The Wee Democracy

stumbling down amnesia lane

so i'm sitting here in my house this afternoon, and the air conditioner is on the blink for a while (calm yourselves, it's fixed now) and i made the mistake of taking out my senior year book from high school. ouch.

having been firmly entrenched in the mentality that the seventies were an era whose coolness i should aspire to at the time of this publication's release, its kind of mortifying to try to reconcile that past incarnation of josh with my current pop sensibilities and personality traits. i mean, it wasn't like i was into floyd or black sabbath or something cool that came out of the 70's. i was into disco and ABBA and bad clothing. it was a failed attempt at being so lame i was cool, the end result being me being terribly lame. come to think of it, i really didn't start listening to soundly good music until i was a sophomore in college. but that's neither here nor there.

and flipping through those pages, realizing now how young and stupid we all looked back then makes me think about how much i've changed since then. that, and realizing how much cycnicism and animosity i still store in the annals of my mind about that particular timeframe of existence.

trying to quantify or at least document the changes i've undergone, or really everyone undergoes when they pass that particular milestone and really get into some developing on their own is an impossible task for multiple, and generally obvious reasons.

i mean, first of all, you're comparing the present with memory, which is pretty much just about the absolute worst means of recounting anything. it's like those oprah shows where they show just how unreliable eyewitness testimony is, and how everyone's story of the same event is so vastly different, it kind of makes you shudder with horror about the weight that same testimony is in the realm of the courtroom. this is me, condemning my past self to death on the basis of what can only be considered as trustworthy as the word of a housewife standing in line hoping to get some of oprah's favorite things, not terribly prepared to be witness to a staged purse snatcher.

you can, i suppose put things into a context, by thinking "yeah, i used to like disco back then, i was louder, and i thought that austin powers was the height of comedic genius", like measuring your day by what tv shows are on, counting down your time in half hour and hour long dramatic increments, literally wasting the time when nothing is on by sleeping or just flipping the stations for 30 minutes, hoping that for some miraculous reasons, happy days has been pre-empted suddenly by the simpsons. you can inventory your personality by what you thought was cool and when, and compare that to what you find to be vastly cooler now. thinking kc and the sunshine band was hot shit, versus touting the merits of modest mouse or something equally hip.

was i angrier back then? had that black cloud settled over my outlook as early as 17? have i mellowed or just accepted the void? am i masking things better now, or just rationalizing my shitty attitude in a sedate voice using all those bs'ing skills i picked up in college? revisiting the past generally tends to leave me with more questions than answers, but i guess that's the other skill you pick up in your higher education. when someone asks you a question, you can answer it with a question of your own that is so convoluted and generally asks for bigger picture thinking that the initial question is lost and the other person is left feeling generally bummed out because you've somehow tapped into a primal fear of theirs regarding the meaning of their own life, when all they wanted to know was what you had for lunch.

you could remember what you used to believe, when it came to religion and politics, but that runs the risk of thinking, god, i was so terribly uninformed back that, and so terribly opinionated based on absolute bullshit. you could think about how you reacted to other people's differences and recalling your take on the moment when someone busted your theories, or, for that matter, considering it was high school, your ass.

then you devolve into a mass damning of the entire period of your life, both your surroundings, and yourself, and lament at just how clueless a dork you were back then, and hope, with trembling fear that you've somewhat figured things out by now.

see? you see the can of worms i've opened when i opened that book? yearbooks are evil. don't take stock of your lives. leave your livestock alone.

move to new york.



feeling: terribly ....listless
thinking of: g train
song of the day: wagon wheel - old crow medicine show
i lost my body playing poker