I’m not very old. 24.
24 isn’t very old to people in their thirties. 24 is old to me.
24 is old to people who are 18.
So I’m old.
I think people generally change their viewpoints on certain things, in particular on aspects of society, as they go through life. You may view something as evil, or good, or you may not care. As time progresses, as you live, your viewpoint can change. You may learn to care. You may learn to not. Your viewpoint WILL change. Right now I’m seeing this world as a strange object in the center of a room and I’m slowly making my way around it. As time passes, I get different views of this thing. When a person is old, old like say, my father, (my dads really old) they can talk with certainty of having done… “been around” ..it. Many times.
I was a sophomore in college and I’d seen it all. I though I’d come to certain understandings that were, for the most part accurate.
Enter finishing school.
Enter death of younger brother.
Enter first real job.
Enter marriage.
Slightly above average redneck, solely for nerd/photoshop skills, overall, still pretty stupid. That’s my classification. Still pretty unweathered.
Kauai is supposedly the oldest of the Hawaiian Islands. There are older islands, but they’re under the ocean. The wind, rain, and Pacific waves pounded them out of existence way back before maps were things to be made. Except for the Wal-Mart and the traffic, Kauai is beautiful. They call it the garden island. Reasons being it’s been eroded, chipped at, polished. Battered. By life.
Me and the new bride sat under many a breathtaking waterfall that wouldn’t have been there without the floods and rain that carved the canyons for the water to fall, into. The island has been out there, facing the elements of its environment, eroding. And it’s more beautiful than most other islands, strictly for that fact.
So I guess if I were an island, I’d be a relatively new island. One that just a short time ago was spewed out of a volcano and dried. I’ve got a jungle on me after tropical birds from other tropical islands took tropical craps on me and some of those dumps contained seeds of tropical plants. Cannibalistic natives from Polynesian points unknown have recently arrived on my shores.
I’m new. I’m stupid. Haven’t seen the half of things.
So right, I’m still pretty unweathered. Getting married and moving into an apartment in North Little Rock Arkansas qualifies me to make sweeping general judgments about the world, about society. Graduating from a college in Arkansas, that most people from Arkansas don’t even know exists, ..with an art degree no less, makes my opinions amount to something approaching, lets say jack squat. I’ve seen some stuff. But most of it was on tv. I’ve seen some places, but I saw most of them through the window of a car driving down an interstate. Still, but still, a change in one of my opinions still matters to me and surprises me.
Take graphic design, take advertising. I went to college learning a trade that halfway through school began to disgust me. Back then, I would say:
My criticism of advertising has always gone like this: if you take the underlying messages of all the ads we’re exposed to, they are remarkably consistent in the values they promote. And if you built a society based on those values, it would be a pretty self-centered, materialistic, live-for-the-moment, hedonistic, hyper-competitive sicko freak show society. Which is pretty much what we’ve got.
And things change. Time passes. If you asked me now, I would say something leaning towards this:
Complaining about the world and being in anguish about how pathetic the world is, ..it’s all so serious and joyless and boring and self-righteous and angry. There’s enough to be depressed about.
And I don’t guess it really matters anyway. People change. Opinions change. Life changes.
I’m getting better at not letting the circus get to my head. I am learning to have fun, somehow, again. Sometimes you forget, the most basic stuff, because you’re just retarded.
