“Well, do you ever get the feeling that the story’s too damn real and in the present tense?
Or that everybody’s on the stage, and it seems like you’re the only person sitting in the audience?
Skating away on the thin ice of the New Day…”
I wonder, does everyone have one of those pieces of music that seems as if it was written specifically for them?
Me, I have about five, and one of them is a piece that I hear at least once a morning echoing through my inner ear; Jethro Tull’s “Skating Away”, which contains the snippet above.
The reason I ask this is in my talks with random people it appears that, yes, people do have a specific piece of music they identify with… Unfortunately these days it’s usually some piece of modern music that either deals with some personal psychosis, some authority issue, or some relationship-gone-bad thing.
I wonder if this isn’t another cause for the recent rash of humans I like to lump into the “asshole” category.
I’m hoping that I’m not the only person noticing the sudden upswing in humans out there that either cannot perceive the world around them, or believe that they are far more important than it. Seriously, from my rather detached view of humanity I’ve been seeing an ever increasing number of people who’s universe extends about three inches beyond their fingertips… People who are incapable of noticing the world around them.
This “shrinking personal universe” is the only thing I can figure that’s causing the issues I see out there every day. For example, people don’t even bother to look when crossing a street or pulling out into traffic anymore… They just assume that people will stop for them or simply don’t notice the several tons of vehicular death coming towards them. Up in Alexandria they’re having a really big issue with people simply ignoring stoplights and that every intersection up there is in a perpetual state of ‘yield’.
Then there is the inundation of “reality” people get these days at home from the TV. I counted no less than 12 TV shows that based their ratings on people competing against one another to be the biggest ass. It’s a well known fact that TV influences how people pattern their lives and humanity right now seems to be worried about being voted out of “life” if they’re not one up on every one around them.
Another disturbing trend in television seems to be the advertisement of strife. In a commercial for some “reality” show about these guys building street rods they emphasized the conflicts that would be in the episode rather than what the episode was actually about. A similar advertisement on a different channel for some “reality” show about people remodeling a house showed some guy chewing out some other guy rather than telling me what the show was about.
It’s easy for me to not like TV… All I have to do is turn it on for a few minutes.
In my view, things are rapidly heading towards watching christians get eaten by lions again, which I wasn’t fond of the first time around…