Awful Ever After
Awful Ever After
Cool, calm, and connected. Forever.
I woke up in the middle of a curve. These days feel more and more like taking a turn too hard and trying to regain your bearings. Sometimes the centrifugal realizations aren’t even new, but they get recontextualized repeatedly around that curve, given new information, knowledge, or experience.
For example, I realized a while ago that the idea of cool isn’t a stable phenomenon. Everything that used to be cool is now remade, rebooted, recycled—when it isn’t rejected outright. That realization is not new, but it has a new relevance when the cool that is contested is your own. When your own idea of cool slips from the zeitgeist, it’s a reckoning. It’s one thing to hold an idea like that out at an academic length, and wholly another to be slammed right up against it.
“Here there is a tabula rasa of indifference. It is like attending a family gathering and realizing you are old, and the new generation does not give a fuck about you or your experience.” – from Tade Thomson’s Rosewater
There’s a time just before your own that remains relevant and influential whether you acknowledge it or not. We tend to compress the time before us right up against our first memories, like a wave against a wall, forgetting the ocean of events swelling behind it. But no one cares what was cool before they were born. An abject lack of history makes it all fair game. Some things that happened “in the ‘90s” actually happened in the ‘60s, ‘70s, or ‘80s. No one really cares when.
We tend to compress the time before us right up against our first memories, like a wave against a wall, forgetting the ocean of events swelling behind it.
In addition, if you’re waiting to get back to that lovely little time—accurate or not, real or imagined—as if something will change and we’ll all return to some former state of comfort or ease, you can stop waiting: We’re never going back—not to the time before a certain presidency, not to the time before COVID-19, not to the time before 9/11, not even the time before social media and smartphones.
For example, The technical infrastructure of television is unrecognizable compared to what it was during its debut in our homes, but it’s still here, our window to the wider world. The telephone has also been wholly reconfigured, but it’s still here, always with us. We can’t cut the cord. Once we adopt these things, they don’t go away.
When I look up from my phone and see everyone else walking around staring at their phones, I always think about us looking back on this time. “Remember when everyone used to walk around looking at their phones? Ah, the Good Ol’ Days!” But can you imagine the next thing being better? Wearables and implants aren’t better to me than just being able to leave the damn devices at home. That’s never going to happen again.
So, are we really trying to stay connected or are we just trying to stay distracted? Maybe the curve never straightens back out. Maybe this is the new normal: chronic dizziness from rounding the grate in the drain, over and over, amen, watching the future dim and the past disappear.
Through Being Cool
New clipping. Video!
To take the sting out of my Sunday morning musing, here’s a new video from my dudes clipping.! “Run It” is from the hip-hop vs cyberpunk project, Dead Channel Sky, due out next March from Sub Pop (more on that soon). Check it out!
Thank you for reading, responding, and sharing,
-royc.
http://roychristopher.com