LET THAT SHIT GO

What is your favorite childhood trauma?

The Eighties was full of shit, full of so much shitty trauma that it made people believe it was (perhaps) the end of the world.  But every generation thinks it's their last -- Every generation believes it's the end of the fucking world. Rounding the corner to the noughties, a new decade held the promise and hope, which (in some strange concentration), brought people to believe in optimism. Belief, yes... because in truth it wasn't that different than the prior years, as far as epochs go. Anyways that optimism, like the sex, freedom, nudity, and drugs which liberated the 60's and 70's from dogmatic white Christian racist tyranny, landed everyone in a decade's-long hangover where most people put their clothes back on and retreated from view. Risqué returned to it's closet, and divorce was discussed quietly under one's breath.   Nearly everyone bought curtains, and stayed at home, or holed up in a cabin in the woods, in a sense people sheltered in place. This era of retreats, was not new, but rather ubiquitous.  Much like Doctors who'd fled NYC after 9:11 to upstate bed communities, such as Cooperstown.

"Heading Up North For the Weekend?"  became THE most popular late 80's catch-phrase. next to the concept of "Retreats", which were veiled attempts by your neighbor to start a cult.
Seemingly everyone was hiding from their past traumas, fear they may be exposed, and perhaps a backlash against previously exuberant free-love indulgence, or for sanctuary of simply feeling good for the first decade in about a century. Fortunately for them those hippie documentaries wouldn't emerge until Ken Burns became a messiah.
Punks and Skaters were always in police crosshairs, or in custody -- and even post-pop-punk bands like Black Flag spouted blatantly racist drivel. This was done because they had nothing legitimate to bitch about.  Counter culture drove a bit deeper below ground, and everyone with normal haircuts were at surface level indoors sleeping it off. Meanwhile, famous republicans (aka white Christian racist tyrants) realigned with "D-Cell" metal flashlights under white blankets, promising broad-ranging behavioral modification, V1... They even re-kindled Bourbon, with every permutation of the name  "Jim", e.g. Jim Crow whisky was born. This contraction remains the ebb and flow of our American ruin.  So it seems odd that everyone cannot recall just how recurrently shitty the world has been to itself in the low troughs of our banal tyrannical-freedom. The give and take ledgers are paid with red ink and baseless currency which we harvest from the clear blue sky to pay our debts. Or more appropriately, we pay our debts with our debt. This Fantasy-Land which we all participate in, is half the time raw with resentment for the other side fucking everything up. Or sleeping it off. Today, as then... we spend the other conscious half wallowing under the covers from shame, and fierce reprisal. And, (perhaps) the third half taking pictures of ourselves.

Wait!  Does it sometimes feel like everything you do, write, and say is meaningless?

​My friend Chelsea says that childhood trauma is something you may wish to share with any random stranger on the bus. That even Creepy family trauma is just a natural casualty of the human experience. That life is so full of that sort of shit that it’s perfectly fine, (even recommended), to share shit with any imperfect stranger. It is a time-bomb to hold on to our trauma, As if this unique burden defines your brand, lest it control our days. The preceding and following "generational flow fails because they carry their 'woody-allen-daddy-diddle' trauma with themselves everywhere". "Why was it so traumatic?", "Really?  Are you OKAY?"  "You look OK...", "So suck it up and move on".  Chelsea says, (before bearing her soul at Karaoke) [that] "...People need to be more open, to be in touch with their emotions", "Let that shit go". Share & shed your repressive shame of (perhaps) simply being raised catholic, you think you have to?. Think of it like a micro-dosing cure for sleepless deep set mental anguish.  Curiously, but unsurprisingly the entertainment which most sells to the couched and coddled post-modern churchgoer are a limited PBS series, a podcast, or books, full of other people's trauma. "Their Story" about survival... is a strange therapy. While the other side adores horror, and John Wick. In my version we all kill the monster, and take a few gratuitous kicks to his nuts. What is so fascinating about someone else's dirty anguish? Do we really need another podcast about church abuse, Russel Brand, or Hip-Hop celeb molestation?  No we do not.  "Share!", she says -- "And set yourself free".  But by sharing, you make everyone more aware. Let that shit go.

Now, I know that is a wacky perspective, but it is not wrong.  People pay big bucks to their online shrink, Psychic, Hypnotist,  or even a pedigreed counsellor to emerge from something they could have dropped-off on a perfect stranger in coach class seat 22B.

Increasingly America turns to fictionalized memoir — Novels full of other people’s trauma, pain, and misfortune to feel alive, to feel anything at all besides defeat.  It is Defeat which rears when the world tips to the dark-side. Today that is totally understandable.  But perhaps letting things go is merely scratches on the surface of a Fight Club methodology.  To be in tune, to really get in tune requires coming to terms with anger, frustration, fear, anxiety -- But also Wonder, Fascination, Awe, and Joy.  It is an unpacking of sorts.  Memory perhaps is the operant which we most need to tame.  It has been suggested that most memories are conflated by trauma and become inflated monsters casting far larger shadows against the walls of our safe spaces. How we remember our traumas is perhaps as much to blame for fucking us up, as are those who have wronged us. Was it really that bad? Like mistakenly being flown to a super-max in El Salvador?
In the Nineties, we used-to tape everything in some strange philately conservation, ostensibly meant to cherish our memories a bit longer. To make it last longer so to speak. A mix tape to share one’s raw emotions, a VHS tape of a birthday party, or recital, perhaps using TiVo Hard Disc to record a big event.
Americans obsessed during the noughties over preserving better times — perhaps simply to bathe in their glow, became the oddest phenomena of Human Kind. Fetish level universal obsession with recording everything everywhere, in lieu of being present.

Within the 90's Boot sector of our human condition needlessly photographing everything all the time deserves a silly noun like 'philately' is to stamp collecting. Perhaps "Phillatiography" will become the catch-phrase for human-kind's obsessive photo collecting. From Doorbells to Ray Bans, everything is loaded with a lens. 

Meanwhile somewhere in the late Noughties, literally all of our tapes were tossed to the waste bin, or “donated” to a charity resale shop. If we had only ascribed more meaning to them -- throwing them away could have been so much more cathartic.  If we were smarter back then, we'd have burned them, as tiny, poignant magnetic effigies, just before Y2K destroyed humanity.  But we didn't think of that, in our frenzy to clear the historic record. Those of us who yearn to come to terms with destroyed evidence of post-Reagan perversity, can be trapped within their imaginations. Relax!, All the evidence is toast.  Alas that long lost history is only an oral one, (tongue-firmly-in-cheek). Fortunately now, your newest greatest trauma's are forever uploaded someplace. Your device will remind you daily through "memories" of how well you are aging.  ...And The ONLY good outcome from our big fat orange permanent record is perhaps that a few survivors will reflect upon our dead empire. Hopefully, they'll drop that trauma on some unwitting stranger on the bus. "You know the story, the one about those billionaire dickheads who'd boiled our oceans, and torched the countryside, before blasting off in a fiery space ship. Let the record reflect how they'd burnt this place to the ground, before they flamed out in space.  This is all sharable, (of course) while you are snapping pix of your Musk Burger and Putin Fries, and Orange Cheese.

Bright sides: Some precious memories, later become snarky Greeting cards in some clever stationer, bearing ironic phrases -- Anonymized awkward strangers sport ever more ironic hair-cuts.  But the nostalgic novelty of our worst eighties exposure has been doubled-down by commemorating every single thing one does today. It seems that we cannot get free of the 70's fascination with capturing ourselves from every angle. Ego, Vanity, or "vainglory" is merely a form of self idolatry where someone likens themself to greatness, Pictures, constant pictures are the modern equal to some idiot carrying around a mirror everywhere. This Vanity is a construct to guard against feeling piteous. "Vanity well fed is benevolent. Vanity hungry is spiteful."[5] -Mason Cooley

The Noughties, were a period of vanity's revival wherein the world emerged from the regressive oppression of 80’s disaster politics, Reaganomics, several hundred million suppressed egos, and an adjacent series of recession… Right about then -- Everyone began recording everything, especially themselves perhaps to trap these better times like specimens under glass. A dried Flower, pressed between volumes which would soon be burnt by our Government. Archiving our tattered taxidermy of a soon extinguished golden era -- Kodachrome came to capture our better times in vivid hues, where we breathed cleaner air, drank cleaner water, and enjoyed an idyllic togetherness. Government by the people and for the people encouraged the EPA and the FDA to guarantee our public health.
But, barely after America had learned to bake cakes together, road-trip together, relax together, being blissfully together manifest a strange outgrowth — An obsession to preserve our good times, at all cost.  The world went Coo-Coo for cameras. Taping everything went haywire. Americans, started to do precisely what they'd disparaged proto-Japanese tourist memes for doing in the early eighties... We began to capture everything, and print the shit out of it. We even got duplicates for free, so we could share how great we looked in one out of every thirty-six frames. 
Today everything is memorialized well before it is even experienced. Every meal, every scenic overlook, every party. Time stamped. It's even likely that the chefs are taking cell-phone pix of the meal you are currently taking a photo of right now.
These recordings are rich vibrant, 3D, 4K, HDR, and also boring as fuck! They include every Texture, every photon, every grain, every crumb, of spreading butter upon toast, and yet they taste like nothing at all.
Nothing matters more than what you ate for dinner, and nothing matters less than what it actually tasted like.
Nothing is intrinsically important about our collecting banal memories like butterflies on a wind-screen. Our obsession to collect (good) memories, began with Kodachrome, expanding into magnetic tape, hard-discs, and (gasp) THE CLOUD, (wherever that is). The insecure cultural obsession born of a nervous cult(ure) searching for meaning, nay belonging through rewinding, is bonkers. Your "Cloud Memories" are like a remedial memoir for illiterates.  We are all doing it, and each and every photo, video of every concert, fades just as fast as our liver will metabolize a sixteen-dollar cocktail.  Nothing at all is being recorded and posted at such a frenzy, that reality is suffocating beneath the huge vacancy of experience.

The joy, even awe of lived experience is lost to the process of manipulating every meaningful moment through a filter, and getting that shit out in front of everybody as fast as one can — Literally everyone. But nobody cares, and everyone just keeps doing this thing, without knowing why, or even that they are doing it -- Like a roller rink without getting to cop a feel.

But seriously -- literally everyone gives zero fucks about what you had for dinner, nor even that you've eaten, just that your capture outshined theirs.  Vanity, is where flavors are delivered in the form of praise, or not at all.  Coo-Coo, right? 
So, part of our potential energies could be implemented to delete all that we wish to no longer remember.  While a smidge of our idle energy could be used to own up to some or all of our mistakes.  The rest of that shit, (namely the trauma) simply needs to be dropped on a perfect stranger -- And this can be done just like "Donating" your old video cassettes, computers, photos to the thrift store.  Like a shitty memoir, or The Moth Radio Hour -- others may benefit from your shame.
The time we kill, is killing us.
Delete the history of your trauma along with those pix of tonight's "small-plate courses"  You'll never see them again, right? Let that shit go.  Share a dark secret with a total stranger, just before choking on the: #BEST-BUFFALO-WINGS-ever?
When the person next to you breaks out pics of a pet, or toddler... why not start out fresh with, "That looks like a proper shithole... Let me tell you a story."

This is a Pixies song about a Phone, right?
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