From Sea to Duller Sea
It's not so much that they all look the same, dress the same, talk about the same age and gender specific subjects - if these conventions were proper, by which I mean applicable and important, then of course they would be amiss to engage in much variety. But sadly these norms are only short sighted habits amassed unquestioningly by those who know not else, and so I am saddened. And stifled. I'm always stifled.
I should back up.
Last night I was at a coffee shop and just outside the nearest window were three twenty-something males (I use the more formal gender term to indicate the severity of my scrutiny). Garbed in the standard issue buttondown shirts and tastefully faded jeans, they sat and talked of real estate. Because that's what you talk about when you are twenty-something, male and ambitious enough to wear tastefully faded jeans on a Tuesday night in Rancho San Diego.
These were the example I needed in order to catalyze the crystallization of a thought that had lately been crackling in the shadows of my troubled mind. I lack peripheral inspiration.
I want to say 'reciprocal inspiration' instead, but the case seems more dire than that. If I were lacking only reciprocal inspiration, there would be the possibility that inspired ones are nearby, but we have as yet failed to connect. Thus far, though, I don't believe that's the case.
I live in a suburb that was spawned by suburbs. Older, lesser suburbs could no longer contain their most virile gametes, which burst forth with a flourish of two-story track homes and Cadillac Escalades to create Rancho San Diego. And here, in a melting pot of second and third generation suburbanites, the impressionable youth learned their worldview, value system, priorities.
Is it any wonder they lack that luster of soul that I call inspiration?
They learned, as I long did, that s/he who owns the most toys is the happiest. The males learned that women are attracted to cars and vocal volume; the girls learned that men are attracted to heels and shrinking seam-lengths. They absorbed the assumption that life goals have names like 'boat,' 'house,' 'fun,' 'retirement,' and 'comfort.'
Most, it would seem, have never had their paradigm challenged by something so foreign as, say, a national park, much less a different country or culture.
And so I sat alone last night, as the coffee shop neared closing, pondering dichotomies and possibilities that none else could see. But the stream of my personal creative resources could only carry me so far. For lack of adjoining flows it dried up before I reached that great river where creativity meets clarity, where sight becomes vision. I picked up my pen and paper, dropped the rest of my green tea in the trash, and drove myself to bed.
I should back up.
Last night I was at a coffee shop and just outside the nearest window were three twenty-something males (I use the more formal gender term to indicate the severity of my scrutiny). Garbed in the standard issue buttondown shirts and tastefully faded jeans, they sat and talked of real estate. Because that's what you talk about when you are twenty-something, male and ambitious enough to wear tastefully faded jeans on a Tuesday night in Rancho San Diego.
These were the example I needed in order to catalyze the crystallization of a thought that had lately been crackling in the shadows of my troubled mind. I lack peripheral inspiration.
I want to say 'reciprocal inspiration' instead, but the case seems more dire than that. If I were lacking only reciprocal inspiration, there would be the possibility that inspired ones are nearby, but we have as yet failed to connect. Thus far, though, I don't believe that's the case.
I live in a suburb that was spawned by suburbs. Older, lesser suburbs could no longer contain their most virile gametes, which burst forth with a flourish of two-story track homes and Cadillac Escalades to create Rancho San Diego. And here, in a melting pot of second and third generation suburbanites, the impressionable youth learned their worldview, value system, priorities.
Is it any wonder they lack that luster of soul that I call inspiration?
They learned, as I long did, that s/he who owns the most toys is the happiest. The males learned that women are attracted to cars and vocal volume; the girls learned that men are attracted to heels and shrinking seam-lengths. They absorbed the assumption that life goals have names like 'boat,' 'house,' 'fun,' 'retirement,' and 'comfort.'
Most, it would seem, have never had their paradigm challenged by something so foreign as, say, a national park, much less a different country or culture.
And so I sat alone last night, as the coffee shop neared closing, pondering dichotomies and possibilities that none else could see. But the stream of my personal creative resources could only carry me so far. For lack of adjoining flows it dried up before I reached that great river where creativity meets clarity, where sight becomes vision. I picked up my pen and paper, dropped the rest of my green tea in the trash, and drove myself to bed.
posted by James at 17:31
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home