Stories (Drama and Mundanity)

Prologue: Sunday Morning

Update on me. It's been a rough couple weeks. Not every day of those two weeks, but enough of them. While I'm not a wandering male out sipping whiskey and chasing women like our well know and dearly adored comrade recently seen here, I have experienced some rejection - along with some fear, sadness, worry - that made it a tough go. But not unlike our resident lady's man, I did drink some whiskey. I listened to music. I played guitar. I wrote. And I got through it. I feel like I've been putting off some decisions and some actions, going to be working today to change that. Current events and world happenings also bring me down, perhaps more than they should. Robin Williams, Ferguson, and I saw this horrible video of monkeys and how they're "prepared" for flight to labs that traumatized the shit out of me; no joke. For me, it's not as much the rightness or wrongness of these things, but the pain inflicted and the anger kindled regardless of who is right. Life can be pretty ugly and sometimes it gets really hard to see the light for the darkness. But I guess moments like these give stir for me to write. Which no matter how good or bad I may be at it, I think it's not only a good thing, but an important thing to do with one's time.

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Brutal honesty is perhaps the most entertaining of all human endeavors. Jason's recent post is a prime example of the drama factor within a solid, honest recalling of life's more - and less - desirable moments. Good, and also very bad, things happens to us here and there along this road. Yet for most of us average, God-fearing, Jane's and Joe's, life is rather mundane; most of the time. Neither good or bad. Just life. The normal tides of the voyage. But the unordinary moments really stitch together our life pattern. The stories we grow old recalling; or at least the ones that just don't seem to leave you, if you're fortunate enough to keep your memory into old age, or to any age for that matter.

Please allow me a short digression.

Stories are a human endeavor and though we've been telling them for awhile now, it's really only been for a rather short time in our overall existence on Earth. Yet these stories have had the power to build a simple creature into a civilized one; a key piece in the development of culture. Kurt Vonnegut, (an excellent author and if you're unaware, go to the Library later, you won't regret it) was an expert, of sort, on the "shapes" of stories. A humorous 5 minute video of Vonnegut lecturing on subject explains how he graphs the shapes of stories on axes. There is also a pretty rad blog post on the matter by Robbie Gonzalez.

Traveling further down the blog rabbit hole on this one, I found this post by Derek Sivers, who condenses Vonnegut's lecture down to a lesson for all of us. We follow along with great stories, such as the example of Cinderella, with all it's up and downs and big dramatic moments as plotted on this time vs misery/ecstasy xy graph:

In the video above, Vonnegut refers to this story as "the most popular story in our civilization - Western civilization - as we love to hear this story. Every time it's retold, somebody makes another million dollars, you're welcome to do it." (Vonnegut's sense of humor is scathingly beautiful). According to Sivers, Vonnegut makes the point that people love this story, along with the other popular story shapes, "and because of it, people think their lives are supposed to be like this. But the problem is, life is really like this...."

Again, according to Sivers, Vonnegut's final point is "because we grew up surrounded by big dramatic story arcs in books and movies, we think our lives are supposed to be filled with huge ups and downs! So people pretend there is drama where there is none.” 

This would explain our current fascination with much 'reality' television broadcast now-a-days.

Real life rarely plays itself out the way Vonnegut's story shapes progress. For some people, the major historical figures in our history, it has, but for most of us the big dramatic curves aren't that poignant. That doesn't mean we treat them as undramatic, it is our story after all and the only one we get to tell. But there are rises and falls along the misery/ecstasy or good/ill fortune axis that make up dramatic moments, our stories, our escape from mundanity. And that is really my focus here. Digression over.

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Someone I probably don't know, and was not me, once said that sneezing is one of those pristine moments that lifts you above the mundane bullshit of ordinary life. Or something like that. I'm not great at remembering quotes verbatim, just the ideas behind them. Sneezing is pretty awesome. 

But select moments in any given individual's existence do the same thing: lift them out of mundanity. Sometimes it's a rather good thing. Some of my own examples: my 19th birthday spent in Canada, the night in Crookston when 9 Paces West won the battle of the bands, one random night spent in a basement apartment drinking Blue Moons and watching Bloodsport and Apocalypse Now with some of my closest friends (which coined the term flabulolinguistics), meeting my future wife for the first time and the wedding 5 years later. This isn't an exhaustive list, but these moments have stuck with me and are some of the high point blips on my otherwise pretty normal overall story shape. Then there is also the dips into the realm of misery: the death of my great-grandmother and later, the death of my uncle and my grandfather. Terrible moments of loss and with my great-grandmother, probably my first real sense of it. Because of the reality of life, I'll face more of these days, as we all do. I don't know that they get any easier. The more you love someone, and the longer you do so, the harder it is to say goodbye.

Another story shape that people love is mundane crushing event that's good in a bad a way (bad in a good way?) where it is usually bad for the main protagonist of the story, but extremely entertaining for the costars, bystanders, and future audiences. The slightly embarrassing, one's 'finer' moments, Jason when he drinks whiskey - who gets bonus points for his revealing, dare I say compromising, honesty.

Most of us have those. I do. No space to share them here.

The proverbial, "point of all this," is not to 'enjoy the moment they don't last forever,' or 'time heals all wounds' or some other cliché. The point could be to enjoy a simple lesson in humility or to stop taking your life so seriously it paralyzes you - don't overdramatize your good or bad moments. But really, I think it is gratitude. Life offers up these opportune and not so opportune moments. Simply, some are great, some are shit, most just are. Together it weaves your story here, in the now, chronicling regardless of the level of dramatic curves, story shapes. And when the dramatic moments in life do happen, they provide you with choices. Sometimes the choices are also dramatic and change forever the weave of the pattern, the path of your life. Some just make for good stories for social gatherings. The real ones, you know where people talk with each other. Best done with moderate levels of alcohol. But that's totally optional. Sort of. See also: Barbecue.

The cold truth of the matter is that we don't have a lot of time. Our lives are actually quite short - or at least shorter than we really like to think about. Coupled with the fact that most of it will be spent on the mundane necessities, that overall mundanity which is quite alright for watching football on Sundays. 

Philosophically, we could argue that it's all that time spent in the mundane, that makes the story moments of our lives stand out so much. The darkness makes the light brighter when the sun rises. The bad shit makes the good moments so incredible. We could argue that, but like most great philosophy, it's a thought experiment that poses more questions than delivers answers we can move on with.

Simply, the lesson is to be grateful there are dramatic curves in our stories; good or bad. Life would be pretty dull, without pain or joy like some lamesauce movie you went to where the popcorn was cold and the overpriced 'coke' was RC cola. Actually, that is traumatizing. I'm going to yell a lot about it and probably get my own reality tv show.

Do stuff, take chances, make choices, enjoy life as best you can and write your story. You'll be mostly to blame if it's not dramatic enough.

Prologue: Sunday Afternoon and #BDandLLHappyDays

I leave you with a bit of randomness and current developments. 

~ Lucas and I were able to get another of our Denver tracks mastered. Whiskey and the Wolves, "Black Letter." You can listen here - we're still pushing for EP release soon, just need to get some of the business aspects of it taken care of. Another thing on the Sunday to do list.

~As I've mentioned before, I keep a notebook at my side and write pretty much anything in it, some of it turns to blog posts, some of it is just reading notes and thoughts. Sometimes the random thoughts, make good little blurbs. Here's a moment of zen from a recent bit of random:

The traffic sound in Southern California is the constant buzz of the consumption hive. A giant, protruding hive sticking out into space with the atom like hover of bees in and out of the LA basin. A buzz populated by the BMW, Audi, Mercedes, Lexus, the drone Prius, and the over compensating Riverside monster truck; the worker bee caste system. The rare Tesla bee has begun to appear. Bee collectors are envious.

~My last couple weeks, as told by my libations:

On the bad days, sometimes a pale ale and shot
of whiskey is exactly what is needed. But mostly
I just needed to write.

I found myself in random bar in Long Beach one
Saturday morning. It was a bloody mary morning.
The drink and food wasn't especially awesome, but
everyone seemed to know each other. I felt like an
extra on an episode of Cheers.

Try this. Take your favorite Hefeweizen. If you
don't have one, just buy one. Pour 3/4 of it into
a well sized beer glass. Swirl the bottle to get the
goodness on the bottom. Pour in the rest. Top off
with orange juice and orange slice, which I did
not have, sadly.

It's taken me much too long to write this post, and like a Kevin Costner film, it's grown too earnest and tiresome. Until next time, BD&LL faithful, salud!