Why the music we love as teens stays with us for life.

Speak for yourself. I now don’t like or find the music mostly unlistenable that I enjoyed as a teenager. For instance, my favorite song in 1992 was probably “Alive” by Pearl Jam. I can’t listen to that song at all anymore and it has no nostalgic memories for me either way.

Sure, there are exceptions, like Tori Amos and Mazzy Star and a few others, but for the most part, I don’t listen to much of the music I did as a teenager, and to the extent that I do, I don’t listen to it often and I wouldn’t count any of my favorite songs from then as favorites now.

My 10 favorite songs at the moment:

1) Saint Claude – Christine and the Queens

2) Biscuits – Kacey Musgraves

3) Lo Boob Oscillator – Stereolab

4) Walk With Me – Lisa Mitchell

5) Boom Clap – Charli XCX

6) Planets – Kate Rusby

7) 100 Black Coffins – Rick Ross

8) Tennis Court – Lorde

9) Sarah – Kate Miller-Heidke

10) Bodaich Odhar Hoghaigearraidh – Julie Fowlis

Not much that is very old on that list, which is typical of me. I get tired of songs and never want to hear them again — or at least not for a very long time.

One of the things you’re witnessing in the Parkland students with their resilience to NRA/conservative harassment and calumny is that after trauma you tend to just not give a fuck.

I was never in combat, but after being in the army and seeing friends and colleagues injured and killed on drop zones and in the course of duty, how much do you think some incompetent boss really stresses me out? I’ve had a gun pulled on me in my own front yard. My own mother tried to stab me. Having some arrogant pharmacist pester me or some blog troll harass me is a break from the other lives I’ve experienced.

This isn’t quite “nothing left to lose” in me or those kids. After all, they’ve got everything left to lose — their entire futures not lived yet.

After trauma though, you experience a certain sort of calm. At least, many people do. It’s the serenity of knowing that you’ve been through so much worse and this is literally nothing. It’s a very freeing feeling, but goddamn do you have to get there the hard way.

I do not recommend it to anyone, but I feel it in my self and I see it in those kids from Parkland. They arrived at calm via the most difficult path and I can see it in their eyes when they stare out at the crowds.

Yeah, “Wow” sums up that performance. (“Pa’lante” is Puerto Rican slang that means something like “forward.” It’s a contraction of “para adelante.”) We live in an age where we are supposed to be dispassionate. Reasonable. It helps neoliberalism persist is why disengagement is so emphasized. She negates all that with her performance. It is why art is important, why it is suppressed, why FOSTA exists.

Does the average left/liberal plebeian even realize that their beliefs have been thoroughly and completely highjacked by neoliberal thought structures? Does it even occur to them?

Equating of racism with not wanting liquid capital to destroy your country? There’s one. Believing that it’s just simply absurd to discuss things like single-payer or universal health care? There’s another.

It’s so pervasive I think they just can’t see it. It’s difficult to talk to people nominally on my side because the vast majority have no considered view, just some talking points they heard somewhere that are just as valueless as whatever the alt-right believes — valueless because they are based equally on repeating mantras and rhetorical formulas.

I’m not casting myself as some exemplar of reason and comprehension. But damn, at least I know there is water.

It’s astounding to realize just how many things in my lifetime have happened that people have insisted “can’t happen.” I think about that every day.

Not doing something is the easiest thing in the world for me. Not signing up for Facebook? Done! I’ve continued to not do that for a very long time, and that simple inaction has made me look smarter and smarter by the day.

I should keep not doing all the things because it’s just so easy not to do something. All the shit I keep not doing is making me relatively more brilliant by the second.

If I keep not doing shit — and every indication is that this will be the case — soon, I will become a pure burst of light, unfathomable to normal mortals.

My dad ages ago would scream at me for all the things I didn’t do because I hated them. Turns out that it was a wise life strategy after all.

“Our faith is faith in someone else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.”

-William James, “The Will to Believe”

Just to be clear: nothing that Cambridge Analytica did was illegal. It is Facebook SOP.

Why people care so much when this has been happening for a decade, I haven’t any idea. Maybe it’ll result in positive change, but I somehow doubt it. If you don’t understand the problem what hope is there for fixing it?