You know, it’s raining in River City today. Been raining almost all day now, intermittent showers on and off, you know the drill. Earlier this morning, the campus at the University was evacuated on account of a bomb scare. They dragged everybody outside and told everyone, “don’t go near the buildings!” Don’t go near the buildings? Sure, it maybe sounds like good advice if you think they are going to blow up and all, but don’t you think it might also be a good idea to figure out who is calling, telling you there are bombs all around? Maybe do something about the problem?
I read some marketing thing today about how the “new generation” looks for meaning in “new and different” ways. They pay attention to things like “number of Twitter followers.” Kanye West, I’m told, has a huge “number of Twitter followers.” That’s great. I’m happy for him. I use Twitter, but I’m not exactly sure how many Twitter followers I actually have, nor do I really care. It’s just one of those things people do, you know, go online and yap a bit about this or that. It’s not real, not in the “stay away from the buildings!” kind of a sense now, is it?
Today’s Friday, I guess I should be really happy about that but, maybe not so much. There’s a lot of tension and events happening in the middle east. There’s a lot of political strife and unrest. There’s pretty much world war III unfolding right before our eyes and, in all honesty, we’re supposed to pretend to care more about Twitter followers? Really?
There seems to be this sort of “public disconnect” that keeps happening and, in reality, growing. It’s more than an extension of the “I’m happy! I got mine!” generation and it’s more like people are completely oblivious to what’s happening outside of their little bubbles. I thought things like Twitter were supposed to keep us all connected? I guess not. Is this just a failure to communicate or is something else, something entirely more sinister, going on here and we just don’t know it yet?
Still, all of this talk about big “global” things has me wanting to do something that makes a difference in somebody’s life. You know, sometimes, as an artist, it’s hard to find that. It’s hard to find that kind of value in your work. We tend to sell (sometimes anyway) just “pretty pictures for the masses” (whatever they think those to be.) It can be hard, sometimes, scratching beneath the surface, looking for true meaning in all of that. I mean, heck, blue is just sort of blue, right? Not much more to say about it.
Yeah, I guess you could say it’s raining today in River City and I’m in a sort of pensive half melancholy kind of a mood. It just feels like a rainy day. We’re allowed to have those too, right? Here in River City? No?
Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go try and figure out what a “blue period” might look like had a photographer gotten his way with it. (Normal perkiness will return, I’m sure, sometime tomorrow. Count on it! I mean, heck, it *is* Friday after all, isn’t it?)
Until next time…
