A Phoenix in Charlotte

So yesterday, in the wake of the news of Kanye West’s mother dying, TGAW hinted, nay, asked, me to do a blog post about it. About how hip-hop is more than sex and guns, and how Kanye was a good example, writing songs about his mother and his family in general. She wanted me to do it so she could interject with a comment about her particular fondness for one of his family oriented tracks.

The event didn’t strike me as something to write about, however. Rap is hardly a foreign frontier for such topics. Tupac Shakur wrote about his mother, for instance. Anyway, the real point of this post is about blogs and web presence themselves.

In order to highlight my point further before making it, consider this example: While at the wedding of two friends this past weekend, I was standing outside the church as the bride and her father arrived. The photographers made them stand to pose for some pictures, and then actually made them take one step and at a time and stand still so she could get some “action shots” of events like the bride walking through the church doors. I turned to a stranger next to me and asked, “Do you remember when pictures were taken of people doing things instead of people doing things so pictures could be taken?” and he replied with, “Yeah, it’s like there’s no live action anymore.” Exactly.

I’ve got people asking me to blog about things so they can comment. We’ve got people doing things (and waiting to do them) for the sole purpose of being photographed while doing them. What happened to living life instead of posing so we can share it with others? It’s one thing to be caught in a moment, but it’s another when the moment is being staged solely for the purpose of sharing it. Live your lives, people! If others want to revel in your moment later, that’s great! But don’t wrap your lives around the concept of making sure the f-stop is perfect so Cousin Benjamin knows how great you look. It may have been more important for the US Government to have pictures of the moon landing, but I guarantee you Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were more concerned with actually experiencing it.

TGAW’s phone is set so it does not automatically delete old text messages as new ones arrive once there is no longer enough space. So instead of telling it to delete the old ones, she is constantly having to erase one or two newer ones. Her reasoning? She wants to save the old ones. Forgetting that these are but text messages, her reasoning seems sound: she wants to keep the old ones for archival purposes. So she doesn’t forget them. They are important to her. But the problem is, keeping them on the phone affects her negatively every single day because she is constantly having to compensate for that missing buffer space. She could just offload them, but she doesn’t. Instead, she constantly has to fiddle with her phone to make space to receive new messages. When she gets a message she likes, she says, “Ooh, I’m going to save this one,” thus exacerbating the problem.  The primary enjoyment is that it is worthy of saving.  Another example of the memory overshadowing the importance of the now.

I’ll end my diatribe with one more example. When I was in 7th grade, I went to Space Camp in Orlando. I worked my ass off, mowing lawns for years to be able to afford it. I was fortunate enough to be able to see a shuttle launch in person while I was there. I had a little no-zoom camera that I took with me. I spent the whole launch taking pictures. I never even looked with my own eyes at the shuttle. When I got home and the pictures came back, they were of nothing but a blue sky with a tiny speck in it. I felt like a fool. Just 3 months later, my whole family decided to take one of the only real vacations I’ve ever been on in my life — a trip to Florida to include a space shuttle launch! (We won’t get into how ticked I was that not only did we “waste” a trip on a place I had just been, but a place I had just been with my own money!) Anyway, I warned my family the whole way down that it was a waste to take pictures, that I regretted it, and that I would be watching the shuttle instead of photographing it. But they did not heed my advice. I watched and marveled while they snapped shutters. And guess what? They regretted it.

A meta-life is a wasted one. Don’t center your experiences around things that you and others will use to recall it. Experience the experiences and let the keepsakes form themselves. Blogs, Flickr, and the like will still hold memories, but you don’t have to center your life around making such things look perfect for others or yourself. The next time I visit a foreign country, you can be damn certain I’ll be wrapped up in immersing myself in the moment and not with how great the pictures I take will look on Flickr. So TGAW, if you want to write about Kanye’s mom, then just write about it. You don’t need a straight man to set you up. Life happens, and you can either enjoy it or preoccupy yourself with the potential vicarious enjoyment others could possibly receive from it. You can either be photographed doing something or you can do something just so a photograph can be taken. Seems like an easy choice to me. And that’s all I have to say about that.