play music neither of us has heard
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009The decade has changed us. We ride the subway like zombies, staring into space while our earplugs sing us songs we know by heart. Back home, back online, we flip through the avatars of people we have not seen in years, if ever. In text messages, in status updates, we pretend to be profound, represent our emptiness as brevity and wit, all of us chasing that high of recognition, all of us wanting our cut, our spot in the culture, our drug.
I have been grounded by fear. Any one of us could be the terrorist. And though we fight against the extremes of opinion and tactics, isn’t it delicious how the mainstream, the everyday commute, the engineered food and plastic computer are killing us? It is a quicksand, to struggle against it just swallows us faster.
All I want today is to turn the noise off, sink into a couch and play music neither of us has ever heard. I want to consign the cynicism of the world to others, and simply walk with you a while. I want to stay up all night making stories for you and forgetting them. I want a rebellion of the one real friend versus the eight hundred, of the private moment versus the public, of the things loved and forgotten against the clung-to, of the sensed and felt versus the reported.
I want to get to know you through the music you love, the books that have changed you, through your most fleeting and foolish fantasies, and through my own five senses. I want to know the you who has stayed up too late, gotten too drunk, indulged in too many daydreams out loud, and is not worried about how she comes off. When the end comes, I promise I will not care exactly where we all went wrong.
