as last week was saint patty’s day, and i definitely got me share of green guinness and jameson, i think it’s appropriate that the soundtrack to this blogpost be a randomized collection from the pogues. god, if any man could be as creative as shane mcgowan without being so monumentally fucked up, in many, many ways, i think they’d be gods among men. but with great gifts come great faults, as mcgowan most definitely shows. three bottles of whiskey a day, not to mention the beers? jay-su, murry and jumpin’ Jehoshaphat. not to mention he’s a goddamn vegetarian on top of it all, if that’s not a bloody fault, i have no idea what is.
i recently had to replace my keyboard because a bunch of keys had fallen off, my ‘o’ key was broken and it generally was rather suboptimal. towards the end of its life span, i was cursing that damned keyboard up and down the block, because i was in the middle of finals and a non-functioning keyboard during finals was all sorts of hell.
at the same time though, after watching it get replaced, i realized how much i’m going to miss that damn thing. enough that i’m going to mount it on a piece of wood, and just maybe save it for posterity, or at least for drunken contemplation. it’s crazy the attachment we can build with inanimate objects. but in this case, i feel like it’s justified. i just transferred all the documents from my old jumpdrive onto a larger jumpdrive…. it was almost 2 gigs worth of mostly documents. admittedly, i didn’t write all of those, and at least some of them had been written on other computers, but most of it was written with that beaten up old keyboard.
the damn thing has probably seen more of the me of the last three years than anyone in this world. more than my family, more than any woman i’ve loved, more than any of my buddies. and i know anthropomorphizing a keyboard is both a logical fallacy and hella nerd status… but as i recently said to a friend of mine, we are who we are, quirks, faults and all.
which reminds me… i picked up another copy of starship troopers by robert heinlein. i read that book the first time when i was still reading from the children’s section of the library. how the hell that particular piece of heinlein reading ended up there, i will never know. i didn’t understand it completely then, hell, i still don’t… but i constantly rediscovered the book over my years, reading it over and over again. i’ve probably read it twenty to thirty times.
and now as i get older, as i begin to try to articulate my philosophy on life, the whats, the whys and the hows of my view of the world, i begin to realize more and more how influential this one tiny little tome was to my life. the concept of the centrality of duty, the responsibility of the citizen and the soldier, the joy in the simple pleasures of life and the companionship of your brothers… so much of it i realize have been articulated through internal conversation with that book.
i hella don’t agree with a lot of what heinlein wrote. he was a rather staunch technocratic libertarian. i’m a pretty progressive liberal. but the central tenet of what we both share is strong enough to bridge those differences…
the potential of the human animal to be more than just the programmed product of hegemonic indoctrination, more than just a bundle of blood vessels and muscles driven by instinctual biological prerogatives. the absolute beauty and utter horror that lies at the core of being a person, rather than just a homo sapien… that, we share in spades.
so here’s to mr. heinlein for teaching a boy to believe in humanity, in its ability to transcend, to be so… much. that no matter how ugly we can be, it is always met with an equal measure of the beautiful. there is no greater gift.
life is like a vaudeville show, hours and hours of preparation for two minutes of action that no one really appreciates anyways.