Hippier Than Thou

Just watched a documentary on modern-day hippies in the northwest: Back to the Garden. Some very inspiring and admirable characters in the film, but a few comments that made me think a little more critically about it than I had expected to going in. This might all sound a hypocritically preachy (a soap box rant about other’s uses of soap boxes?), but here it is anyway. I am all for peace, love, happiness, and green-living, but when it crosses into the realm of judging or discounting another individual’s conceptions of what that means, I say that is decidedly NOT hippie. It’s one thing to counter-culture and to speak truth to power, it’s another to berate and judge a person who is truly doing what they think is right, or at least what they believe to be inoffensive to their surrounding world.

I’m one of those post-modernists who believes nothing is benign, that all of our actions have consequences that we could never fully understand, but most people are probably not too concerned with all of their unintended consequences. I think we’re limited in what we can consider day-to-day, in terms of balancing the big picture & the mundane, the sacred & the profane. If someone is doing justice or goodness in the world as they interpret it, or conversely is expending the majority of their time & energy dealing with substantial daily challenges in their life that I can’t even imagine, what if that’s enough? I think to some degree those folks need a pass on whether they recycle every piece of waste they have, or inadvertently spend their money supporting oppressive multi-nationals, or are able to research varying perspectives on whatever hot-button issue is hitting the news.

Has anyone ever seen the movie, “The Ballad of Jack and Rose”? It’s disturbing in a few ways, i.e. a pretty questionable father / daughter relationship, but there is a scene that I’ve never been able to shake. Been a while, but my recollection: The main character is Jack, played by Daniel Day Lewis, an off-grid eco-warrior clinging to high ideals of sustainability, harmony with the earth in human development and altruism. He has this monumental revelation with a real estate developer, where he considers for the first time that this man is also doing what he thinks is right for his family and his world, and is probably well-intentioned and defensibly just, in his own perspective. It’s incredibly well done, and the empathy (and probably guilt) of Jack is so tangible it hits you like a thick fog. This gets at the kind of sensitivity and non-judgmental approach to one’s ideals way better than I could right about it – a great vignette on a concept I haven’t really seen explored elsewhere.  

Blog #1

Is it time for me to enter into that quintessential 21^st century practice of recording every moment of my menial life? No my friends, it is not. I pledge to NOT text post when I get cut off by a cell phone driver on the freeway, or Twit about my recent cup of good coffee, or Youtube my baby’s spit-up wonder that looked suspiciously like Elvis. Or Andre the Giant. Or Andre impersonating Elvis.

But I’m also not so cocky as to think my words are any more golden than the next, that anyone else is going to get as excited about my latest life queries & witty vignettes as I am. And I am excited, I guess I wouldn’t be writing this if I wasn’t. But cautiously so. I think about the Terry Gross Fresh Air interviews with always-formerly nervous and self-doubting artists & writers who, interviewed now because of their amazing contributions, are quick to provide encouraging words to would-be poets, storytellers & thinkers. I don’t expect to get there, I don’t need to be that guy you hard about on the radio, but I think I might be a step up from milquetoast, or his a-hole cousin, self-aggrandizement.

This Blog is for the Big things. The Big ideas, to me anyway. Or maybe the small but beautiful wonders. This isn’t the place to contribute meaningfully to those grand ideas and beauties, but I’ll give my little spin on them, and hopefully connect a few dots. An occasional childhood story or daily interaction, but only the ones that stick with me enough through my busy days & years to commit to memory and to paper. Oh wait, it’s not paper… it’s 1s & 0s, and the permanency of the digital archive is kind of frightening. If I’m not careful my kids are going to Google their parents, or Facebook-hunt for scandalous stories from our 20s and beyond.

I’ll also try to avoid the kind of stream-of-consciousness babble that my writing can turn into, like where I started to go a little earlier. Wait until I learn Blog footnotes – then I can go all OCD until my heart’s content on every tangent my little typers can titillate. I’ll just end this first post with a tidbit of irony.

Today I thought I invented a word to describe a well-known concept: Technarcistic, or Technarcissistic “if you’re not into the whole brevity thing” (quote anyone?). That is, the utilization of digital media and social networking to delve deeper into and exhibit for the whole world our wonderful egos. I think Narcissus would definitely have been a blogger. It’s funny, I did my crappy 3-minute Google research to see about profuse blogging as a trait of Narcissism, or at least a less-than-healthy individualism of digitized America, and only found blogs about (usually condemning) narcissism. So if you’re like me and generally think of personal blogging as a kind of Narcissistic activity, consider yourself lucky to be reading this on someone else’s blog, and better yet a budding self-hating blogger’s blog. But yes, I Mark Hammond invented a word, right here on the In-ter-net for all to see.

Oh, and about the title. Maybe a little corny, but it’s the title, now & forever I suppose. Inspired kind of by two sources. Many of us live and work in worlds of short sound bytes; fast, efficient and driven communication. I was sitting in a long and dry presentation one day, bullet point after bullet point after bullet point, longing for deeper exploration and real, organic human narrative. So this is my attempt at a bullet-free zone – my narrative outlet. That, and it’s from a great line in the Fugees “Nappy Heads” and then Sublime “What I Got.”