Life Prime

No, it's not the next installment in the ever-difficult metroid series. I've really been thinking about perception recently, as is evident by that beast of a post I made yesterday. But aside from pondering the mechanics of the human mind and what exactly it is to be human, I've also had some shallower queries on perception floating around. More specifically, I've been thinking about what it means for something to be "in it's prime" and whether the true beauty of a thing is measured in its occurence, or its remembrance.
Ok, maybe "shallow" wasn't the right word, that sounded pretty fucking smart. I blame it on the Thoreau and Emersonian prose I've recently been forced to read for my recent uncharacteristic plunge into the profound. Personally, I'm inclined to think that most celebrated prose are not actually as brilliant as they're hyped. Rather, they're the result of a writer having a personal epiphany which has changed their life who tries to convey this epiphany to their audience. The audience drinks these prose in because they sound smart, and they hope that the writer's epiphanies can be transferred to them. However, it being a personal epiphany, the audience is never actually effected enough to adopt this epiphany themselves and apply it in there own lives. Basically, they walk away from the experience fooling themselves into thinking they've changed inside, but anything they've gleaned from the experience slips from them in short time.
Sorry, I've been inwardly ranting about prose for a while. Which basically makes me a hypocrite, but whatever. The shallowness comes from the connections I'm about to make. Let's start with Star Trek. The Triangle has often discussed how amazing it would have been to be as into Star Trek as we are now 5 or 6 years ago. Back then, DS9 and Voyager were running new episodes at the same time, and the tail end of the TNG movies were coming out in theaters. It was, without a doubt, the best time for a Star Trek fan to be alive. However, I was not into Star Trek back then, and the other two were arguably too young to fully appreciate the beauty of this "nexus of Trek". In the present day we have no more Trek to look forward to (No, XI does not count, as I am still not looking forward to it), and so we lovingly and longingly watch the myriad reruns and DVDs to sate our cravings. There is a sort of beauty in experiencing a show in hindsight, as you can truly appreciate it as an entire being. For me, also, my isolation fantasies play into this, as these episodes seem to come at me from nowhere, previously hidden from me in an unknown past. In this way, the shows themselves are a type of isolation, and a world their own. But is it more beautiful to experience the shows in their prime, or in this mysterious hindsight? For something in its prime is a wonderful thing itself...
Which brings me to State Radio. My second-favorite band of all time, favorite existing band, they are certainly in their prime. I fear I may jinx it by saying so, but this trio is on fire. I hope to see many more albums of theirs of or even near the quality of their recent work. Experiencing their work as it emerges, I am ever intrigued by their sound's evolution. But let us compare them to Dispatch, my favorite band, and a group I only got into far after their prime, and just before their official breakup. Looking back on them, it is fascinating to see their sound's evolution in hindsight, a progression from acoustic love songs to political reggae rock. This, too, is wrapped the mysterious isolation of an unknown past. My entire perspective on Dispatch is sandwiched between dreams of what it would have been like to be a fan in their prime, and this is fascinatingly mysterious.
But something that we all experience is the prime of friend groups. When groups move on and aprt, I often wonder about their primes. They are, undoubtedly, good times, but they leave a lot of things inclear. Those of you who read this blog, even those who have left the obvious friend group, i would like to think I am still in a prime relationship with, as we keep in regular contact and consistently have good times whenever we get together. However, with other friends this does not happen. I spoke on the phone today with an old friend whom was very happy to talk to me, and I to her, but I feel that the solid friendship is a thing of the past. This is not a fault of I nor her, but it leaves me wondering. For unlike Trek or Dispatch, looking at the past does not grace me with the beauty of isolation in this case. It just seems sad, leaving my mind with a bitter taste. All I can say is that my perception of the primes of life confuses me. Sometimes hindsight is happy, sometimes it's not. But either way, let's enjoy the prime times we can have now before they're gone.

-OSK

Joke of the Day:

Man walks into a bar. Woman wlaks into a bar. Man and Woman hit it off. Man and Woman go out for a nice dinner. 6 months later Man and Woman get married. Man and Woman have kids.

What?It's a nice story.