born_in_the_wrong_decade IKC 56-80 sometimes i wish i was ten or fifteen or even twenty years older, to have been around when stuff like the_smiths and joy_division and the_cure and all of the bands i like best were still fairly new. On the oher hand i am glad i am mostly too young to remember the reagan era, though i suppose from what my dad and my uncle say, we may as well be living in it again now - though i think back then it had a better soundtrack 020923 ... Elzbieta Hell, sometimes I feel I was born in the wrong century, the wrong era! So yeah, they were all poor and died young but they didn't have to deal with such complex bullshit. 020924 ... listo You are serious, no? Perhaps my less than perfectly fluid english leaves me unable to fully understand your meaning, but I think it is dangerous to imbue one's own personal experience with far greater weight than those of others, even, or especially, with the detachment of great expanses of time. I am of the opinion that the problem is in fact not an abundance of 'complex bullshit,' but an absolute dearth of complexity, overridden entirely by so much self-imposed 'bulltshit,' (as it were). 020924 ... Elzbieta Please don't get your underware in a twist, Listo. I know perfectly well life isn't all roses and poppies for anybody. I wasn't judging or saying my problems are worse, just different. I'm looking for a change of pace in life...just getting the crops in and hoping no one dies from bad meat sometimes seems a little less complex than all the lives we are forced to live today. People sacrificed a lot for survival for a long time. Now, living to be 65 isn't much of a problem, but many people(myself included) still aren't happy...sorry to rant. I hope I cleared things up. 020924 ... squint *raises hand* *shifts uncomfortably* but then again, if i were 10 years older, i might still be looking for guys ten years my senior. bah! 020924 ... listo I am in no way confronting your right to believe that a more rudimentary existence is in fact in some respects a more simple one. I don't think I could necessarily contend otherwise. But crops and, by western standards, quite avoidable death, are of very immediate concern to most of the world's population. My father was in what I supposed is comparable to the foreign service, posted in western africa, until I was ten years old. I lived in an environment, or perhaps more accurately, detached and cloistered from an environment, of disease, malnutrition, civil war. I'm not yet 20, perhaps I have a great deal to learn, perhaps I suffer too heavily from the weight of my incomplete, liberal, ivory tower (is that the correct term as I understand it?) education, but it is impossible for me to feel anything but 2-dimensional these days, the more and more I reflect upon the first half of my life and the constructed complexities, the drama without levity created and imposed by the priveleged individuals I was surrounded by. Perhaps I don't give enough credit. In my youth then, and in my youth even still I have difficulty reconciling and accepting the mental and emotional exhaustion that come with being in such surroundings, even with veritable safety. As we age I suppose our empathy is replaced by more mundane and manageable emotions. With a forced detachment. Humans, so deeply flawed as we are, can deal with only so much without rendering ourselves merely vehicles of searing self-contempt, and then how could we live? Would such pressure extinguish our mental and emotional lives? I know that it has done so to many men. I am overwhelmed by so many unfinished thoughts, by the flood of resentment for those I lived amongst for so many years in those circumstances. I've lived in the states for nearly two years to the month and I also much say that it is impossible to feed from pieces of sound, words, and images from other places, other realities. It is deeply vacuous to compose suffering for one's self from the suffering of those who you have never bore witness of. I've seen a great deal of this in my fellow students. At the same time, however, I don't find much fault in allowing a small part of one's self to be swept up by the small pieces of life, as long as they truly belong to the person they carry pieces of away. And I certainly do not mean to imply that the person who posted after my initial post was one of those individuals. And please to think that much of what I write has anything to do with you. What I read here and what I write, in various incarnations, is merely triggered by the sight of words, their syntax, their relationship. It is a way for me to externalize my thoughts, not a way for me to externalize my feelings on other people or aliases. It isn't possible for me to grasp another's meaning in this medium, or in some respects, any other. And I don't think, especially from the conflicts I've read within these pages, it is possible for many others, though they might believe themselves capable. 020924 ... listo and yes, joy division and the happy mondays are fantastique! 020924 ... jane haunts me. 101114 ... ever dumbening no 101125 ... ever dumbening hey fuck brain. don't fucking use my screen name. 101126 what's it to you? who go blather from