Stolid in the Face of Armageddon
So I'm reading George R. R. Martin's novel The Armageddon Rag, which is a great book, about '60s music, its culture and counterculture, what it all meant, and what happened to it, its symbols, and its adherents in the years since. As you'd expect from its title, it's dark, bloody, and, at best, bittersweet. In the section I've just finished, our hero returns from his '60s quest across the nation to his '80s life, and find that his partner has decided to break up with him, and when he rails at her for being so businesslike in the process she says they'll continue the conversion when he can be more 'mature'. After she leaves, he drinks a six-pack (or more) of beer, and passes out on the couch listening to The Beatles playing over and over on the stereo.
And I think, Why can't I ever react like that?
And a voice says that it's because I've just come back from a coffee shop where I had a double mocha and an apple turnover, and now I'm writing an on-line journal while listening to James Taylor in my $700/month apartment in Madison, Wisconsin.
Which is, of course, two parts illuminating and three parts irrelevant.
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