The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated time movement, and will likely continue to usher us briskly into the future. As someone who has always been frustrated with the sluggish state of societal development (or retardation), this comes with welcome enthusiasm, albeit with some pangs. For example, many, if not most of my friendships have disintegrated over the past year, and one even died. But perhaps that's just the future trajectory of events playing out in fast-forward; perhaps the lost friends were already on their trajectory into the past, and my friend that died was certainly on his trajectory towards death from cancer. I'm not one to necessarily argue for a prolonged life in such a painful scenario.
Alas, a sudden jolt into the future can cause whiplash, but it's not necessarily going to leave one crippled. On the contrary, it can provide a needed alignment of sorts -- a reanalysis of our encrusted, ignorant personal and societal inertia that so often stymies progress. I think humanity was due for a jolt, and for all the death, pain, and loss from COVID-19, I prefer it to the outbreak of a new world war happening in my life, which was arguably the last major jolt the world experienced. That jolt, World War Two, was far beyond an "alignment;" it was near mass suicide. I've arguably lived among the best times to be alive in human history, and in one of the best places: the wealthy, relatively stable United States of America from 1980 to 2021. Given alternative realities of different places and times in human history, I'd say I've been very lucky thus far. For one, I've lived a very healthy life to age forty! That alone is a rarity worth celebrating given the statistical history of human experience. In other words, every generation has their major events and struggles, personal and societal. And given what I know of human history, COVID-19 may not be a bad card to draw from a corrupted stack with many bad cards.
But I don't want to get ahead of myself (to be meta about it, of course). I'm formulating a focused writing on this subject soon. If not for irony's sake, I wanted to share something from the past -- something that seems like it's from another life in another era: playing a show in a crowded bar. Oh, how I miss such revelries! I've started writing music again and am in the process of recruiting a new band and potentially recording a new album by the year's end. But before I go back to the future (oh, just STOP with these puns!), I'm enjoying a glimpse of the past. Watching and listening to this, I both yearn for, and scoff at its naive innocence. Evidently I'm already a grumpy old man post-COVID-19.
dKOTA // "saved" >> white eagle - pdx 06_11_2010 from dKOTA on Vimeo.
