Sitting in the doctor’s office, I picked up a waterlogged copy of The Economist. A surprising read, actually. I’m not much one for figures and graphs and, well, economics, but there was such a variety of topics covered on a global scale and with real insight. Nice for a change. Makes you realize how much a lot of our other rags are becoming dumbed-down to cater to our ADHD-riddled populace. Made me want to get a subscription, y’know, soon as the finances get stable. Karla’s housesitting, so I’m sitting at a desk in La Canada and last night we watched – gasp – cable television. Watched the Jazz thankfully pummel the Spurs. One of the first games I’ve caught all year. Deron Williams looked like he’ll be around for a while. Ditto Carlos Boozer. They pretty much fulfill the old Stockalone roles on the team. You can see them running the same plays, setting the same screen and roll sets, etc. Don’t think they’ll win the series, fun to root for though. Watched Chariots of Fire for the first time (Best Picture, 1981) which started off veeerrrrry sloooowwwly, but picked up later on. Interesting meditation of what drives people.
The Travel Channel this morning is making me want to go back to Europe, or at the very least makes me miss the old days. There’s a sense of adventure and randomness associated with those memories. Going out with friends, no telling who you might meet or where you might end up that night, or with whom. Don’t know if I could keep up that lifestyle indefinitely, but nice memories on a sun soaked Sunday in La Canada. The cheesy all-American couple’s trips through Venice, the bubbly woman’s reports from Copenhagen and Geneva so much more enticing than Not Your Average Travel Guy’s fairly average travels through Philadelphia. Travel is transformative, but it’s not just visiting the locales that I miss, though, I kind of miss that part of my identity. The worldview, the self-understanding, that is in many ways very different to implicit American values. In fact, it’s very un-Americanness is part of the allure. America’s youth-oriented, Disneyfied culture seen as a kind of foil. Shallowness, materialism, individualism, cutesy-ness. We’re a culture of quaint and cute. But there are upsides to American culture, the embrace of different kinds of people, the positive attitude. But I do miss the value of tranquility and community from back home. The anxiety being, how much will that forever be a thing of the past given marriage and settling down? Will my children ever know that part of who I am, or just become conformist American automatons? All valid worries, but at some point, you have to release those fears and let things come as they do. On the way out of the doctor’s office I saw this true Californian, 40-ish gent in a shiny new black BMW, hair done like he was a member of Fall Out Boy or something, tattoos, Ray Bans, the works. I guess that’s the cake-and-eat-it-too promise of California. Other places you might be expected to grow up, assume traditional lifestyle roles to be respectable, to earn an income, to make your parents proud, whatever. Here, you can be Peter Pan and earn a six figure income. That’s sort of the charm of the entertainment industry, I suppose. It’s interesting to listen to prophets of postmodernism waxing philosophical about how, these days, such boundaries no longer exist, we live in an age of different identity structures, conceptions of the self, definitions of success, etc. etc. and then to go visit family in Oregon or New Jersey or wherever and it’s clear that you can’t simply say across the board that we live in some newfangled postmodern age where everything has shifted, the old ways are irrelevant, etc. Things aren’t that easy. Things commingle and collide.
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