12/9/08

Dragnet

We are all undergoing artistic schizophrenia. Some folks might find this helpful, the ability to simultaneously channel, filter and flip through a million influences, snippets and references and distill it into something uniquely their own. This is where we can sing the praises of having a literal world of information at our finger's tip. But for me, and I don't doubt quite a few others, this is amazingly detrimental. This ever-growing sense of modern-day anxiety caused by the very applications that are meant to comfort and de-stress - this is what makes the act of creating anything - nevermind art - nearly impossible. Each time I do anything at all I subconsciously compare every cadence, every lyric, every whip of my whisk to every other thing I've seen or heard in my lifetime. Fast motion. Flip through the hypothetical iTunes album covers of my life.

It's depleted my capacity for memory. Every day, I'm inundated with so much information that my brain can't categorize quickly enough. It can't process which memories and what knowledge is worth keeping in accesible parts of my lobes. What occurs is cultural amnesia - if more than a week has passed since I've heard a song, seen a movie, read a book, all the information disappears. I've been slipped a pop culture roofie preceding a night of bourbon and heavy petting and all that remains is the taste of cheap lube and leftover burrito in my mouth.

My patience has gone amok. The J button of my Reader is within such easy grasp that I find myself actually pushing J anytime I'm on a website, wanting the next thing. The muscle of judgement has bulked exponentially, mostly for the worse.

I don't know. This is the start of a larger rant but I'd rather just show you some photos of our Christmas tree, named Güs. You see, many years ago [2, if you're counting] we had a tree named Gus, fat and squat and bushy and ornamented with empty, glittered beer cans. We tried our hardest* to find a replacement but settled for this handsome, slim fellow who is a beaut but is no Gus. So we trimmed him with flea market keys painted brass, wine corks [in keeping with our wino theme], stickers, and various other ephemera. So he is Güs. Welcome.






* We did not try very hard.


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