Fashionably Arcy.

Thanksgiving is over. *Commence agonizingly repetitive traditional Christmas songs heard year after year after year* The sweet sound of seasonal advertising. Ho ho hopeless resistance!

I have recently come to realize what comparatively dismal times these are for my generation. My grandparents grew up in the roaring 20's, my parents were in the prime of their youth in the 60's hippie revolution, and I was raised in the glam 80's and Nintendo 90's. But what kind of social or cultural revolution is there these days for kids to associate with? Fairly much nothing, it seems. American pop culture may as well be at an all time low. Early 90's pop music was incredibly cheesy, but somehow managed to be cheesy in a good way. "Ice Ice Baby" was such a bad song it somehow managed to be great, and I could write a novel about how much good music came out of the 80's. American pop music in the 00's is not only cheesy, it's also unoriginal, uninspired, and downright depressing in its manufactured blandness. Take a look at all the great movies that came out the first four years of the 90's, and compare them to the sort of movies that have been released in the last four years. Beyond terribly overrated blockbuster franchises like Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, I have not seen all that much worth being excited about. The exact same goes for video games. The early 90's represented the absolute golden age of gaming for myself. Now, we have ultra-realistic war-simulating nonsense like Halo 2 and innumerable auto racing games with omg awesome grafix. Video games in general certainly used to have a lot more personality than they do now, and I am grieving over the drastic negative turn it had to take. I take all these factors into account when I try to understand why so much of today's youth is either depressed or on Paxil. We live in a time where there really isn't much exciting going on, aside from an utterly unnecessary and senseless war over in a desert far far away, which really isn't terribly exciting anymore if only due to repetition. These seem like such stagnant times, and it's no wonder why so many kids seem to be struggling with their purpose in life. The entire world as we know it has already been completely mapped out and explored. There is no frontier left. There is no true wildlife or wilderness. No longer can anyone place any reasonable amount of hope in being an explorer and someday discovering brand new islands or continents that no satellite has ever photographed or no human has ever set foot upon. It seems like nearly everything has already been done by previous generations, and there isn't that much left to do. This is actually a central theme in Pump Up the Volume, one of the very decent films to come out of the 90's. Watching it made me extremely grateful I never had to grow up in a generic American suburb, where nearly every house on a street looks identical, and every street arranged into a large, tidy geometric grid is virtually undiscernable apart from the street signs. ...Where global fast food chains and giant corporate retail outfits reside on every other block and the cultural mosaic is about as drab as a plain white linoleum floor. I suppose I am very fortunate in that regard... that I have always had the opportunity right outside my door to escape into mother nature and leave the overwhelming dullness of contemporary American society behind for awhile.

I find nothing that society and "reality" has to offer nearly as exciting as the sense of surrealism that overcomes me when I journey out into the night beneath a full moon and spend hours weaving and wallowing in the reality my imagination creates for myself. That is what I find truly worth living for. Surrealism and the extensive use of imagination seems to be appreciated by so few these days... but if I didn't have an incredible capacity for it, I would find life quite dismal... and I now understand exactly why. The best things in life seem to be the simplest. The harmonious music that plays on in my mind as I explore the night, the lovely feeling of slowly drifting off to sleep in an exhausted state while listening to the rain outside, the intensity of an orgasm. If we did not have the capacity to achieve such pleasure, what would be the point of going through all the motions? There's really no reason to deny it to ourselves. Beyond all the unnecessarily complex details, like my worry of getting my big paper finished by next week, the things most worth living for are the simplest things. The real reason I feel beauty all around me is because beauty has saturated my heart, and it pumps through my veins. I am simply glad I know what I am living for during a time of such... decadence.

My mother finally lost her waitressing job. The owner has been speaking of shutting down the restaurant for years, and he finally made up his mind, apparently. I guess she'll have to find a similar job closer to home, and with her qualifications, it shouldn't be too hard to find one that produces nice tips. It's not the end of the world, mom.


yeah, i'm lookin' at YOU!