Trendspotting was never a movie.
But Trainspotting was.
Trainspotting was about the lost generation of disenfranchised Scottish youth, lost in a shimmering pool of hedonism and heroin, doomed to drown in it's mirror bright refraction of life, like a tartan Narcissus in the Sky with Diamonds.
Trendspotting would just be a bunch of half baked customer service reps, taking hits off of a bong shaped like a lectern and stoning all over human behavior around Holiday Season.
Allow me to explain.
If I've had any career other than theatre, then it's been in customer service and retail.
I'm good at people, so that's my business. (What a shmucky thing to say, right?)
Anyhow.
Like any blogger worth his MacBook, I would presume to understand how people work because I have a liberal arts degree and a pedantic disposition, so herein I shall(!):
So, we have built this convention of 'The Time of Year for Giving' which has, in a genius of Edison-ian parallelism, produced 'The Time of Year of Getting'
These have, in turn, twisted 'Giving' to 'Buying' and 'Getting' to 'GIMME'
None of this is news, but bear with me.
The gift of giving has gone sour in the state of men-mark; married, middle aged men.
They enter my store (for it is always Mine while i work there. Not in any any deliberate ego stroke, but it does help to feel at home in one's. work, no matter how frivolous), these shambling, briefecase bombardiers, braving this foreign land of fashion and feminine grooming... things, desperate to find some token of fealty; some sacrificial ornament to pay homage.
Homage not to the partner they think they're buying for, but an unconscious obsequience to the pagan demands of Consumerism, The expectation of Tradition, Demonstration of Success, and Sparkly Shit.
But we mask it with words like Love, Commitment, Generosity, Festivity, and Sparkly Shit!
These men come in, desperate to buy some object, some fabrication of our cultures agreed upon standard of what beauty is, and throws HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS at me so that I may act as officiant to this ritual; he's handing me the mag-strip dagger to eviscerate his pocket book and spill it's gold-backed entrails straight into my bosses coffers...
And I'm...
I'm.
Going to let that particular rent settle.
Life is just too short.
I started this post on Wednesday; a hump day.
We all have them.
But Wednesday was a different day.
I am finishing this posy on Friday, December 14th, and that means that there is nothing I can say that has any value in the face of what has happened. Human life has been sensibly wasted, and no one understands what it is that exists inside us that makes it happen.
But it keeps happening, and we have to mourn more senseless loss.
Children.
Children are a wonder of potential energy; a slow fuse firecracker of bright, colorful, wondrous Chaos.
We celebrate what children represent in our old, more practiced lives, because their eyes see all of what is with a wonder that we've forgotten.
They remind us that even an old man can be exotic, new in the eyes of his infant grandchild, and that bananas are delicious and paper being torn is hilarious, and dentist appointments can end in drug induced hilarity as well as a tooth ache.
Children remind us how to celebrate the simplicities in our banal, everyday, humdrum lives by reminding us that
There is Nothing hum drum about life.
Life is a great swirling accident, and that those children came into our maelstrom world was magic, and magic must not go unappreciated.
If you pray, then give thanks for the joy that those children brought into the lives they touched.
The rest of us, the lonely cynics, will do what we can to honor the lives of those children by loving where we can and thanking those who touch our lives in whatever ways we can.
I've chosen awkward, stilted words on the internet.
now I'm going to go call my mom.
Love
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