My mom likes this british singer named Sarah Brightman, who happened to be doing a concert in my town last wednesday. My mom bought 2 tickets, for her and my dad. My dad couldn't go for some reason or other, so she asked me. I had absolutely no idea what kind of music Sarah Brightman was, though I know what my mom likes and so I had my suspicions it might not be like what I usually listen to.
Since Sarah Brightman is from the U.K. I guessed she might be like Enya or something. I figure the way to get through Enya is to try to visualize scenarios of yourself as a movie star in an expensive drug rehab center kicking a $10,000 a week cocaine habit. They pipe in Enya to blunt whatever edge the environment might still possess to drive you back to drugs. The reason for that is because they need to dilute every possible pressure in the environment to prevent a relapse and they probably realize that seeing the color of a bird is enough of a reason to drive most coke addicts back to doing it.
Well it wasn't like Enya. So it wasn't so bad. The music was a little strange to me, but it was nice to see my mom enjoying herself.
Anyway, if you're going to see Sarah Brightman you will have absolutely no problem sneaking in booze. The security at this concert was somewhat lackluster, perhaps because her fans aren't really too likely to be raising hell in the bleachers. I think I could have snuck in a keg. All I would have had to do was put a hat, sunglasses and a trenchcoat on it and then sat it in an empty seat and no one would have been the wiser.
The Sarah Brightman concert was at the coliseum which is a giant round bowl with a dome roof. Not deliberately, the stage lights were slightly illuminating the metal girders that radiated out from the center of the roof to support the giant dome that sits over the coliseum. So anyway, if you've ever seen the movie Independence Day, the bottom of the alien ships looked a lot like the web of steel girders of the interior of the roof of the coliseum.
So I noticed how due to the way the light off the stage sort of lit it up the roof looked a lot like the bottom of the spaceships in the movie Independence Day, and I realized that I could definitely do worse than be at this concert. For one thing I could have been watching that brain dead movie Independence Day. The rest of the concert was kind of a nice relief after I had that thought. My mom and I enjoyed ourselves, Sarah Brightman seemed to enjoy herself and life for all of us continued uninterrupted.
Now here comes a totally unrelated and completely non linear break from what you just read, which is also the second half of this piece of writing. I've had some philosophical ideas on my mind this week. I have been thinking about what I think are modern conditions of growing self absorption and the self justifying rationalization of progress. I called it a modern condition although it probably isn't.
The more facts about the world we learn the more we discover that the earth, the sky, the stars and the galaxy have been pinwheeling around us through billions of miles and years. They might do it just to make us feel unimportant. But most of what we take away from that is the awareness that we only get so much time, and there is just so much stuff to do. So we are accelerating our lives and matching the hurtling stars, with no expectation of reaching some terminal velocity. It just gets faster and faster.
It creates the weirdest things. Actual personal growth is postponed in lieu of staying current. We want to keep up with everything, with the social galaxy, so we race along with it but we don't actually know where it's going. Nor do we even really care if where it's going is good. The most important thing is not to be left behind. For some reason we know that is terrible. We don't seem to mature, but we develop in all kinds of ways. We are self obsessed. The center of our thoughts are me, this, here, now, and what things can we do to make the subject of our thoughts rich, beautiful, famous and mighty.
We progress and we are rational about everything. This is why we are self obsessed, as a rational rat in race you need to be watching yourself so you can superficially improve to reach some goal. So the rationality of self examination leads us to focus on our self as the center of everything, but the center has no center.
What am I doing? Every second of my life is packed with sensations; food eaten, games played, dollars earned, phones answered. I have 2 phones, 2 jobs, 5 email addresses, 900 aquaintances, and free time which I cram full of make work projects, entertainment, and directionless self improvement. Now I don't want to sound self loathing or anything, but my activities are pretty useless. I'm not a cardiologist, a molecular biologist or a world leader. Nothing I do makes any difference to this world, which appears to make no difference to the vast and whirling universe. But I am still totally absorbed by my life's affairs.
It's as if being active has become a substitute for a purpose. Sometimes I feel like we run in circles so at the end of the day we're fatigued enough to sleep.
Was it always like this? I think so, its just the pace keeps changing. My parents came from a time when people started to really populate the world with gadgets. Little boxes and screens, speakers and invisible waves. The gadgets have a logic that says everything that uses energy must accomplish a goal. So when we see the general effectiveness of our gadgets it makes people appear all the more ineffective and goalless.
Gadgets do what we ask them, they only do that, and if they fail they are discarded. In comparison people seem to be a burdensome cluster of half completed or failed goals and wasted energy. In the absence of a purpose we strive to have the effectiveness of our mechanical creations. Whether or not what they do has meaning at least they do something.
We have a zillion more products than we did 50 years ago. We can put microchips 1 million times more powerful than the computer on the Apollo moon lander into milk cartons. This proliferation nurtures a growing wilderness of technology. On every tree in this wilderness there is a sign telling you something, but it only makes sense if you can read every sign on every tree. There are just as many maps which make as much sense as the signs. And despite all the information there is not much to chain it all together into some kind of understanding. So a lot of us just wander, except we're usually running.
But we seem happy. Maybe because this action distracts us from the seeming absurdity of our spectacular lives that end with an abrupt death? That is a distressing thought we can dodge, so we dodge it. But should we?
Why the fuck not.