Pardon Me

If I could travel back in time & change one thing, I’d throat punch the guy who made it popular to hold local parades.  I don’t want to come across as some Scrooge because I’m degrading a Christmas holiday tradition, but can someone explain to me the appeal of standing outside in 20 degree weather waving at complete strangers while they toss you 2nd rate candy?

I stood in line for 3 hours for this crap?

Parades use to have meaning, but like so many other things, they’ve been watered down by society.  Not so long ago, parades were a way of honoring troops returning home from battle or paying homage to some momentous occasion that we’d eventually record in the history books.  They were a way of letting the world know how important we as a society thought a particular moment in time might be.  Now?  Now they’re used to showcase Little Miss Junior Jefferson County as she waves to people she doesn’t know while sitting in the back of a pick-up truck.

I would definitely attend this parade.

But not this one.

I was driving home with my wife the other night and we got caught up in the traffic from one of these “parades.”  We were on our way home from a basketball game and had no idea that a parade was even scheduled for that night.  What should have been a quick 15 minute drive from the gym to our house turned into and hour and a half of pure agony.  A cop yelled at us for driving through an intersection at a time he deemed inappropriate (even though the light was green and he had waved us through). People who had been parked for the parade continuously butted into traffic, cutting others off in the process.  Parents let their kids dangerously run in front of oncoming vehicles.  Stop signs were run, people turned left on red, and everyone drove down one way streets.  The amount of traffic laws broken were immeasurable.  If tickets had been handed out, our cities coffers would have been lined for years.  It was chaos.

In my minds eye, this is how local parades always feel.

Evidence of parades exist as far back as 3000 BC.  These usually consisted of Emperors and King’s marching their armies down main street as a display of power; Showing the rest of the world exactly what they were capable of.  If these types of parades still existed, I’d absolutely be there.  Throw a parade for WWII or other Military vets? I’m there dressed in my Sunday’s best.  But throw a rinky dink Christmas Parade where people willingly sit in traffic for hours to catch a glimpse of the local Rotary Club as they pass out bite sized Laffy Taffy? I’d rather eat a bucket of rusty nails.

 

-bg

Into the Airwaves

With the way we continuously advance technologically as a society, it’s easy to forget how recent our past is.  We spent centuries as nomads, farmers,  and peasants, but because we all have iPhone’s & iPad’s, our past is easily forgotten.   It took centuries to build the wheel, and only decades to go from black & white TV’s to iPhone 5’s.

I recently came across a video on YouTube.  It’s from the game-show called “I’ve Got a Secret,” and it first aired in 1956.  The premise of the game is simple enough.  A contestant stands in front of a panel and answers questions.  Each member of the panel attempts to guess what the person’s “secret” is.  The contestant on the night of February 9th, 1956, was Samuel J. Seymour, and his secret is that he was an eye-witness to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.  Watch for yourselves:

The video is old, grainy & in black and white. But the remarkableness of it should not be lost on us.  It’s 2012 and we’re watching a video of someone who witnessed Abraham Lincoln die.  This is a firsthand account of one of the most famous assassinations in world history, and it’s casually sitting on YouTube with less than 1,000,000 views.  How sad.

Gangnam Style, by the way, has 666,000,000+ views and counting.

Technology has accelerated to the point where our attention spans are at an all-time low.  Sure, we can focus on more things now than ever, but we only focus on them briefly before the next shiny toy comes along that demands our attention.  We’ve got too much unimportant stuff weighing us down, that, at this time next year, we wont even remember we had.

Quick, what kind of phone were you using in 2007? Whatever it was, I’m sure you were dying to get it.

We as human’s have a incredible feature built into our brains that we rarely realize.  We have a way of forgetting the bad things that have happened to us.  For most of us anyway, the only bad things we ever remember are the truly traumatic events, or events that have helped shape who we’ve become.  I realize that even as I’m typing this, nothing I’ve said will stand out.  By this time tomorrow, you’ll probably forget that you ever read this, and that’s OK.  What I’m saying isn’t of any particular importance, other than this:  Stop focusing on the temporary things of this world or else the things you own, end up owning you.

– utjf

Letters from the Wasteland

What happened to us that made us forget what we wanted to be?  I’m sure there’s no statistic out there that measures how much our imagination deteriorates the older we get, but I know it’s significant, and that’s a shame.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a Paleontologist.  I wanted to travel the world digging up dinosaur bones.  I wanted to figure out a way to bring what I saw on Jurassic Park to life.  Maybe I wouldn’t go quite as far as recreating actual dinosaurs, but I definitely wanted to study them.  I couldn’t imagine anything cooler than globetrotting and digging up T-Rex skeletons.

Then one day, I forgot about it.  It wasn’t a conscious decision I made, it just happened, and I wouldn’t realize it until years later when I was halfway through college.  “Wait, why am I studying to become a teacher again? Wasn’t there something way more fun I wanted to do?”  This happens a lot in life.  It’s rarely a decision we’re aware of, but something happens, and we lose a little bit of our imaginations along the way.  (And BTW, I didn’t end up becoming a teacher.)

Most of us are like this.  How many of you ended up in the job that you dreamed of when you were a kid?  How many of you guys became a professional stunt man, and how many of you girls became a ballerina?  Maybe the responsibilities of adulthood cause us to lose part of our imaginations.  Maybe the stress of bills and work evaporate our creativity.  Whatever it is, it’s heartbreaking.  I know some of you out there actually became mountain climbers or race car drivers.  But that number is minuscule compared to the number of people who dreamed of doing these things as kids.  The most tragic part of all of this isn’t that we couldn’t become what we wanted to be, it’s that we forgot what we wanted to be.

I was watching a Donald Glover standup special the other day and he put it perfectly.  What he said was basically this:

The idea of Santa Claus is really weird and bizarre.  There’s this fat guy that sneaks into your house through your chimney while your parents are asleep.  He eats all your food, leaves a couple of gifts for you, and then he climbs back up the chimney and leaves.  As a kid, you’re perfectly fine with this weird fat man who sneaks around your house while you’re sleeping.  But as an adult, you’d probably take a baseball bat to the guy’s head.

If you still believed in Santa Claus as a 40 year old male, then Christmas Eve would probably the most terrifying night of the year.

 

I have no idea how to get creativity or imagination back once they’re gone.   Society likes to repress weirdness, and I get that.  It makes a lot of people uncomfortable.  The older you get, the harder it is to have a family & a career built out of eccentricity.  I have a job that, while I do enjoy, It’s not something I look forward to doing every day.   I’m not exactly discovering new species of Dromaeosauridae if you know what I mean (Raptors).  And I guess that’s ok.  If we were all Astronauts & Rockstars, no one would ever be by to pick up my garbage on Wednesday mornings.

 

-utjf