Rock On

Man oh man, I've been thinking a lot about personal taste. Now what is it about this? I mean, it's not like we really give it a lot of though. Everybody's got preferences, and we all sort of admit that they're idiosyncratic. And then the matter drops.

Of course everybody is different and has different history and so forth. And yet, somehow, I still don't understand a lot of the things people like. The infinite possibilities, if you think about them, really make you sort of blanch. I mean, really, it's kind of vertiginous to think of the way in which anything at all could be preferred by someone. We call a lot of these people crazy, and maybe with good reason. But that makes us a lot stranger than other things out there. Amoebas don't get screwed up like that. Squirrels don't. Dogs only rarely do. But people are really diverse and nutty in their likes and dislikes.

But maybe that's just all part of our architecture, you know? I mean, if our wiring is really so complicated, whatever it is that makes us people but cats and so forth not, then it would stand to reason that our preference hardware is likely to be complicated. We're adaptable--there are people nearly everywhere on the land of the earth. We have the omnivorous ability to subsist there, and the know-how not to die of exposure. I mean, only Antarctica is so relentlessly Coccyx-like as to be uninhabitable.

Okay, so that accounts for cultural variation, sure, but what about within a culture. I mean, with all of the ideological pressure on people to conform to a certain understanding of the world, why isn't it likewise understood what is the "correct" thing to like or dislike? Maybe though I'm looking at the problem wrong. There is a huge amount of overlap in what people like at least a little. But the divergence comes in when we talk about what people like a lot. Or most. And there we want to say that some things are better than others. Chocolate vs. The Beatles; Dega vs. Baseball. Those comparisons are pretty spurious, sure. I mean, I guess the "apples and oranges" line applies there. Okay so what about vanilla vs. chocolate. There is no arbiter here, I think, unless you appeal to other values like does cocoa production cause appression in the third world, or something.

Well, so I mentioned the Beatles which I have to say is not my favorite band but I recognize as do many, they have some sort of objective betterness to them as compared to the vast majority of rock and roll bands. How about this:

There is a sort of objective goodness to enjoyment. I don't know what exactly, but we put value on people vuluing. A reflexive relation, we might say. But likeing stuff is a good thing. I mean, wanting food is good in terms of survival. Liking beauty in people is good in terms of securing a mate (beauty being of course whatever it is that attracts you to another person sexually--cf. the beauty of sadness and then figure out how the suicide girls site is so popular). And so on. Maybe then we can say that loking other things, like at least cultural artefacts has a sort of value that is objective to it as well. Like we recognize the utility or something for keeping the myths and legends of our society alive--the story we tell ourselves about ourselves; the identity we invest in by inhabiting the narrative.

Which brings us to the Beatles. This group has a hold over our collective culture far outweighing that of, say, Peter, Paul, & Mary, or Slipknot. Their value was first in the emotional appeal of the songs, then in their symbolising a whole generation's esthetic vision of itself, and then as the archetype of a form of cultural expression now so ubiquitous as to be unremarkable. Rock and roll is, now, literally the soundtrack to some people's lives. I must admit, I'm one of those people who plays music pretty much whenever I don't have to listen to anything else.

Of course, there is the whole question of the value of aesthetic objects, which I think is a cool topic all in itself. But I guess the idea is that personal taste, besides providing arguably valuable benefits like personal individuation etc. also really gives us a flexible mechanism for cultural evolution. Nothing is worse, I think, than a culture or cultural group that spends all its time trying to preserve exactly the past because it is somehow the perfection from which we've fallen.

I don't want to get all philosophical here on that topic, it's really a rant for another time. What's good, or what've objectively good, is what, unfortunately--I mean, I think it's unfortunate to have to think this, it'd be better to have a clearer theory, many people like _and_ is not popular for the sake of being popular. That is I think what separates lowest-common-denomenator t.v. and Brittney Spears from the Dave Chapelle Show and Erykah Badu. So if you like The Dismemberment Plan, or Modest Mouse, The Roots or Tupac, etc. and so on, take heart--you can like something everyone else likes and still like something good.

Looking

How do you react when it looks like a man you knew for years--a man who, for all you knew, was a dutiful husband--turns out to have been a horn dog all along?

Back up. He's a medical student, and she had leukemia for several years. So happy together. She died only a few months ago. Three months. I don't know how you can say that's too soon, but maybe it is... Three months seems alright (but maybe pushing it? I'm really ambivalent here). You have to deal with the death, don't you? The whole "mourning process."

Or maybe it's a bit of jealousy on my part, because he's so easy and accomplished at certain things that I will never be skilled at. Like picking up women, for instance. Okay, so now I have to look inward. Perhaps I have projected onto this guy my own fantasies... I don't think that's entirely accurate. It is not surprising to find some element of the psychological. However many women I meet, and however many more I would like to meet--actually not so many--, there is no satisfaction.

I reject the idea that I am jealous, having looked inward, for the pain he suffered (not to mention hers!) is too great to compensate for a few years of happiness: To have loved and lost... yes, but I've already done that. More like astonished. That is the awesome--I mean, in the oldest sense of the word--part of it all. The contingency of their committment, the lightness of it, the strength, like a bird's bone; hollow yet full of power. And in the end that void must be impossible to fill and yet easier than breathing to set aside, to replace with a new void-in-the-making, and new attraction and a new love.

That isn't part of the healing process--if there is one. That is what we do; we move one and let the healing take its own time. A failure to mourn is a failure to move on, and the psychic stitches we use to hold our broken hearts together cannot replace the mechanisms our minds intrinsically contain to unconsciously fill the gaps. (Though sometimes these last fail.) Our imperative is love... or something that replaces it. Of course the eye returns: to dampen the pain, yes, but also to send it into the past.

Dread

How can a fiction take such hold of my mind? I am trapped in a delusional paranoia, i wander the halls of my home I peer into darkened rooms, I open closets to chack and recheck... Last night I heard a scream from inside my house. It was faint and faraway, but it did not come from the neighbors, and I was alone. I hear thumps and thuds, I head creaks and crunches and somehow--was that laughter HOLY SHIT!

This is wrong--but it is the two a.m. thought too tired and the caffeine is long gone but the neural drain is still there and oh. lord but this makes you edgy and... edgy.

Was drinking cheap beer last night, probably some brand that you love to hate and will drink if you have no money (per usual) or there is nothing else available, because you want to get drunk. And I was playing Wario's Woods--rock on Nintendo, bitches. But seriously. And I got that paranoid feeling, like there was something behind me and I closed the door to the bedroom which I never do and suddenly I felt safer. Which is ridiculous because you know if the killer is sneaking intot he house a closed door makes it easier for him to get close before springing. And of course, as you know, once you're trapped in the bedroom you have to climb out the window into the roof to escape--but the I can't do that in the three seconds between the door bursting open clattery on its hinges and the hulking rain-dripping dead-eyes axe-holding killer lunges forward splitting my head like an overripe watermelon. No I can't get out because the screens on the windows are good for keeping people from breaking in (maybe) and then all you see is the computer screen with the happy music and the falling bunny heads and the cute explosions and there's my brain leaking out onto the oriental rug.

But so then as I was thinking about this I fucked up the game and lost. Dammit. So I took a shower, sang myself a song, and attempted to sound out a bit of Finnegans Wake which if you've ever seen you know is in-fucking-possible to read. Good night. But thehn so I was still awake two hours later thinking about things in my house.

This is worse than when I had to cover my TV with a blanket after I watched "The Ring" in a dark room. Who can I hug?

OMG coffee!

Seriously slept in today, no problem except I forgot to set my alarm and there you go I'm totally late for everything and five miles behind and out of breath. I did set the automatic on the coffeemaker, and now I'm sipping on some delicious Fair Trade kind of mediocrely roasted but still...

mmm...

Which I'm not sure how this all goes, sort of brain-out-of-breath and there's this guy behind be caughing (although he's got cystic fibrosis and it's not cool to complain about him). What to do what to do? Maybe you'd like to be like me and be late for everything and stay up late worrying about your closets and I have this long hallway near my bedroom leading rightinto/out of it in fact and there is a little light from my neighbor's porch coming through the "dining room" window and the venetian blinds but still it is long and dark and the livingroom is totally pitch black and this house is about 150 million years old and it creaks and there are thumps and thuds and I don't think it's all from my neighbors or if it is I wonder why they're moving their furniture around so much and they couldn't be fucking unless they are like silent b/c the walls are pretty thin but anyway so read House of Leaves it's starting to approach Infinite Jest and Gravity's Rainbow in my view.

Straight up.

To begin.

New place, new time, new channel, same old me.