Friday, June 13, 2008

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button




I feel like I live in an era that was born old, and will vanish from the earth in infancy. It seems almost as if the story of the baby boom makes more sense if played in reverse: growing up in the shadow of nuclear war, rebelling for democracy and peace and a new world in youth, and then a march behind their elders into a kind of adolescent consumption.

It is truly, born under unusual circumstances. What ruin will they leave for us. They will leave so much ruin I cannot even begin to describe it. These are haunting notes, and even this trailer implies what I think to be true, that over and over again, when faced with a rift between sensation and emotion, that all they can do, is move on.

Half of Second Life, or more, I think, seems to be wrapped in reactionary thoughts and attitudes, fighting battles that I do not understand, speaking a code that I cannot break, and a language which is not written down in any book. Instead, they seem to be passing backwards to a moment where their morality does not apply, freed from rules that they never believed in, but were instead merely forced to obey, there seems to be a rift that either wants to not believe that there was ever any purpose for the rules at all, or that they can be imposed by bombast.

I do not believe either of these things, but I cannot yet say with precision and rigor what I see. If only trying to look forward, and not back, did not hurt so, and strain the mind's eye. If only it did not lead to such places of dark despair. Perhaps I am not meant or made for this stretching of the imagination.

But I know that it must happen, some how, and by the hand of someone.

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