We regurgitate and repeat song lyrics, quotations, and the thoughts of others. We are living in the information age where we have an unfathomable amount of past ideas and thoughts at our fingertips. We are the recycled refuse of the human existence and we are relegated to a world where we compulsively share the only thoughts that ever truly originated from our own simple minds. “I’m hungry.” “She made me angry.” “I worked out really hard! Love me! Find me attractive!” In the end, there really is nothing new under the sun. We’ve seen, and done, all of it before.
Even as I write this post I find myself thinking about the lyrics to dozens of songs that I want to be played at my funeral in a desperate attempt to define myself posthumously. Do I really need to let people know who I think I was? I find myself caring about this even though I know it is purely human vanity that drives this desire.
“I’m the son of rage and love.”
Am I really St. Jimmy? I know that I once thought I was. I assimilate the mannerisms and speech patterns of the people I admire. I figured that out a long time ago. Even knowing it I can’t seem to stop doing it. To me it almost seems like I’m bestowing a sincere and wonderful compliment to these people. I give them an obvious cue to notice my approval of who they are or who they portray outwardly.
It’s not such a horrible thing to assimilate lyrics, music, and actions of the art that defines who you are. By doing so, you are showing your own approval of the information that came before you. We pass off the things we say online as our own inventions because it makes us feel like we contributed something worthwhile to the soup. As we put these ideas back into the pot, it’s like we season the meal with more of what we found to be representative of who we are. It’s like the sheer volume of our essence will somehow make our presence here more lasting or immortal.
The journey that we take in this life is something composed simultaneously of shit and magic. We hope that the mundane truths about existence don’t apply to us and that somehow we are more memorable, more special, or more interesting than the teeming masses that surround us. It’s to our everlasting shame that our hubris makes us think this way. My only hope is that I can rise above this somehow and enjoy my life for what it is and not what I wish it would and could be.
I don’t flatter myself to think that anyone really reads this site or the things I write on it from time to time. I don’t even truly think myself that gifted of a writer. In the stormy sea of never-ending information, this post is nothing but a stream of urine mixing into the salty brine. That means I don’t have to end this elegantly. I wrote it for myself, which is more than I can say for you sorry bastards. Wait, that’s extremely hypocritical and callus of me to say, isn’t it? We very much expel the thoughts of our betters for ourselves. We don’t give a damn if they really help anyone else. In the end, that’s not what we set out to do.