Like a bowl of soup

Aaaaaaaaaah. Vacation. And looking forward to the sitting-still time on the train so that I can finish reading Lord Jim, which rocks. Joseph Conrad is my hero and what's more, because he was a sailor I can believe his first person Marlow narratives are real - that you're sitting listening to this man talk for hours and hours and hours.

Isn't it odd to think of - during those long, long months all stuck in a boat together, before radios or TVs or video games, before universal literacy, before cheap paperbacks, newspapers - all those men would have to talk. Not just the sailors, though. Everybody would have had to talk. Talk and sing. We're probably incredibly shitty conversationalists and phenomanally shitty singers in comparison to people even 50 years ago. Well, it's evident. Most people seem incapable of talking about anything but themselves these days. Me included. My Chris Isaak vocal impression is really coming along though.

I do get frustrated sometimes - I'm not nostalgic for the past, I'd rather be alive now than at any other time in history I know of, but I feel like our great capacities as thinking and feeling beasts are being channeled down purposeless courses, courses encouraging buying lots of things, but not - well, not exploiting that side of humanity which is sublime; our power of empathy and our ability to look to a future that doesn't have us-as-individuals in it.

Mortality and the sublime may be on my mind more than usual because we've been listening to lots of Otis Redding. I've loved Otis Redding for ages and been sad that he died in a plane crash, and been touched that "The Dock of the Bay" was a big smash hit after he died despite that getting to be the Time of the Fucking Hippie Guitar Wankoff. But I'd never realized he was only 26 when he died. Can you believe it? With that voice! It's a strong old man's voice. Listen to him tell you to shake! Shake! SHAKE!!!!