Zeitgeist

These times just don't suit me.

It's not that I'm getting old. I still enjoy new things, new music, new styles. I have no problem putting Mozart and Lil Jon next to each other on a play list. I just installed a new car stereo with iPod, auxillary and (ready for this?) USB adapters on it. I can cruise along, blasting Lil Jon from my USB key.

No, I'm all about innovation. That's not an issue for me.

What is an issue is how mean, angry, and insecure this country is getting. Well, has gotten.

When I was in my teens, we used to wear some damn silly looking things. Jams (those three quarter length shorts) in horrible clashing shades of neon pink and orange. Pink dress shirts with skinny ties, baggy suits with Hawaiian shirts. And yes, part of us knew we looked silly.

Those days are gone. Go to the store now and you find many shades of black, gray, brown. I love the utility of my cargo shorts, but there's a limit to the angry, militaristic clothes I need.

Cars. Take a good look at cars. There are the pathetic pseudo assault vehicles (choke, cough, Hummer), and the even sadder throw back pseudo muscle cars. Don't get me wrong, some of them are really sweet looking (muscle cars, not Hummers; all Hummers look stupid, including the ones you folks with dirty minds are thinking of right now). The thing is, can't we come up with anything new? And can't it be a little bit fun and a little less "My country will invade yours if I can't afford to gas this bitch up?"

It's depressing, and I've realized that over the last few years, I've let it get me down.

I've spent a lot of the week listening to Prince. New Prince, old Prince, Prince from that time when he changed his name to 0+> and we all laughed and kept calling him Prince. I miss the days of weirdly androgynous people in purple rain coats and women's underwear, and Wendy Melvoin pretending to give Prince a Hummer (uh, a hummer) while playing Computer Blue. It was just so... colorful.

I miss that. 1999 was an anti-nukes song, and Ronnie Talk to Russia was about as clear a message as you could get. Things were serious then. It's just that we handled them so much better. We didn't act as bitter.

I once asked my friend the Mad Scientist how the hell you could live in this atmosphere, and (to paraphrase,) he said, "I guess you smoke marijuana, listen to obnoxious music and download internet porn." (for the record, he was not seriously advocating any of that except maybe the music part)

So, that's what I'm doing. Resisting the bitter zeitgeist of our times by listening to a short, crazy, androgynous black guy in women's underwear sing about "purple bananas" and God. It really seem like the only thing to do.