And what rough beast, it's hour come at last

Hello my darlings, my doves, my tiny alter egos of my ego altar.
Edit: I AM sorry, it's been so long, I've forgotten to give you mood music. It's tech house today, we're getting particularly navel gazing and second guessish.
I recall, I believe, writing about the unfortunate mythology that surrounds books in today's facebook oriented society.
Let me clarify that, because otherwise you're going to think I'm one of those shitheads who A. uses terms like 'facebook oriented society' without retching, and B. believes that the society of today revolves around facebook. Which it doesn't. And I'm not. But, despite the pitfalls, I'm using the phrase to try and communicate the specific type of person slash mindset that I'm talking about.
You know them. Typically literary in some way, always plastering their shared media sources with sanctimonious yet earnest tripe and piffle regarding the MAGIC NATURE OF BOOKS the ABILITY TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE to SPIRIT YOU AWAY TO A WONDERLAND to PROFOUNDLY AFFECT YOUR MINDSET.
Typically accompanied by those sort of drawings where the world is portrayed as drab and dour until a rainbow pours out of the pages and butterflies and blue-sky-bracketed clouds forming portals for inner city kids to traverse and etc etc reading rainboooooooowwwwww.

And of course they're totally right and that's the annoying part. As is the case with most things clichè, it's grounded in a truth so undeniable that bothering to state it outright comes off as unnecessary, wasteful. Which is why we instantly bristle when we hear people say them, regardless of their accuracy. It's the same reason we roll our eyes when people make airplane food jokes. Yes it's bad. We've heard. Mattress tags are indeed silly. How astute of you. Yes, books have the power to worm their way into your mind like a prion and start snapping ideas together like so many misfolded proteins, leaving spongy mush in their wake. You didn't have to go and say it like that, like it gives you any authority. Like stating the obvious earns you any points.
It progresses too easily towards that sort of self congratulatory mindset that automatically places the thinker on the side with the clouds, unicorns, and rainbows. Beyond appreciation to deification, cultish mindless bullshit like if they don't have books don't fuck them and so on. Which I spit on, as I've said before.
Not that it doesn't apply, of course. I mean, I doubt I'll ever find myself in a situation where I'd have to make that decision, but most of that revolves around the fact that my ability to fuck people relies a significant amount on whether they've read the right books beforehand, rather than a judgement call on my part.

But the idea persists, and not solely because it gives people a yummy feeling in their ego to think it. Those sort of empty calorie notions flash in and out quickly (you know, switching your profile picture to something pink, or red, or green, to symbolize solidarity with the flavor of crusade as appropriate). Book reverence perseveres through decades. Why? Because it almost demands it.

Have you ever read or watched a depiction of a character learning to read? Who wasn't a kid doing it at the 'appropriate' age? There's only one way for it to go. The character struggles, sheepishly because he's having issues with something children can do - often utilizing children-oriented subject matter and tools - until suddenly, finally, Spot runs and the transformation begins. Our character ecstatically reads everything in sight. The world opens to him and he giddily traipses about agog at the density of information crammed into these little curls and lines everywhere he looks.
It's clichè because it's the only way it could possibly go.
Words are actually that powerful! It's inconceivable that, after having lived with indifference (if not suspicion and resentment) towards letters and symbols your whole life, you wouldn't just be brainmelted as your worldview expands exponentially to contain the combined literary works of everyone ever ever.
Of course, as kids we weren't in much of a position to appreciate this.
I still remember my own moment, with these cheap yellow covered reading primers of thirty odd pages, struggling against them until they managed to slip past and lodge themselves behind my eyes and suddenly suddenly COMPREHENSION and subsequent elation and going back and grabbing all of these damn books and paging through them like blazes and probably bothering the shit out of everyone since you're damn right I read them aloud, who wouldn't?

It's just annoying, is all. To be reminded. To start reading books again after a period where they were an unaffordable luxury, to get that nudging from the world, from your own brain, that is the cerebral equivalent of a pious newsfeed post talking about the wondrous emancipating powers of words.
Because it's undeniable.
Because I can feel it, I can observe it and it's terrifying because who was I before, who did I used to be, how dull of a person have I been without this? Have I been? HAVE I been? Am I still? I didn't ask for any of this, you bastards.

Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. Live in silence.

What they're doing is making objects with their voices, singing structures into existence. They offer things to you, saying "Look at this! Look at this!" and as your attention goes towards these objects you realize that what you're being shown is impossible. It's not simply intricate, beautiful and hard to manufacture, it's impossible to make these things. The nearest analogy would be the Fabergé eggs but these things are like the toys that are scattered around the nursery inside a U.F.O., celestial toys, and the toys themselves appear to be somehow alive and can sing other objects into existence, so what's happening is this proliferation of gifts, which are moving around singing, and they are saying "Do what we are doing" and they are very insistent, and they say "Do it! Do it! Do it!" and you feel like a bubble inside your body beginning to move up toward your mouth, and when it comes out it isn't sound, it's vision. You discover that you can pump "stuff" out of your mouth by singing, and they're urging you to do this. They say "That's it! That's it! Keep doing it!".

There exists, I think, a shared inherent desire for unadulterated understanding and limitless communication. Probably because we know it's impossible and we've got a nasty tendency to want the impossible.

We respect the music makers, the writers, those who can express themselves properly and eloquently, not only because what they say has merit but because they are capable of saying it at all.
(That may be even more important, actually. Meaning may be more facile than we'd like to think.) This is a vague and difficult trait to put to words, but it's easily spotted in the wild.

The most important thing to realize is that the two are separate - the story and the telling, and the skills involved in both. You need both to be truly valuable, to have an impact that is far reaching and disruptive to other people.

Which is what we all want. To influence, to affect, to make a splash. No man is an island, and apparently that saying has something to do with our interconnectedness? I always forget what that quote actually means. I remember it has something to do with for whom the bell tolls. (Spoiler alert: It tolls for thee.)

People can have great experiences or thoughts and be right shit at communicating and they'll never successfully reach out and transmit. You see these people and feel sorry for them, for they are crippled and it is often evident that their failings are less their fault than the product of their larval surroundings. Can you imagine that concept? There are some people who fucking suck at communicating and either can't or don't realize it or care enough to change. Some people never had the desperate and driven need to fill the world with themselves. Some people never had to flex those muscles! Some people don't love language. Languages. Oral or visual. Audible or nonverbal or action-based. They will talk, or otherwise stumble through the existing avenues of information exchange, and you will notice a pervasive averageness to their output. A lack of lilt or imagination. A sort of verbal equivalent of that guy who uses 'lol' too damn much - near inappropriately. A tendency to rely on the preexisting stock communicative tools.

Here is the terrible truth: These people might hold completely valid, even valuable and insightful and invigorating ideas.
They just can't realize them. They are severely limited.

It is like trying to talk to someone who doesn't have a proper grasp of the language you're using.
They could be a rocket surgeon back in whatever country they come from but to you they're on par with a kid because their speech patterns are infantile. We immediately internalize and readjust our assigned statuses and it is ultimately a fucking tragedy.

The other half people are those of us who have the ability to communicate quite well but lack anything to communicate. It's probably less common, just because of the relative rarity of the necessary background components coming together. A developmental period steeped in different media, a desperate and driven need to express the boiling adolescent pressure. Probably a hunger for attention. All sorts of things.
Regardless, you get folks with big vocabularies wanting to emulate their influential masters, casting recklessly about for any scrap of depth or meaning to wax poetic about.
Literally. This is the source of hack poetry about love and the void and emotions and shit.
Do not be fooled: These people might not hold completely valid, even valuable and insightful and nourishing ideas.This is why those people with both attributes can say things five thousand odd years ago and still be remembered today. We ought to revere them because they are rare and valuable, because it required skill and effort to not only perceive the universal truths they uncovered but to capture them and preserve them in a format the general public can consume.

This is the heart of every cliché and bumper sticker saying's appeal - it is true, and we want to associate ourselves with its fidelity in the hopes that we may share some of its resonating trueness.
We want to be seen as people who can see and show and tell, who know and can show that we know in a way that proves that we know rightly.
We are shown things produced by others and it hits us. We go "oh that's it, that's it exactly". We appreciate manifested, proven mastery. We also covet it.

Of course we will forever look like insufferable pricks if we try to directly parrot the transcendent quotes of the past, and people will continually find it impossible to resist doing so even though they know that.

It's an opportunity for people to circumvent their disability - to use the words of somebody else, somebody who not only 'got it' but 'gave it' to the world. We shouldn't sneer. It is the frantic gesturing at nearby objects. It is the mime of charades. It is trying to get an important point across using the only means available.

From mixtapes to devotional prose to Hallmark cards. It's all the awkward appropriation of the words of somebody else, bending them to fit our own burning desire to turn ourselves inside out and finally show the world that we too carry this nova brilliance within, where it is utterly useless.

New In Town

"I said," said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, "have you got any gin?"