Ramblus 12 - I went back and counted
There isn't much I get upset by or spooled up about anymore no matter what the topic - terrorism, presidential elections, or the importance of the use of real cheese and not just cheese food products in school lunches. I have sort of hit a point of acknowledgement. Acknowledgement and acceptance that largely it is something I can not change. In a presidential election, I have my one vote, but I don't seriously believe that it's all that important because the voting system does not represent (and I use the word deliberately) what it once did. For terrorism, if I see a guy wearing (fill in your favorite generlization about terry cloth headware here) setting down a box and then running like mad in the other direction, I promise to tell the local authorities, but once again, I acknowledge that there isn't much that I can do about terrorism. And what to do about cheese food products? Well eat them, of course...I'm not finicky and anything with even the word "cheese" in it has to have some redeeming value, right? Well of course it does.
I have recently come to the conclusion that its all going to have to hit rock bottom before anyone looks up and says "Hey man...I just noticed that nothing in our lives has any real content any more. We just sort of pat each other on the back and tell each other it's content, but let's face it...we have no idea."
A lot of folks really don't know...probably because they got laughed at for reading books or beat up for thinking and not going with the in crowd. Worse than that...some then grow up and have kids of their own and teach them that the worst thing they can do in their lives (that they bloody well better show some appreciation for) is disagree with mom or dad. What I'm getting at is the predominant message pervading at least the US if not many countries. Stop Thinking.
If you, dear reader, will dare to think and look around you, you will see the results of this everywhere you go. Many people are genuinely frightened to be alive due to all the potential hostility (after all, a bomb exists that can erase a city, and people exist who are happy to detonate them), and if they aren't living in a tiny self made box of ignorance to escape that and all the less dramatic but still deadly potential violence, it might be because they are hiding from the screwed up self esteem that goes along with being innundated every day by images that tell them that to be successful they need to get Hairplants™, or BreastPlants™, or WhiteTeeth™, or StayHard™ and that to find a companion you must conform to the norm as defined by a bunch of people that really don't care if you're successful as long as you send in $19.95 for the shipping and handling on a free trial right away.
That is a generalization, of course, but I am sure you all can see what I'm referring to. Maybe it isn't as epidemic as *I* think it is, but it IS epidemic. If you don't think so, don't forget to watch the commercials as well as the show during next season's American Idol. (And I'll let Muggaz put the BAM!!! on that if he happens by.)
When it comes to music - my friends, acquaintances, random people in lines at the bank, and that bum that lives in the box on the corner will tell you that I can go on and on about my ire over the fact that millions, maybe billions of untrained ears are determining the course of an art that is strictly aural in nature, and they are doing so because a visual element has been added to it which, vision being what it is, is stealing the show. As I once heard Dennis Miller say, and I paraphrase, "Style is beating the sh*t out of substance daily." and being a musician in a world where no one seems to really care about what I or my peers can speak to them musically as long as we look a certain way while doing it, I agree.
But now...an invention has come along. A BRILLIANT invention. And it means that I'm not alone anymore. Writers are going to take it in the shorts, too, (but probably not so much as musicians, because most people these days think thought is bad for you, and reading tends to cause thinking.)
What is that invention? Well, to support my belief that people should think, I'm going to let you figure it out, but I'll give you a hint. It's right under your nose.
No, not your lip, I meant figuratively.
Ock, keeping it simple since 1962