What I Learned In 2010

What I’m Listening To, Pt. 6

“Don’t Look Back Into the Sun” - the Libertines

Last one of these I’m doing. Heading on a mondo-road trip, so we’re gonna change the format again. Gotta keep changing directions if I want to keep up the challenge, the excitement, no?

 But as to tie it into things (and prevent Andy from just booting me off the blorge), today I learned about the Taman Shud Case, which is….guys, seriously: Capital F Fascinating.

 Here’s the thing though: like…what does it matter anymore? There’s no human element to cracking the case on something like that. It’s 60 years old, the only people who get any closure are the detectives and scholars who spent so much time trying to pick away at it and make it make sense. And keeping with the honesty kick, does anyone care? Does anyone lay awake wondering who this guy was, or where he went to school, or what his sisters were like? Does anyone care that this human being is dead, and that he maybe and horribley outlived his mother? That he had poker buddies, or a dentist? Nah, it’s just a big great mystery that we all went to delve into. For the edification of our own intelligence, and for the satisfaction of classic Human curiosity, we focus on the glitzy smack of wonder and adoration.

Ya know, there’s a lot to be said about self-reflection. A lot! That shit’s important. But you can only learn about the present and past what’s already been done or decided. I know that’s a heady sentence, but it’s the notion that (the impersonal) you become a historian of your own expeiences; one can spend their life categorizing the who and what and why, and not thinking to move forward and just persue a new thing. Hey man, I swear: you can do both!

 What is it that makes us want to kick around the bones of a crime scene and figure out how it could’ve happened 60 years later? *METAPHOR ALERT* Is it the same thing that compells us to dig around in our own lives, in our own failed experiences and not think about the “why?”, when the answer can be defined as simply as “Because. Because that shit goes down sometimes. Please look around at what’s going on now, please.”

 I’m rambling a bit. I’m gonna close this up. God, Andy’s so annoyed with me at this point. Let me not tie this thing together snugly:

 ”She will never forgive you, but she won’t let you go, oh no.”

 No. No she won’t. Lay the bones to rest and close the cover of that book. The past is…gone. It’s done. It’s had it’s say, and it isn’t moving from it’s position. Deal with it or ‘fuck off’, because the past is the most stubborn and hard-headed thing you’ll ever have to deal with. Set in it’s ways, uncompromising, bound to follow one track, the past forces you to accept it (or not), and allows you no opportunity to change it (or not).

 In short, the Past has got nothing on the Future.

-diggy

What I’m Listening To, Pt. 1

“It Was Only Love” - The Cribs

For the entirety of this week, my portion of What I Learned in 2010 is going to become What I’m Listening To in 2010. Up there will be the music and down here I’m going to either write a little essay about it or (more likely) write whatever the hell I want to.

 Why? Primarily because I couldn’t think of any decent puns related to the Ides of March, so I scrapped an entire column on the death of Caesar. But also because I’m sick of Tumblr and wanted to change up the format for a bit. What better way to share your thoughts and feelings about incredibly intimate things than by assuming that someone else has recorded a 3-minute pop song that encapsulates it for you? I’m gonna go use this extra free-time to go get a haircut.

-diggy