Critique is generous: it engages the other on its own terms — or on terms of the event. It lets the other do its thing and then wonders how the other can extend it and it, in turn, can extend the other. It is a glorious repartee.
So one day you wake up and for no apparent reason you’re thinking about your friend Jamie. You haven’t talked to Jamie in, I don’t know, 2 years. But there she is, her virtual self staring you in the face. Never mind, whatever, you go on with your day. And then there’s that distinctive pluck of harp strings announcing a new text message: it’s from Jamie!
But the scent of the event has dissipated, its feeling gone. It is now a movie I saw ages ago — I know the story but I don’t feel the power of it anymore. In many ways, it might as well have happened to someone else. I don’t know it happened to me, not from the inside out.
The decadence of yesteryear no longer glitters with either promise or romance. We are always already watched, always already judged. Throughout Somewhere, Dorff screws beautiful women simply because he can. It is neither depraved nor decadent.
The first and only time I voted was in the 1988 presidential election. I clearly remember walking in that little private wank booth and looking at this strange paper on which I was to mark my selection for this or that candidate. I remember feeling so small, so irrelevant, the process so dehumanizing.
For 30 years, give or take, booze has been a great teacher and me, I’ve been its less than reluctant pupil (although I’ve not always been open to its pedagogy). Here are some things I’ve learned over the years.
Large rocks budge, a tiny bit, over centuries. To us, they just sit there, enduring. But slowly, they are eroding and moving. I wonder if, to them, time flies.
No doubt, there are plenty of pleasures to be had today. But is it possible to enjoy yourself, to live through yourself rather than through the ubiquitous corporate Hollywood haze of images, desires, and emotions? Is this a question even worth asking?
I never cease to be amazed by the magic of words — these contrived scrawls, these guttural mutterings that somehow conjure, entice, explain, seduce, confound, convey, reveal.
I want to say that Buddhism tries to establish such a mood of moods but the result is no mood fluctuation at all — to the enlightened Buddhist, all is a steady hum. No manic highs, no manic lows: just a state of perpetual contentment. Which, I have to say, sounds pretty good. Sometimes. Sometimes it just sounds creepy and nihilistic, a kind of avoidance of the flux of life.