Ghosts of the 20th Century

I'm starting to see a kind of vision of my new project. Several things have been revealed to me, right under my nose so long as to be invisible. For example, fiction writing. I often struggle to find a fictional matrix for different parts of my real life, to convey the lesson learned in a dramatic but fictional, made-up story that has rules and critical guidelines and more reasons to suck than to sound good. Why bother? I now wonder. I have lived a weirder and more varied life than any of my friends, family or acquaintances. Why not just do what Ken Kesey did in Demon Box? Change the names of the people, give myself a suitable alias(he called himself Devlin Deboree), and just get right down to the real nitty-gritty.

There is also a thematic quality to a notion I have. Because of the tremendous increase in media bombardment in the last 50 years, certain human values have been reversed. Celebrities we enjoyed years ago are now ridiculed for being old, as though it's something negative. The Rolling Stones come to mind. But getting older is better than becoming dead, right? Are rock'n'rollers supposed to become classical musicains now that they've aged?

I don't know and to tell the truth, I don't care. The media thing I'm talking about is actually for the fans, the audience, the real people who spend money creating the excitement in the first place. Our youth is preserved is so many different ways I think in a certain way it can actually overcome us. The same music that I listened to in high school now plays as I drive my granddaughter to pre-school. The shows I watched are either original on some channels or remade with new actors on another. Every media event is preserved.

The only thing not preserved in its original format is me. And my friends, my family. It makes me wonder what life was like when what happened was not recorded. When you had to remember stuff, to recreate it, not just flip the dial. If you saw Edwin Booth perform Hamlet, you saw something not recorded or ever viewed again. It existed in your mind and nowhere else, except for the other viewers who were there.

Didn't the Plains Indians have a thing about taking photographs? That the photography actually stole your soul away from your body. Think of what has happened to all of us now, in The Age of Media Domination. We're the ghosts of the 20th century.