i'm the only member of my generation
my toes are crooked from sitting inside my shoes. i'm a fan of slippers, which is one of the other things i admire the Czechs for [apparently Czechs are surprised to hear that i admire them for certain things]. i wish we had a culture of slippers; slippers are either novel and funny, with bunny or frog heads on the fronts, or slightly pathetic, like old people who sit around all day in slippers.
on the other hand, a policy of not allowing shoes ever in the house can become slightly ridiculous also; when i left Bourek's house i kept forgetting things upstairs and having to take off my shoes to run inside for two seconds and then come out and tie them up again, and then untie them to run back in for something else. the fear of being gauche.
***
last night i was drawing in the coffeeshop and listening to an older man lecturing the girl at the counter, giving her little pearly truths about life. i was thinking unkind thoughts about the arrogance of the old. arrogance to think whatever burnished pearls of wisdom they have are anything but curiosities. this is usually the problem after the generation in power has fucked things up severely [oh, like with the Lost Generation, for instance, World War I and all]. and while the baby boom [this man's generation and my parents' generation, I suppose this man was about ten years older than my parents] hasn't failed so profoundly, i have my own reasons to distrust their wisdom.
i was talking to the archivist at the Sulzer Library in Chicago about this. i didn't write about it at the time because it didn't seem so interesting to me, but i had to dig up information about a particular neighborhood in Chicago and its landmarks for my summer job. i did this a few times. i looked through all the pretty, moldering advertisements for butcher shops and grocery stores the had in the archive and talked with the girl who worked there, who was a grad student in history with a bit of an activist bent. i told her that i distrusted current activist methods; how they've changed very little from the sixties, while methods of control by the folks in power have gotten much more subtle and better. for instance, people really started protesting the Vietnam War when the government started drafting college students -- the power is much too smart to do that anymore, the only people proposing the draft are Democrats as a sort of useless thought-experiment ['would politicians be so willing to send troops to war if their children were also part of the army?' of course not, which proves my point].
i'm simply not prepared to say that the powers that be give a damn about my opinions. i told the archivist this, and she said, well, how old are you? i said, eighteen. she said, you were fourteen when Bush was elected? i told her i was a freshman in high school when he was elected and a freshman in college when he was reelected. she said, oh, okay, I get it.
after all, I've always read the news, and it's hard to have youthful-idealistic-opinions when the government is making it clearer and clearer that they care about nothing more than their ideology and will manipulate all facts to serve it ["On Bullshit"], that public opinion is just the reflection of masterful coercion, and thus what is the state founded on? bah.
***
he also started talking about Buddhism, about desire leading to suffering, extinguishing all desires for happiness or enlightenment or something, etc. i told him what i always say about that; i'm not cut out for asceticism. it occurs to me that maybe the reason American Buddhists always harp on so much about extinguishing desires is because it dovetails nicely with the world-denying traditions in Christianity, it appeals to our Puritanical nature. and that perpetual American dilemma between abundance or asceticism.
***
blah blah. i need to stop writing long political screeds. i'm becoming one of those ranters you occasionally meet and feel a little contempt for. it's simply that nothing much is happening lately, what's happening in my personal life is entirely too petty to mention.
on the other hand, a policy of not allowing shoes ever in the house can become slightly ridiculous also; when i left Bourek's house i kept forgetting things upstairs and having to take off my shoes to run inside for two seconds and then come out and tie them up again, and then untie them to run back in for something else. the fear of being gauche.
***
last night i was drawing in the coffeeshop and listening to an older man lecturing the girl at the counter, giving her little pearly truths about life. i was thinking unkind thoughts about the arrogance of the old. arrogance to think whatever burnished pearls of wisdom they have are anything but curiosities. this is usually the problem after the generation in power has fucked things up severely [oh, like with the Lost Generation, for instance, World War I and all]. and while the baby boom [this man's generation and my parents' generation, I suppose this man was about ten years older than my parents] hasn't failed so profoundly, i have my own reasons to distrust their wisdom.
i was talking to the archivist at the Sulzer Library in Chicago about this. i didn't write about it at the time because it didn't seem so interesting to me, but i had to dig up information about a particular neighborhood in Chicago and its landmarks for my summer job. i did this a few times. i looked through all the pretty, moldering advertisements for butcher shops and grocery stores the had in the archive and talked with the girl who worked there, who was a grad student in history with a bit of an activist bent. i told her that i distrusted current activist methods; how they've changed very little from the sixties, while methods of control by the folks in power have gotten much more subtle and better. for instance, people really started protesting the Vietnam War when the government started drafting college students -- the power is much too smart to do that anymore, the only people proposing the draft are Democrats as a sort of useless thought-experiment ['would politicians be so willing to send troops to war if their children were also part of the army?' of course not, which proves my point].
i'm simply not prepared to say that the powers that be give a damn about my opinions. i told the archivist this, and she said, well, how old are you? i said, eighteen. she said, you were fourteen when Bush was elected? i told her i was a freshman in high school when he was elected and a freshman in college when he was reelected. she said, oh, okay, I get it.
after all, I've always read the news, and it's hard to have youthful-idealistic-opinions when the government is making it clearer and clearer that they care about nothing more than their ideology and will manipulate all facts to serve it ["On Bullshit"], that public opinion is just the reflection of masterful coercion, and thus what is the state founded on? bah.
***
he also started talking about Buddhism, about desire leading to suffering, extinguishing all desires for happiness or enlightenment or something, etc. i told him what i always say about that; i'm not cut out for asceticism. it occurs to me that maybe the reason American Buddhists always harp on so much about extinguishing desires is because it dovetails nicely with the world-denying traditions in Christianity, it appeals to our Puritanical nature. and that perpetual American dilemma between abundance or asceticism.
***
blah blah. i need to stop writing long political screeds. i'm becoming one of those ranters you occasionally meet and feel a little contempt for. it's simply that nothing much is happening lately, what's happening in my personal life is entirely too petty to mention.