Every once in a while I realize how lucky I am. I mean, beyond being alive, being healthy, educated, reasonably good looking and intelligent, etc. I mean the global enclaves of the Internet, the everywhere convenience of cell phones, and the amazement of video on demand. Things like that. Videogames aren't too bad, either. And I can stream a million songs over the Internet, at near-CD quality, 24/7. I can get new DVDs in the mail (and it sounds like NetFlix is starting a VoD program as well).
At the same time, though, it's also decadence -- one of the signs of a declining empire and the ever-widening gap between rich and poor. While I enjoy all of these technological wonders on a daily basis, people wander right outside my apartment wondering where they're going to get their next meal, or their next high, or both, and they're willing to do unsettling things to get them. They've done it before and they'll do it again before the week is out. On my way to work, I encounter more of them, a steady stream until I hit the freeway. A concrete river of loss and hopelessness. Tonight, a single mother is going to steal formula from the grocery store because their entwined misery is worth more to the neoconservatives than the loss of one potential happiness.
Tonight, a mile away from you, a few hundred feet from you, in the next room over, there is something going on. People are having passionate sex, hatching devious plots, falling in love, rocking the fuck out, plotting murder, speeding drunk in a convertible muscle car, cheating on their wives, setting shit on fire, shooting big guns, and all you're doing is reading crap on the Internet.
Go forth and get jiggy.
At the same time, though, it's also decadence -- one of the signs of a declining empire and the ever-widening gap between rich and poor. While I enjoy all of these technological wonders on a daily basis, people wander right outside my apartment wondering where they're going to get their next meal, or their next high, or both, and they're willing to do unsettling things to get them. They've done it before and they'll do it again before the week is out. On my way to work, I encounter more of them, a steady stream until I hit the freeway. A concrete river of loss and hopelessness. Tonight, a single mother is going to steal formula from the grocery store because their entwined misery is worth more to the neoconservatives than the loss of one potential happiness.
Tonight, a mile away from you, a few hundred feet from you, in the next room over, there is something going on. People are having passionate sex, hatching devious plots, falling in love, rocking the fuck out, plotting murder, speeding drunk in a convertible muscle car, cheating on their wives, setting shit on fire, shooting big guns, and all you're doing is reading crap on the Internet.
Go forth and get jiggy.
But, I never want to stop being good at drinking, fighting or fucking, either.
Tightrope, fucking tightrope.
As for this-e-here thoughts of yours. Well, it's true. It's strange to come out of the nightclub where I work counting twenties, after watching people spend twenty on the door and seven-fifty for mixed drinks, or worse, five dollars a Red Bull(we get them for three dollars a case) envy them their money and social life, only to be hit up by a tweaker for a cigarette or spare change. I have to walk through a park to get to work which is where about twenty to thirty homeless people live. It's unsettling, not the homelessness or the poverty so much as the juxtaposition.
The book I quoted in my journal entry(with convient Amazon link!) is not only a great read, but it deals with this kind of thinking a lot. Most of the book takes place in Havanna during the exodus/recesscion years of the mid-nineties. The most impressive thing about the book is not the depression and povertry and decline, but rather the simple joys and pleasures that the charcters find in fucking and smoking cheap grass, drinking rotgut rum. You think about how most of us have never lived without cable television. what we'd have to do if we didn't have television or stereos, couldn't listen to music whenever we wanted. These people go days without water and still find joy in life. It's amazing.
And, for the record, I am in an aloost constant state of jigginess.
Or was that drunkenness?
I know, I have a lot of fun, at least.