Treme and Me

 In a world in which it seems normal to go through life thinking that all is forever lost and that it would be so easy to give up and move on to something better somewhere else - somewhere ostensibly safer and nurturing, to a certain moment in time and space in which the soul was nourished, the scars wiped clean, and the ruminations numbed permanently... Anywhere but here in this discarded, decrepit, wasteland that is now forever altered and emptied of humanity with only the ghosts of good times past to inhabit the detritus of a reality that has betrayed us.

Treme (2010-2013) begins in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and examines through the lives of New Orleans' musicians, chefs, publicans, wanderers, and assorted dreamers what it means to try to resurrect a community in the face of every possible (natural and structural) hurdle imaginable.

Until recently it seemed impossible to view the world as moving backwards through our time of; technological advancement, steady dissemination of a human rights framework to eventually encompass every human being who lives today, growing awareness of the critical importance of universal education and income equality, and the tireless work towards equity and justice outcomes for our historically disadvantaged communities across the world.

Everything in the above seems to have reset in a very short time these days, so imagine my mental state that it so happened that I clicked on Treme on HBO exactly when I was the most pessimistic about the state of our world, and was delivered head first into a universe so completely unfamiliar and, at the same time, incredibly enticing - that any semblance of natural resistance to being enveloped in its warm, musical, colourful, magical embrace was altogether rendered futile immediately.

I certainly have to say that it brought me out of a dark place, personally, to see the effects and the aftermath of John Goodman's character's suicide in Season 1 on his fictional family, and I had to switch off from the show for a few weeks after Khandi Alexander's character's brutal gang rape and Steve Earle's character's death - to a pointless mugging gone wrong - in Season 2.

The music, though, is what did it for me. The hyper-real presence of the horn sections, the street musicians, the rappers, the country and westerns, the jazz ensembles, the 'Indian' chants (and costumes), the wannabe musicians who are forever striving, and the classicists who are always pushing beyond their comfort zones, the hustler musicians peddling their wares to whoever has a buck (or a barbecue rib) to spare... Can you imagine a show where the music is not just a narrative arc enabler but the central character among almost every other tangible and visual signifier of culture that could exist; the food, the carnival sights, the beauty of the French Quarter and the lakefront/bayous/Gulf Coast... the music completely envelopes the city in its musty haze, in its dimly lit storefronts and bars and clubs, in its period housing and shanty towns laid waste to by Katrina... in its deeply felt struggle of city natives returning to a devastated land to recover something of themselves in the face of predatory shark-like corrupt public officials and police... determined to once again change the course of this mercurial city.

I suspect that I will never again love a show as much as this one, and that makes me look forward to Season 3 ever the more.   

Soup Kitchen-ing

 I feel dumb.

To qualify, I feel dumb these days.

I also feel; left behind; overcome; trampled upon; overtaken; marginalized; destitute.

I don't know if I should have fed all these feelings into a generative AI program to get back a whole post about exactly what I am feeling - disseminated to the masses in an easy-to-digest, grammatically impeccable, particularly anodyne, and carefully overwrought perdre la boule.

The older I get, the more I seem to regret ever being born - all this aspiration and go-getting and transitory-mindedness and, eventually, responsible citizening in a foreign country... points to a large cosmic joke, the dust of which I increasingly sense to have been wasted on me.

It's regrettably too late now to turn back into dust, cosmic or otherwise. Too many stories of day-trippers in mid-life crises, leading on to full-life calamities for those left behind - cautionary tales that I cannot ignore any longer... Similar to how I feel when I think about powerful motorcycles and the open road these days: all well and good for back in the day, back when there was so much I didn't know about the vagaries of chance and sheer dumb luck.

I can catch the feels these days from those around me, just as I can low-key sense the extra-ness in my slow unravelling - which is a whole impermeable mood... but what is worse is that I feel like I must express myself in this way; a figurative gotcha smirk at a convivial mode of expression, shared among those with whom I could have nothing in common but to whom I still feel a need to relate.

Is this what being middle-aged is, then? The slowly tanking cred, the superflousness, the irritation at a voice being tolerated for the time-being...

I thought I was going to be consequential by now. 

I guess I just must need to feel lucky that I've survived thus far.

Somewhere over the horizon

Having been someone with a pretty loud internal monologue manifest over the course of my forty-six years of life, it has always been a source of interest to me to dispassionately observe the topics that make up the main theme of the monologue at various times - through periods of change and continuity, through personal crises and successes, through epoch-making instances, and to the extent that the dull, daily drivel of being a productive contributor to the global economy determines your abiding self-image.

The main theme that's running through my head these days is; ageing. That's not really a surprise considering that my main source of employment involves long, meaningful hours spent contemplating and managing the daily foibles of a plethora of older people availing of federal government subsidies to sustain their independence in (what they don't always describe as) their golden years.

My monologue, though, has also been considering ageing through a lens of pitiful self-awareness - I now have two chronic health conditions, diagnosed over the last couple of years, necessitating the daily intake of medication, and shaping just how my prospects appear to me over the next (possible) thirty-plus years of a now compromised life. It dwells on a sudden, unprepared-for end and what it would leave behind in its financial wake. How that would shape my wife's and daughter's remaining years - in the context of my own experience of the loss of my parents. What retirement really means. What fantastical experiences remain to me over the following years. What legacy I have left behind. What emotions I have engendered among those who have known me. What memories I will linger in, and what must be forgotten or hidden.

I am painfully becoming aware, through my internal monologue, that I have now become something that I don't recognize; that I have preoccupations now that preternaturally defeat my will to keep a sense of myself as weak away at the far recesses of consciousness. I have even started to forget spellings of words and their meanings; I used 'they' instead of 'there', and 'respectively' instead of 'respectfully' in two work emails recently - something that I sincerely could not have imagined myself doing, considering that 'proof-reading' is an existential matter to my sense of self... proving that even the hitherto rock-solid checks and balances in the sacrosanct are now at risk.

My monologue also continues to delve into the idea of violence; a fitful concept that hasn't visited me that often physically and, if I am honest, not even psychologically or emotionally in any sustainable way through my life. It seems like the occasional violent thought that runs through my internal monologue is some kind of last-ditch effort to retain a whiff of that wild, uncontrollable rebel I confronted in the mirror each day in my late teens and early twenties; reflecting the current status of the pathetic, miserable, and scared young man I was, posturing with all my might about... what could be.