innerspace #15 - Pressure Drop - Millennial Madness and The Needle in the Haystack

So, here we are in the last weeks of the last month of the last year of the last decade of the Final Century of the First Thousand Years of Post-Ancient Civilization. In reading the last hype-boggled sentence, am I the only one left feeling a little confounded? I mean, what's the big deal, really? Isn't it all just numbers? Isn't the *real* big deal, chronologically-speaking, supposed to go down next year on New Year's Eve (2001 being the real calendar-marking year of the 1,000 years passed since Year One, C.E.)? What happened to all the Nostradamus disasters, falling hunks of fire-hail, dead, singed flying creatures plummeting earthward like talismans of the Devil, and prophesies of widespread mayhem and chaos?

All I've seen so far is much of the same...homelessness and patent, ludicrous usurpations of power, blind negligence from most members of the populace, and a kind of amazing, fog-wandering obliviousness and consumer frenzy that has punctuated almost every other December for as long as I can recall. New York City, for one, is sinking into the Atlantic due to the horrifying influx of tourists and emigrees who'd like to start their New Millennium right, in the most spectacular, magical, culturally stimulating (and ripoff-rife) place on Earth. I've been dodging them in the subways and on the sidewalks for the past two weeks, hurdles of conspicuous consumption being thrust into my path to try the very limits of my usually genteel patience.

Scroogey, ain't I? Well, the highest spiritual masters advise us always to Question Everything. And since I'm currently back on the "What Is Everything?" query-wagon, I have found myself thinking that a two with three zeroes in front of it doth not the end of the world make. HOWEVER, being all for spontaneous and self-willed displays of inner transformation, the number 2000, allied with the knowledge that things can always be willed to change with time and concentration, is as good an excuse as any, as far as I'm concerned, to head for the hills of contemplation inside one's brain. So, to commemorate this, the last three weeks of the First Chance at Human Greatness, I'm going to make like a hermit for a few pages, and ponder this thing called "Civilization" that we've all had a hand in weaving. If you're wondering where the musical content will come in on all this, just hang out for a little bit.

I was born, for better or worse, on the brink of the Last Quarter of this insane century. A few weeks before my birth, one of the finest politically-installed liars in history was ass-booted off of his Imperial Capitalist Throne. A brutal, chilling, senseless and bloody war, which put a dim cast on the lambent hopes of the "Summer of Love" generation, had recently ground to a stunning, nauseating halt. Amidst toothpaste advertisements, the mute, scalded faces of napalmed Vietnamese children gazed into television cameras abroad, their images unceasingly delivered with gleeful nonchalance into the living rooms of privilege, over family dinners. Meanwhile, just outside the living rooms of privilege and across the nearby tracks, people of imagined "minority" status held each other up with a multitude of knives and guns, and killed one another for drugs, money, gang territory, or whatever else the people in the living rooms of privilege would later watch on the evening news (after the gory foreign war footage).

Needless to say, by the time I was turning four years old, I'd already witnessed more violence, moral disintegration, deflation of spirit, social vacuity and inexplicable waste than anyone my age had previously ever been privvy to, save my contemporaries, who were also, at that time, turning four years old (or something close). Now, a vast twenty-one years later, I sit on a proverbial pier glowering frustratedly into the foggy expanse of future time. I think to myself, "Well, I may be a little scorched around the edges. But for heaven's sake...why am I still so hopeful?" Indeed, despite the fact that you may have thought the preceding paragraphs to have a somewhat dim tinge, I have managed to maintain nothing but the utmost faith in humanity to pull itself up by the bootstraps.

I endured the psychological nightmare of institutionalized elementary schooling in the Reagan Era, and haggled with my the currency of my soul through the rigors of the American High School Sausage Factory in the Bush Era. But at least I got a few bucks in the misty college years from the Clinton administration's generous educational reforms, so things could've been a little worse. Granted, because of the previous regimes, I froze my hide off in Upstate New York, rather than saucing it up with the glitterati at, say, Vassar or Harvard. But if that happened, I probably wouldn't have made it to a Phish show until much, much later.

Finally, I come across some on-topic musings. This new high-tech art forum, the Internet Magazine, has only started seeing its popularity and industry-standard potential rise in the last two or three years. Had I been born at some other earlier time, I would've missed out completely on writing for Jambands.com. I would've said "dot what?" if someone from The Future beamed down, like in the movies, and said "Do you know that in the future, column inches will be a thing of the past, and you, as a writer, can prattle on with endless relish until Y3K about your observations on life?".

And what's more, the concept of the Jamband has only risen to prominence within the last five years, spurred on mostly by the recently mentioned, piscene-titled foursome, and more archaically so by the now defunct but ever-seminal Grateful Dead. Had I been born a few weeks earlier or later, I might have made it to the late-summer 1995 Dead show I was planning on seeing, my first, which would've happened if not for the untimely death of one rather integral member of that band.

So, perhaps in retrospect, some things were just meant to be. I can't help but believe this, because even in adversity, sinking things tend to bob a little, and rising things find their continuing elevations on the oddest and most randomly-situated breezes. Energy is the very most sought-after and disputed never-diminishing natural force imaginable. It's hilariously everywhere, gloriously neutral, and has been and will be there for us, and INSIDE us, always. It is, notably enough, notoriously corruptable, mutable into its heavy and sluggish negative state with greatest of ease. Energy's positive manifestations are visible around us as the things that have taken modern human society a notch or two above previous stations of human squalor and strife. Computers, medical innovations, space travel and human psychological knowledge are all clues that when channeled in a good way, energy can make us humans look almost *worthy* of inhabiting a planet as magnificent as Earth.

But despite the trimmings of technology and industry, a vast majority of us (even the most seemingly "modern" and dirt-free individuals) remain a bunch of very ugly little sub-animals, since animals, outside the judgement of human arrogance, are kind of alright. We remain hell-bent on persisting in fear of not looking cool enough (or of looking maybe a little too good), fear of shortage, fear of failure, fear of giving in to forces we can't comprehend with microscopes and calculated telemetry scales, and a billion other fears which, despite distinction, are all borne of the Giant Fear: Fear of Letting Go.

Carol's Y2K Top Ten List of Most Fearless Musical Feats of the Last 25 Years:

10) . . .

What, are you kidding? Not only do I totally loathe year-end lists, but I would have needed to be thinking about this since at least last year. Even I don't have that much time on my hands, and even if did, I think I'd probably rather be making history than telling people what's already been done, which they might have missed and that, to me, constitutes something worthy of placing in an arbitrary hierarchical structure that doesn't really mean anything. Profound apologies to all of you who like year-end lists, but I've always found them a little annoying.

Alternative Top-Ten lists could read something like "Top Ten Reasons for the Speeding of Human Cloning Research". Half of my friends are torn in parts this year-end, their New Year's decisions being the hardest, most integral and personal and far-flung they've ever had to make. Cheerily having made my decision a long time ago (I'm not telling...you'll just have to look for me), I scouted out the jamband's glorious info-hub, Jambase.com (http://www.jambase.com) to see what was hip all over the Lower 48 for New Year's Eve this important year. Besides the heavy hitters (moe. in Poughkeepsie, NY; Phish in Phlorida; The Disco Biscuits in their hometown Philly), there are countless others, for a variety of costs. Ekoostik Hookah in Ohio! The Allman Brothers band in Chicago! KVHW *and* Hot Tuna both in San Francisco! Right down to the bands playing in the parking lot at Phish's Big Cypress show, there are a zillion things going on this New Year's eve that, to local yokels, would be the best thing to consider, since its near their homes, families, and household pets.

Even I myself considered swapping all the choices and the haggling to spend the Passing of the Torch in a small woodland cabin in Vermont, with one of my best friends and her boyfriend. But come on. In the end, I realized that although I'm all about speculation and quiet meditation, I have to be DOING something that night, bearing witness to whatever it is my particular map of existence has led me to. Though it may all seem arbitrary, collectively speaking, the anticipatory energy is going to be massive, and the creative release happening on all fronts, in all states and countries and in all minds and hearts is going to be MASSIVE. As long we all concentrate on living for the world and not just ourselves, and making this Earth stay on track until it's time for us to pack up the old calendar and go on Galactic Standard Time, I don't think we'll all do so badly.

So, what have I got to say for myself in this, my super high-pressure, final "innerspace" of the Millennium, under close observation for pithy sentiments and tender and timely tellings of the whys and wherefores of the years to come? Not a whole hell of a lot. Call it anarchy. Call it exhaustion from seeing what people are not mistakenly calling one of the best Phish shows of the past five years this past weekend, 12/11/99 at the First Union Spectrum in Philadelphia, PA. Call it sheer laziness. Or call it the combined factors of dodging bums and commuters, tourists with the GNP of Burundi in their shopping bags, and the fact that I might wake up tomorrow and not be able to get to work because of a transit strike. These things and more, having imbued me with a lifetime of toughness, make me think that 1/1/00 is going to be just another Saturday morning, rolling groggy-eyed and sightless from under a bigger pile of beer bottles than usual. Perhaps a certain someone will snore softly nearby, and the CD's of the last night's show will be murmuring gently from another, foreign room, still on endless repeat from the night before.

Where are my morals? Where's my religion? How can I think to pass such important times in such a careless fashion? As always, like a broken turn-of-the-century phonograph, inside me a voice is repeating the phrase: "you've lost it, you'll never get out of this maze". It's all about music, live music, from here till the end for me. The Cathedral of Sound is now portable, replete with setlist generation, from miles away and in seconds (so we can all weep for moments spend by ourselves). Sometimes, as my mother used to tell me, the more you watch, the less you see. Families don't get to chose one another; they come into one anothers' paths by hairpin turns of fate and circumstance that are on the curriculum lists of the Universe.

The time for re-writing The Book Of Life is right now. And sometimes, no matter what they taught you in first grade, you just have to walk across the road, and hope that the drivers will take care of not running over you themselves.