Random thoughts

Rock stars today fulfill the role once held by painters (Van Gogh, Caravaggio), composers (Mozart, Tchaikovsky), writers (Hemingway), and poets (Shelley, Eliot, etc. etc. etc. etc.) as our society's headcases-in-chief. I don't entirely buy the argument that this is because we don't care about those occupations anymore -- there just have been no real cultural celebrities from those fields since the early part of the last century. Most painters today are either obscure or pure, empty craftsmanship (Thomas Kinkade, for example). No poet has really caught the public's attention in a very long time -- was Dylan Thomas the last? But, then, Caravaggio and Van Gogh... these people were not celebrities of THEIR time, but were only really discovered and popularized many years after their deaths. It probably helps that rock has such a high death rate. Nothing makes you more appealing to history than a fast and tragic end. Hey hey, my my.

Human life is a Fourier series, created by the superposition of endless cycles of this sort: birth, growth, age, death. I, ferinstance, was born into consciousness this morning, grew into awareness at the peak of the day, sunk into exhuastion, and will very soon return to the little death of unconsciousmess. I was born in Dearborn years ago, grew up, will eventually hit the downward slope (let's hope it isn't yet.) Etc. I blame this iterative thinking on my day job.