This is what it is like to be and feel old. It is to wake up each day and to feel that everything good has passed, at least in terms of an apex, at least in terms of appreciation of said apex. Nothing produced today, no art, no music, no films, etc can equal the impact of what was produced in the past. That which was produced in the past was produced at a time when I lived – that means to say that what I am appreciating occurred in the recent past, or at least the past that constitutes my life time, with compensation duly added for the time when I was alive yet had no comprehension of events occuring, mostly limited and focused to my childhood pre-five years old, although certain fugue like states later in life caused on purpose or by accident also qualify. I am listening to Metallica’s Master of Puppets right now and wish, oh so badly wished that I saw them in concert when they were in their prime.
But wait, I think I did. I think that during Woodstock one could consider them in their prime. If that is the case, then I saw them and crowd suffered to them, for when Master of Puppets came on I went up. I wound up kicking a dude from Texas in the face on my way down which would not have been so bad if he wasn’t the same person I had not only been hanging with for the past few hours but the same individual who was plying me with alcohol during the entire time. He was hooking me up and I kicked him in the face. He didn’t mind though – we both laughed and drank more. So I lived through it but didn’t live through itl, because that was one isolated instance, that was one show and an abnormal show at that, a show which helped shape the course of my life, something that opened me up though still limited me, something where I learned what I could control and what I could not, a show that set me up for all the rest that has transpired.
And the guitar soars as I type, the sound rising like the lines on my face, so beautifully hard, climbing towards the top of a cliff that will only make you dive, as a huge stone stab falls crushingly onto you, as if in slow motion the walls of a room closing menacingly without a human cyborg relations bot to rescue you. Chris Campenelli sang this to me with a crazy look in his eyes. I am realizing that every person is so deep, that the wells of the thoughts, even empty thoughts are deep, are perverse, are layered, are ready to multiply at a moment’s notice and only need the spark to cause it to flow. And the music dances onward, upward, swirling around in the melody maelstrom, cue the drums, smash smash smash smash smash