Epicycle

SCENE: bar. Commenting on jukebox selections.

M.: She's playing three songs in a row from the same band. How shameful!
ME: That's pretty bad. But to us, it would be shameful to play three songs from the same genre.

That more-or-less accurate paraphrase will set the tone for this entry. The theme is transience. It has become painful to me to realize that we construct our society around this. It is the base ingredient in the caultron, the predominant enzyme in the soup. Other things are just thrown in as seasoning: the carrot of modern economic theory, the saffron of the entertainment industry, &c., &c. Transience seeps into our literatures: we rush madly into originality. We construct our elaborate pastiches with objects so obscure only the academy will move to hand down plaudits. But it's not just (or predominantly) art that feels the gadfly's bite. The inspiration for this post came as I drove past an endless chain-link fence and arrived at an intersection. U-haul trucks driven by transients in polo shirts were carting furniture and flickering televisions. The factories were disgorging their workforce into a residantial diaspora. A cargo train was speeding away from the entanglements of its past life. So I take license to exaggerate! So what? I've never lived in one place for more than three years. I have no cultural roots. I once went to a church with my grandmother, but I've been to more synagogues. But what is it all? It's amulets; it's epicycles. Folk remedies to pervasive maladies. My own war (the balkans, on-and off, 1991-1999) is as real to me as the war of the Austrian succession (1740-1748). Children jump in puddles to disturb the surface. From that, they are compelled to drive the paving machinery that knocks down their cottages. Renovations are preludes to selling the house. (A grandiose and expensive equivalent of wiping the toilet seat for the last time.) I cannot dwell on any one idea for long becuase the overarching drive does not allow me to. Inside our urban centres we are mixed like little soup seasoning and our cars drive huge races down a maliciously straight hippodrome. The radio sometimes cuts out as we drive along, disturbed by a copse of high-voltage teleconductor wires and we have to make conversation. The same sight can signify many different things depending on what "tune" is blaring out of the staticky speakers. Yesterday, it made the pink apartment building a hopeful arcology and a glimpse of heaven. Today it was a pretty piece of fruit rotting just under the surface. It's hard to work up passion when you age five years every day of the workweek and have to sleep off the flab and wrinkles during the weekend. It's hard to be a generalist today, when every specialist is wielding a mallet, just give them the chance. Well, maybe after the oil crash...

Consider: "...that, according to some ephermeral internet source, quotes are the second-lowest form of wit, just above puns."