2005/04/15

Spring we're sprung

Everyone's looking for something or someone to love. As Mr. Durden'd say, I look around, I look around and what I see is striving. These people aren't content to sit on their laurels. Eating nuts and berries and trouts and squirrels ain't good enough for them. They want love. And not even necessarily perfect be-all end-all love, but just some love. A friend of mine told me that postmodern angst, at least the kind that gave rise to grunge music and veganism, is really a distillation of the angst induced by the alienation and oppression inherent in industrial cultures.

I wouldn't know. I like nuts and berries and squirrels, although frankly fish sort of disgust me--I like crawdads tho'.

But love isn't always the same. It's a search for purpose, like people desperately need this thing to fixate on. Then they want to join it, and finally be it. Procreation, sure, yeah, what-the-hell-ever. I mean, a shag ain't a shag anymore. It could be art, though. So ask yourself when you really put out a lot of effort into making your lovemaking a lovely experience. I mean, I'm down with--as the man says--a quick pickle-tickle; but it can be more than that. For everyone involved, both in front of and behind the camera (oops, sorry Belinda!).

Other people want to love their work. They don't want someone to love back, but they want acceptance, that is self-acceptance. This U has a lot of graduate students, so it's pretty familiar. Meaning and significance through accomplishment is the order of the day, neorosis-wise. Law and Med school too. But grad students are extra-special. Things are rarely good enough for them, they just whine about how they can't get anywhere, can't get anything done, don't know what they're doing with their lives. And then you threaten to take away their funding and BLAM! they're whining twice as hard about that.

There are a few, finally, who look for love in art. Some use their art to get love (just look at the guitar player or singer of every famous rock band); some make are about love and go looking for love to get material (hello, fiction writers); some love their experience of life, but the only possible articulation of it is thru poetry. And so forth. This ain't your run-of-the mill love. There's an intensity of experience here, a sort of embodyment of self, that makes the affection one-sided. That's why some art is self-loathing. But the love of a work is often like the love of a child--there's some of the artist in there. And at this time of the year you get an outpouring of nervous energy from these people. Bands go on tour, etc.

Whatever it is, what I see around here is energy and need, much of it orgiastic, some of it desperation, all of it basically insanity induced by the warm weather. Fuck it. Or, if that's not your thing, paint it. It's like they--and now that I come to think of it probly you too--have this sense of something wrong in the world, and if they just put anough goodness back into it everything will come out fine. Or they just wallow in the pain and say fuck it. It's not like you can move to a new planet, right?, or stop wearing polyester clothes... It's not like you could do anything to get assholes out of positions of power, or slap some sense into parents these days (holy shit I remember too many times seeing like 1-2 year olds being given bottles of Mountain Dew or Pepsi), or get people to drive some fucking SENSIBLE CARS YOU STINKING POLLUTING BAD DRIVING ALMOST RUNNING ME OVER TWO-DOLLAR WAX JOB ASSHOLES! What the hell is wrong? You. You, reading this, for sitting on your (probably) fat ass and wasting time not doing as I command Make Anarchy For Me Now!

Okay, so maybe a little carried away there. But you still love me, don't you?

1 Comments:

Blogger eripsa said...

lies. this is the best of all possible worlds.

15/4/05 13:19  

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