I maintain that short form internet video is the best evidence of human devolution. Aldous Huxley was right. We will do ourselves in with pleasure. The brain has an infinite appetite for the novelty of this stuff, if not the subject matter. The short form internet video exploits the brain’s shortcomings, one of which is an inability to discern image from reality effectively. Our brain initially reacts much the same way to a video as it does from actual involvement in the activity the video depicts. The downside is that once your brain is flooded with the chemicals that keep you shuffling through thousands of illusions of new experiences, there is an emptiness that sets in, because you’ve been short-cutting the processes and cutting straight to the rewards, which then, of course, cease to be rewards. You’ll never feel the way you really want to feel if you participate in the long-term fooling of your synapses. If you regularly succumb to the lure of this sort of thing, I respectfully recommend that you stop. Try to do something else.
I’m spared a great deal of exposure to the most inane of short form internet video because I don’t subscribe to many services that feature it. When I am exposed to it, I’m careful not to teach the algorithms that I’m interested in things that I know are harmful to my psyche. Sometimes what the algorithms are left with makes me roll my eyes. “Really, guys? Another clip from the Wings Over America tour? Is that all you got?” On other occasions, they can be quite chilling, especially when I was only talking about something, performing no browsing or searching, and a device is proven clearly to have been listening to me. Try as I might, I haven’t managed to prevent that at all times.
Though short form internet video is blatantly designed to maim and kill us, some subjects leak through that transcend the soul scorching onslaught. Perhaps these videos are served up mostly to guys like me, but they do present undeniable prompts for introspection. One that was presented to me recently was one of those anonymous street interview scenes. The guy says to the subject, “What if I gave you a million dollars? How would you feel about that?” The subject replies that he would be grateful, because he already knows what he would do with it. Then the guy says, “What if I made it ten million dollars?” The subject clearly believes that such a windfall would be amazing. Even his facial expression answers the question. Next, the guy says (I’m paraphrasing), “What if I gave you the ten million, but on the condition that if you took the money, you would not wake up tomorrow? Would you still accept it?” The subject changes his tune, saying no. Finally, the guy asks why the subject is underwhelmed with his life, because every single day of it, by his own admission, he’s given something that he values even more than 10 million dollars. Nice. He was a clever li’l suck, I thought. How profound that was. “Damn right!” said I.
I wondered how it would have gone if the subject would have been OK with cashing out after a single night with ten million dollars. That would have taught that guy to interview strangers on the street. I’m sure there are people like that too. Thankfully, I would not count myself among them. I try to remember this nugget whenever I’m engaged in self-pity or wallowing in frustration over simple things. In these activities, I have developed a rare expertise, but I’d like to lose those skills. That brings to mind another video, which was about the structure of the brain. Some bro pointed out a particular section of the brain that supposedly becomes larger over time when people regularly do things they don’t want to do. At his suggestion, I thought my “don’t want to do this” node must be huge. The bro went on to say that it’s small in overweight people, but enormous in athletes, creatives and highly successful people. OK. Whatever. Interesting idea, just the same.
I ruminated on brain damage like this as I sat at Jiffy Lube waiting for an oil change and tire rotation. Like Woody Allen’s hypochondriacal character, Mickey, in Hannah and Her Sisters, who imagines that he has a brain tumor the size of a basketball that he can feel when he blinks, I was thinking that my oil change had to be swelling my “don’t want to do this” node to at least the size of a Granny Smith apple. I’m hopelessly cognizant of wastes of time. Why I feel that time is limited can probably attributed to any number of neuroses, but regardless, spending any of it at Jiffy Lube amounts to indefensible recklessness. To distract myself (notice that I did not say “to kill time”), I beat it across Rt. 46 to Advance Auto to pick up some wiper blades. That was a cozy ten minutes. I was soon back at Jiffy Lube sitting on a bench out in front, trying to enjoy the sun on my face for a moment. In New Jersey, they don’t give you bags for anything you buy anymore. Everything is still packaged in plastic, but the bags for your merchandise are really fucking things up. I felt the plastic tube of the wiper package on my lap buckle unexpectedly and it drew my attention down. I read the boast printed on it. It said something about having been providing quality disposable, universal wiper blades for twenty years. I’ve reached a point in my life when twenty years of anything (other than hiccups) doesn’t even impress me. I’ve got guitars older than that. Let me know when you actually accomplish something, Rain-X. I’ll bet the guy who made the video about the bulging brains of the disaffected used to work for them. I’d have fired his underachieving ass too.
The tire rotation was adding more wait time, so I decided to go with it. What was I doing twenty years ago? What have I done over the last twenty years? In one way or another, I was doing much the same thing that I’m doing now. Writing, obsessing, getting music together for a new album, and swelling my “don’t want to do it” node. Fascinating. The leitmotiv could be reduced simply to this: engaging in the endless cycle of beginning again. This is what I do. People who write songs, even people who write great songs, wonder how in hell they did it, and worse, how the hell they will ever do it again. Somehow it happens, but they always feel like they’re at the beginning. That’s me in most things. Begin again. Try another angle. Start over. Start again. That thread has been woven through my entire life. Maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Maybe anything else is fiction. In twenty years, I’ve been given $73 billion in daybreak. Some of it, I’m quite certain I didn’t squander. Some of it, sadly, I did – with worry, doubt, fear, resentment, or God knows what else. But now I know people who can’t begin again, who can’t start over – at least not in the same way. I’ve even known guys who didn’t wake up in the morning, for whom the check stopped coming. Sometimes, I remember my good fortune. Sometimes, it’s invisible and I’m angry as hell about it. Learning to recognize the ten million dollar daybreak is also an endless cycle of beginning again.
As a good friend of mine used to say, “I tried to write a song today. Failed.” If I did, that’s OK. I got to hear the sound of my guitar. My hands still make it work. I call it the “Sunshine Telecaster.” It’s the yellow one I was just breaking in 37 years ago. I put yet another set of strings on it last night. When cream yellow itself yellows with age, it takes on a richness, a glow even, that can only truly be appreciated when you remove the pickguard and see the original color preserved underneath. The Sunshine Tele is older than the Brain Bulge Bro, and it’s still a great tool with which to begin again. With it, I’ve earned the glow. I never made a 20 second video about the tone or the color. There weren’t any shortcuts to the instrument that it has become, just as there weren’t any to becoming the guitarist that I am. Your brain wouldn’t know the difference if you scrolled to it, but I do.
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