Sink into a new song downloaded online.
The law don't mean nothin' to you.
Just slip into the headphones & give that isolation a whirl.
All set? Good.
I've struggled with the notion of Post-Modernism for a long while. I can't come in here pretending like I know the first and last word on the matter. I know that the term came to all us hep kiddies from the world of architecture, and began it's rise into codified thought/behaviour-type at some point in the latter half of the 20th century.
This is, in itself amuzing, as the Post-Modernist crowd will drag cats like Nietszche & Kierkegaard into the fray.
But I'm already getting ahead of myself. Swimming out past my own depths. Like I said, I don't know enough about the subject to break it down in any useful or meaningful way. Really, my whole beef with the structure is that it is, by appellation, a reaction to something else. It just strikes me as bizarre that an entire thought/behaviour-type should become a pop darling with a premise so simple, and rather silly, as reacting.
But hell, why not? Perhaps that's the true essence of its brilliance. It puts that shit up front, so that no one has the unfortunate epiphany, after years of devotion, that they've been following a vendetta.
However, I had a point in this.
I have been grumbling about this "Post" prefix for untold years, and I finally found what i believe is a reasonable use for it.
It will be the perfect prefix to the descriptor for the new generation coming up at our ankles now.
The Post-Ironic Generation.
You see? Yes! It's perfect!
A generation of drooling semi-humans, weaned on the VH1 "I Love The..." shows, which I found so amuzing at first. Right up until a fateful trip to Hot Topic.
I was looking at shirts festooned with memories from my long-gone childhood, being sold to laughing children.
Eh? These kids can't possibly have any fucking clue what Strawberry Shortcake, or Destro are.
Why are they being sold my memories?
Fuck... yeah... It sunk in... This grand Slacker generation of which I am a member has spawned a generation of kids who aren't going to be equipped to identify irony. All is one. Sarcasm is not a defense mechanism, or a method of contrasting absurdities in behaviour and culture, it's just a conversational style.
The tools for juxtaposing cultural references are being wiped away.
They will be the Post-Ironic generation. The generation for whom irony is meaningless, because the transparent don't cast good shadows.
Shit maybe I'm selling the idea short. Maybe the swing into a tremendously conservative, stratified cultural politic, which such a generational lobotomy will doubtless cause, is just what we need to get this shit-house really stirred up.
Fuck it, why not?
_________
On the other end of things, I have found myself in a position of unutterable absurdity. I'm taking off next week to hide out at a Buddhist monastary for five days, and now all I can think is that I'm going to wind up behind schedule on the strip.
Christ, it's not like I've got an editor breathing down my neck. I created the schedule, I can bend it.
That said, I do have an editor about whom I should be concerned. I owe a review to S, the first draft of which was lost when all of my document files disappered in the transfer over to the new laptop. Fortunately I ran into her in Palo Alto last week, and let her know. She's been getting some very cute freckles.
Alright, it's no longer "late at night", even by the most liberal of definitions. I've got a snoozing wife to snuggle... or not, it's hotter'n a priest's breath in here.
Enjoy yourselves, daywalkers.
