There's only so much talk of the economy that one person can take and so I flipped the dial to the wholly uncreative realm of modern disc-jockeydom to catch Don Henley's billionth royalty roll of End of the Innocence. I've always liked the song (it's kind of shameful), but I do. I get those goosebumps sometimes along the back of my neck and upper arms. Such a sad song.
What's funny is its been the feeling and not the lyrics, which are terribly dreary as well, that effects me most. I never caught the politics of Reagan and the USSR, inner/outer turmoil, and youth awakening and wanting to go back and find that one place where they can't touch. I'd put my own meaning behind the words, meanings more convenient for me. I do this with much of the music I listen to and I'm sure it bleeds out into other facets of life, redirecting many people's actions and intentions to fit something more palpable for me (Sorry everyone about that bummer). Perhaps it's an effort to remain sane. To think of all the things I intentionally miss... sheesh.
Innocence. A recurring theme in every coming of age story or discussion. My kind of talk. I began to think the other day of what it means and toss the notion it has anything to do with virginity. Fuck that. I think it has to do with hope and optimism and feeling oneself to be unique. When those things begin to go, when it cracks ever so slightly and the light gets in, or the dark gets in... now we're talking. It's a kind of losing. Losing a bit of yourself each time and becoming less innocent for it. Knowing too much, that guilty hunger for that which brings you grief.
I lost something abroad a long way from home. I was nineteen and on a bus and some loud pan flute music was bumping this Blue Bird crawling up the switchbacks of a mountainside. Clouds formed from the breath of cordillera trees generating a peculiar microclimate in the dripping canopies. As we came to the pass in this rich jungle the road dropped away and the clouds parted and I saw a great swath of destruction below me stretching for hundreds of miles. Biblical shit. Slash and burn, cattle farming, tightly packed banana plantations, and the shanties. I could never not see it again and it was everywhere, it followed me. The garbage, the poverty, the ugliness, the lack of stewardship and responsibility and all those big words and ideas of the haves. The essential knowledge that racism is not nearly as important as the civil unrest between the caste systems. The glaring distrust and hatred between the haves and the have-nots, and the haves welcoming the bickering between lower classes as fodder for distraction from what's actually occurring: subjugation of the poor's labor and land. Bummer.
It didn't tick right for a while and never again ticked the same way. And there was home and relationships and the bitch which is high school. I watched my friends and acquaintances become cruel before my eyes, for nothing. I couldn't figure why some newly developed muscles and a patch of new hair between the legs could be reason enough for being a dickhead. And yet, there it was.
Growing up is never easy and some of us are still doing it, or at least trying. What's funny is the place I always felt purest and most hopeful was the place I was taught (and thank G-D I wasn't raised Catholic, can you imagine?) could bring the reckoning and an end to innocence~ in someone else's arms. Innocence is some hokey shit anyhow and its pursuit and attainment is as likely as individual predestination, Calvin-style. Talk about setting yourself up to get pummeled.
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