Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
Compelling Songs and Stuff
Originally posted on December 20, 2015
I’m getting older, have topped out, noticing that young people are taking things in may new directions. I’m older, wiser, or at least wise enough to notice my past follies and contemplate my present degrees of ignorance. There are still many, many things I want to do, but I am also realizing that there are many things I’ve done that are melting away. They are far less compelling.
I’ve lived through such a rich time. Songs were sing-able and romantic, which now stands out in this present era when most songs are hardly sing-able and really don’t attract me to sing. But then again, many women whom I might have been very attracted to as a young man are poignantly un-attractive now, seemingly empty-headed and concerned mainly with how they look. This only serves to remind me how my views on so many things are slightly discernably changing!
Many of the activities of the young seem even more uninteresting, and no doubt many of the activities and interests I’ve had may seem uninteresting to not the next but the following generation. This tempts me to feel despair, but then again, pride in certain qualities two generations before me, or certain concerns, no longer seem to be of much value; nor do they even tempt me. So I wonder if it has ever been thus. Maybe three generations, but no more. What was heroic, beautiful, fashionable, smooth, and, in short, valued back then doesn’t interest me now. But it occur to me that many of the things that seem of value in my time may seem uninteresting if not even somewhat repulsive in a few generations. Hoo-hah! It seemed when I was young that what was great was sort-of eternally valuable, but now it seems more passing in value, evanescent, even.
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