Jazz

Jazz for me is like water. It trickles into the ears, facilitating thought.

In my caffeine-addled brain, it makes me think of humanity and the human condition. Why do we fight reality with such vigor? The facts are there but we interpret them in hundreds of different ways and many times, it's just one or another. There could be subtext, regardless of whether or not it was meant to have any subtext. All these facets exist, yet we choose to take one angle of it.

If you take a cone and slice it vertically, the cross-section will be a triangle. If you slice it horizontally, it'll be a circle. Reality is dynamic and contains more than just two slices, yet we choose to look at it in one, two maybe three ways, but that's it. We shape reality based on these angles and forget or disregard others because it doesn't fit into the equation.

That's why we have eras and then the following era overturns that very thinking. We are in the era of irony and cynicism and what comes from that? Hope and a yearning for the pure, the innocence of the past. We are the generation that clings to the past, thinking that it was somehow better than now, when all it is, is reality hitting us in the face. It's always been there, we've just never seen it.

From a generation that's seen the subversion of authority, of violence and hatred rises a generation that acknowledges the hope and the goodness in people. Random acts of kindness come from that.

I think New York has got it right in many ways. It's viewed as somewhat of a sad existence, but the initial guardedness, yet the helpfulness (that is given as if it's an obvious thing to do) of its denizens is the active acceptance of reality for what it is. There are millions of different people out there, thinking millions of derivations of the same thoughts and we try to only accept what we agree with. New Yorkers (for the most part) see it, condemn what they condemn and accept what they accept. Of course I'm over-generalizing but I feel that this is a kind of truth that I've gleaned from the whopping 11 months I lived there.

Anyway, too much caffeine and too many papers to write make me think of such things.