Are you my Audience?

I’ve lived much of my life in conflict. For instance, I want to pursue creative endeavors, but I don’t want attention. I want to produce pointless stuff, but I also want to drone on about the importance of doing stuff that will inspire future generations. You don’t even want to see the six-fingered hands I’ve been drawing recently.

Part of me wants to continue to point out all the ways in which I’m a disappointment. And part of me wants to understand it. After all, my gut feeling is that it has some logic to it. Just like using gasoline produces exhaust, my suspicion is that my six-finger hands correspond to something.

I grew up in Texas, and I wanted to be a “good boy.” (Like a dog). It was very important for me to do the right thing, and I wanted to be sure to avoid trouble. As I got older, I was REALLY into spoken word albums by Jello Biafra, the lead singer of the Dead Kennedys. When he came to UT Austin, I went to see him and cringed every time he tried to burp not-into the mic but failed. …so many loud burps—how embarrassing.

Anyway I feel like Jello’s ‘schtick’ was to disabuse us now-adults of what we’d learned as youths, to point out a lot of the myths we believed and to identify them as mythology. As an adolescent, it felt liberating to discover adults told lies, too, but now what?

It seems like tearing down the mythology simply identifies more to do. Right after the millennium, holocaust enabler IBM had a hilarious ad where a man said (something like) “It is the year 2000, and I see no flying cars. I was promised flying cars. Where are they?!” I remember finding this ad hilarious because it was both funny and true.

It seems like people didn’t think much past the 90s. But guess what:  that’s the past. When I was a kid, the 60s were as far behind me as the 90s are now. And like I was at some store hearing some band cover a song by The Cure. Well guess what—that’s over. Yesterday is a memory. It’s time to move on. We need to go to the future.

It’s good to _remember_ the past. Not to live in it.

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