Category: Musings

Around this time last year someone was wondering whether she was in love with a person or an idea of that person. That stuck in my brain, and continues to as my own inner Wembley constantly questions and deconstructs my affections for certain people. What I would suggest is that everyone is always in love with their idea of a person, to some extent. Non-telepathic beings that we are, we never fully, truly know each other. There are always secrets that can be held back; a wife can live decades with her husband and have no idea about his latex boot fetish. What we know of a person is dependent upon our experiences with them, who they are around us, and that’s an inherently limited array of data. [1]

This is particularly the case in the early stages of a romance. When we know very little about a person, we build on what we know of them and what our imaginations would like them to be. In the case of a person for whom we have great affection, our imaginations tend to assume that this person is worthy of higher esteem than perhaps they deserve. When someone excites us romantically, our brains get excited and fill in the gaps with appealing assumptions. We idealize and in some cases idolize. Then when the relationship doesn’t last, we mourn not only the loss of a physical and emotional presence, but also the loss of the ideal that we held onto so strongly.

I try to puzzle out these sorts of things so that I can avoid them in the future, but in this case I don’t think there’s any way to avoid it. Our brains are geared to imagine and create and run scenarios. Creating and losing our own illusions may be unavoidable. Hopefully by simply being aware of these dynamics, we can proceed more cautiously and cushion the inevitable disappointments. The alternative is to get incredibly excited about someone you barely know and then get incredibly depressed when they don’t meet your expectations.

I’d be a terrible romatic comedy screenwriter.

1.) I also have this theory that everyone is a different person to each of their friends. The person I am when I’m with Friend A is a different person from the one I am with Friend B. The differences are subtle, but very real. My mental filters change, my movements and statements are different and obviously our exchanges will be specific to our shared interests and experiences. When we connect, we change slightly.

This thought just popped into my head:

The universe is mostly nothingness. That should make anything else a pleasant surprise.

Really, the fact that life exists at all should be reflected upon often. Unless your life is one of constant excruciating pain, then existence is preferable to nonexistence. If you expected more, then you watched too much television as a child.

This thought has been running around in my head for a few weeks: Mathematics is a hoax. It is a man-made construct, a product of wishful thinking on the part of humans who want to be able to measure and define things absoloutely. Certainly mathematics is useful for describing relationships between things, but I’ve noticed that the universe rarely deals with the sorts of perfect geometric forms and numerical certainty that we seem to assume exist. The universe seems defined by curvature rather than straight lines. In fact, I can’t think of any case where nature has produced a straight line, a square, a triangle, a cube. Spheres and ellipticals are the rule, not the exception. Pi is a defining constant, and its depths are infinite, and thus never truly absolute.

I’m not saying this as some grandiloquent denial of the discipline; it’s just one of those ideas in the night that makes me wonder. I also have an irrational distrust of protractors. I still have a hard time figuring out how one starting point can have multiple ending points without the resulting lines being the same line (neither intersecting nor being parallel) for at least a while. I think that’s where the uncertainty starts: curvature. The universe would make so much more sense if it were all straight lines and perfect ratios. I suspect many mathematicians think it is.

I’ve been getting some nice compliments on my photography lately, and I have to admit I feel like something of a fraud when someone refers to me as a “photographer.” A photographer, in my mind, is someone who knows how to control light and understands how a camera works. I am not one of those people. I’ve been pondering the schism between the many digital camera photographers who have no idea what they’re doing versus the actual photographers who do. I discovered that the dichotomy resembles that of punk musicians versus “real” musicians. Punk and indie rockers freely and proudly admit that they don’t know the first thing about basic music theory, yet they still create compelling music. Like them, I’m just getting the idea across, and not paying any attention to technique. Heck, I only know what a few of the buttons on my camera do.

As someone who has always approached music from an insider standpoint, I’ve always been a little leery of people who take pride in their ignorance. Now, in the realm of photography, I’m one of them (well, I take no pride, but I’m still ignorant). I guess I’m just too lazy or too busy to sit down and really learn. I wonder if this is becoming something of an epidemic in the world of art as technology makes everything so much easier. I remember an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where there was this tool that sculpted automatically from whatever was in the artist’s mind. No technique required, only the content of the idea. I guess art doesn’t necessarily require technique and training, but with my digital camera I can’t help feeling like I’m cheating.

Reflecting on the recent hullaballoo on Social Security and how it will supposedly crash on us, I began to wonder about how many children from the 70’s and 80’s will actually make it past age 65, given the dietary trends of the past few decades. Fast food and microwaveable meals, two terribly unhealthy and overwhelmingly popular sources of nourishment, really took hold during those generations. Factor that in with an overall decline in cooking skills, and you may have a recipe for untimely demises for people my age. We have a tendency to think that in the future people will be living longer, but given the eating trends of the last few decades I have to wonder if the opposite may prove true.

I’m going to make fish and broccoli tonight. What are you having?

Just a few weeks after my post on cat hoarding, the delightful San Francisco columnist and incisive master of the cheeky run-on sentence Mark Morford goes off on the same topic. Coincidence? Or is my blog truly becoming the trend-setter, the taste-maker? Consider also that Charlie Murphy recently announced that Chappelle’s Show is over. I can’t help but think I’m to blame. See my lame previous post.

Dave Chappelle went on an unexpected hiatus this year just before beginning his third season. No doubt the pressure of following up two seasons of already-classic comedy is enormous, so here’s something I thought of that might help Dave on his return, a sketch that explains his departure:

The pressure was too much to bear, so Dave has to find some new place to mine for comedy. So he visits the comedy mines administrated by Billy Dee Williams. But it’s a trap! Wayne Brady’s back to take over the show and so Dave has to go on Whose Line Is It Anyway? to prove his comedy Jedi skills. It’s a draw until Billy Dee offers Dave a Colt 45, which Dave and Wayne use in an object-improv showdown. Dave comes up with more bits using the can than Wayne, and wins. Billy Dee says “works every time.”

I really should get back to work.

I was having a discussion today with a lady at the church where I play bass about Antiques Roadshow. I think someone needs to come up with the Anti-Antiques Roadshow, a show where people bring things in to be appraised, in hopes of being told they have some horrendously rare and valuable item, only to find out it’s utter crap, worth nothing.

Sometimes I’ll get sucked into watching the show, because I’ve always held an interest in old things, but it only makes me wonder what the big appeal of antiquities is. How can any desk be worth $100,000? It’s a desk, for pete’s sake. The exorbitant prices for old, rare things has only one source: rich people who can outbid everyone else.

When you get right down to it, antiques are only valuable because there’s a certain magic to any item that survives a series of decades (or centuries) intact. There’s an even greater magic if the item is rare and beautiful, but overall the magic of an antique is, at its heart, pure novelty. It’s a novelty that a particular item was lucky enough to withstand the ravages of time and remain in good condition. What that item gives us is the closest opportunity we’ll ever have to experience time travel. So perhaps the people who pay vast sums of money for antiques are really obssessed with time travel.

As someone who freely admits to being fascinated by time travel, I certainly understand the appeal of an antique from that perspective. I also enjoy pondering the stories that a particular item accrues over its lifetime, stories it will never tell. The movie The Red Violin is a great example of why an item gains value with age. I can’t imagine paying huge amounts of cash for that novelty magic, though. I guess it’s all relative. Fortunately for me I tend to collect small things like old postcards and matchbooks, and I can continue to do so, safe in the knowledge that no rich people care about those items (not enough to make them prohibitively expensive, anyway).

What’s unfortunate to me is that people will pay thousands of dollars for an 80 year old piece of furniture, but often won’t give an 80 year old human being the time of day. Here are stories that can be told. Which reminds me, I need to interview my grandmother more. She has so many stories I’ve never heard. She grew up in Houston in the same neighborhood with Howard Hughes. I only found that out this year.

OK I’m rambling now. Go listen to old people and don’t pay too much for something just because it’s old!

This morning, as I was pulling (uninstalling?) crabgrass from the garden Katherine planted in my backyard, I came across an odd thought. What if celebrities decided to go on tour like rock bands?

This happens rarely in comedy venues – you have your C-level stars like Dustin “Screech” Diamond and Christopher “Kid n’ Play” Reid trying their hands at standup careers, but what if a famous actor or group of actors just decided to tour, maybe doing one-act plays in rock clubs? Given that recent concerts by former New Kid on the Block and C-level reality star Jordan Knight have been well attended at Juanita’s, why not A or B-list actors? Something important to realize with national touring acts like Knight (or even popular rock acts) is that many people attend simply because they want to see someone famous (or in Knight’s case, formerly so).

I realize that there are touring versions of Broadway plays carrying celebrities across flyover land, but I’m talking about something less intensive and on a smaller scale: no sets, minimal props, no more than 4 people on stage. Why take a huge production on the road when everybody is there just to be in the same room with a celebrity? I think this could be a horribly lucrative thing (imagine, if you dare, Cameron Diaz and Drew Barrymore doing scenes from Ibsen’s A Doll House), and now that I’ve thought this through, I’m actually glad it hasn’t really caught on, because then there would be far less music going on than there already is.