something that smirks knowingly at your awed look of amazement, but really doesn’t have the time to stop and talk to you about the nuts and bolts of the impressive show it’s putting on. We give more fucks about the universe than it does about us, I suppose you could say. Which makes sense. But it’s still scary. Those hideous beautiful glimpses are always only exactly that; they never last long. So fleeting, but so omnipotent – a scope that makes you sick to your stomach, makes you sink to your knees and cry for reasons you don’t know and can’t understand. You cry, and your voice rings out, echoing off emptiness and expanse, hollow and searching.
Anyway, back on the horse, train, locomotive mechanism of some sort. Next week, poetry, and other things I don’t understand. So next week: most things. Probably some phil0sophy too, but I’ll make sure to direct it next time. Corral it. Or at least pretend to. Sometimes you just need time to see yourself think.