February 8th, 2006

So, years ago, Martin and I wrote a Bob Dylan parody song called "The Post-Modern Post-Mortem". We really did think we were cute. Here are a couple of verses from it:

Well hey mister, can you spare me some change?
For I patted a lion inside the grange
A wise man came to me one day as I played
He stood before me and started to say:

"All the dust in the wind is makin' me sneeze
And I spoke to my cat for an hour in Chinese
Now I gotta go dance with some Limburger cheese."
And he left me without a thanks or a please.

I can't speak for Martin, but it was apparent to me that the whole world couldn't survive the way we did back then. There was an entire infrastructure of people, places, roads between them, and means of getting there that we relied on heavily. Money flowed from our parents' pockets (primarily) to the focus of our attention, whether it was sleeping overnight under the stars on a logging road pullout (how dangerous is that?) and then buying breakfast at a cheap roadside restaurant the next day, or sitting with our guitars at the windy front of the ferry through the Georgia Strait, playing A minor chords and attempting to come up with ways to be musically original. (The best we could do was come up with something we'd never heard of ourselves, and mistakenly think we were being original.)

Okay, so we were 19, 20, 21 years old. Originality is not a requirement at that age. And nobody was expecting us to have all the answers ... but we sure thought we were original and knew the secrets of the universe anyhow.

The one thing that I was vaguely aware of, though, and just didn't want to admit to myself or Martin, was that we were in a bubble of protection and convenience. We didn't need to hike through dozens or hundreds of kilometres of forest to get to our next destination. We didn't need to worry about what it was like to be hungry. We could have our sojourns to Vancouver Island or The Interior in a car with money for food and entertainment (or to just buy more guitar strings and notebooks) because of the inertia of a culture and a society around us.

It's what I mean by the above statement that "the whole world couldn't survive the way we did". We had to take a free ride off the backs of a lot of other people. It was a light weight for them, perhaps, but it was nonetheless us in our prime yet not contributing to the society that was carrying our luggage. We were busy poking fun at that society—telling it and ourselves how much better than it we were, while at the same time needing it to keep us alive, well fed, and happy.

The whole world acting in the same manner would be impossible. Nothing would get done. We'd all be dead.

Imagine that.

Well, we grew out of that stage, and we did little damage to the world in the meantime. I think we're long past the statute of limitations there would be for the minor vandalism of removing letters from the wall surrounding a new housing development:

Monday:    BERKLEY ESTATES

Tuesday:   B RKL Y  STATES

Wednesday:   RKL     TAT

Thursday:    R       T

Friday:    [cancelled on account of that not-so-well-concealed
           RCMP cruiser parked behind those trees over there
           just keep driving and stop staring fer chrissakes]

The above notwithstanding, we were okay. We were seldom a danger to ourselves, and never one to others. But we certainly were a couple of chowder-heads. And now, after those experiences are long gone, we have a perspective on the world that our more straight-laced friends don't (and now never will) have.

They were responsible while we slept on the front lawn of the BC Parliament.

They went to movies and watched TV on Friday nights while we drank Vodka and Jolt Cola and passed out in concrete gutters under overpasses in January (and nearly froze to death).

They helped their parents move furniture and stayed at home to play crib while we sat around campfires in the middle of nowhere and strummed our guitars and wrote stupid antisocial songs about the decay of society.

They have better concentration, digestion, and probably coordination because they never attempted to drink 750 ml of Johnny Walker (red) on a three-day empty stomach, and then stagger around under the northern lights of Yellowknife looking for the path that led to the tent they would have just thrown up inside of anyway ... (ahem) ...

But they can also say they never made a loan against their future to do it. They can hold their heads up proudly and honestly say they never took from the society around them for the first ten years of their adult life. And they have fewer moments in their personal history that make them squirm to look back on:

Well, good on them.

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