There’s a qualifier you don’t see every day.

As I was saying to my buddy the other day, “Jeff, you may or may not exist, but no one can burp the alphabet like you.”

I think the topic here is not one of narcissism but nihilism. The nihilism of living through how other people (who ultimately may or may not exist) may see you. In this process one can get so wrapped in the exterior that they lose all semblance of self.

“Sorry, just thinking out loud.”

We think in words.

We sometimes even think in sentences.

I know often I’ll get a mental “flash” of insight or understanding, but won’t truly comprehend it until I “speak” it out in my brain. It’s the curse of the overeducated and the media-saturated that our very thinking becomes parsed out into the modes of communication (writing, language, and increasingly, visuals–prolly due to the tv-saturation we all live in) that our society uses the most.

With this being the case, what is ACTUAL experience and what is our careful internal arrangment of the experience, as we undergo it, but framing it with our own descriptors, our own inner language?

What’s “real”, and what’s the story we’re writing for ourselves in our heads every second?

Or are they both real?

I always thought there was something strange about tourists photographing/videotaping the Grand Canyon, as if any screen could capture it. Rather than being and experiencing, it was about what? proving to others you were there? Reminiscing about a experience you should have been having but missed because you were documenting it?

I had an insight into this at a Peter Gabriel concert in 1986. Gabriel - a cult figure at best -was propelled briefly to superstar status after the MTV-fueled ‘So’ LP became his biggest seller and thus was playing arenas instead of the smaller concert halls. Philadelphia’s Spectrum is really just a hockey rink, so it was not a quality experience: neuvo Gabriel fans stood on their chairs the entire night, singing along with the songs they recognized, drowning out Peter, to the point where he actually asked for quiet and when that didn’t work, he cut some songs a verse short. It was 2+ plus hours of listening to what amounted to the City of Philadelphia Sings Peter Gabriel’s Greatest Hits. During Solisbury Hill, as the audience continued singing and swaying their arms in unison, some young guy behind us shouted to his friend “Wouldn’t this make a great video?” My friend Ethan, who had had it by that point and was no longer able to contain himself, whipped around and retorted “Yeah! Almost like the real fucking thing!”

So there you are, at the concert, actually seeing the event, and you mind is on some later electronic replication of same. Is it any wonder Fox News and ‘reality’ TV is successful? We’ve an entire generation who quite literally cannot think outside the idiot box.