May 31st, 2008.

And the rain came a’tumbling down. Seriously, it’s like we have transported a bit of the Midwest with us and I can’t believe how much rain is simply stampeding out of the sky. Hopefully it can’t go on like this for TOO much longer and we’ll be able to play our set in a couple of hours, but for the moment, Heather and I are huddled in the dry warmth of our car waiting for a moment when we can dodge into the Herndon Festival without drowning in the process. I’m not sure how hopeful to be.

Still, it’s damned impressive.

Rain perhaps makes people stupid, or maybe it’s just been a couple of Those Days. You know the type – where people drive like they’ve had some part of their brains cauterized? Perhaps they’ve had the spatial relationship centres of their brains damaged in previous car accidents, or maybe they’ve just had that whole fear thing removed with an ice cream scoop. In any case, weaving and cutting their SUVs randomly from side to side on the DC Beltway, the crazies have been out in force.

Last night Heather and I played Artomatic again and unfortunately it was nothing like as smooth as it was the time before. This time, though we knew where we were going and got there with plenty of time to admire the rest of the visual creativity on display, a lot of the event itself was running behind schedule and we were harried and hurried and cut to 15 minutes of time on stage. I fear it might’ve been even less if it weren’t for the fact that I’d gotten fed up with waiting, flicked the buttons on the sound board myself and bloody well just walked up on stage. Declaring things “go” at least made something HAPPEN and sometimes ANY action is better than inaction.

After spending another couple of hours exploring, my friend Sandy and I went to see Speed Racer. Though it seemed like an awesome movie and I’ve been craving catching it, we got through about an hour before walking out of the theatre and demanding our money back. Though there were only 10 people in the theatre as a whole, the rest of them were answering cell phones, playing video games and letting their 4 year-olds run amok. After having trash thrown at me, having my chair kicked and talking uselessly to the “parent” of the children running around behind me – it was time to pick up and find something else to do. Paying $20 for me and a friend to pick up trash so we can sit down, clean toilet stalls to make them usable and finally have the above theatre experience? What the fuck. It confirms my feeling that there’s a large percentage of our population that simply shouldn’t be allowed to breed.

Society only works if we’re all playing by the same rules.

Well, the rain’s letting up just a tad – and perhaps it’s time to make a run for it. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

(three hours of later.) LEA and ilyAIMY managed to have the window in the weather. We managed a moment of clarity of storm and we played to a slowly strengthening crowd with our final songs being greeted by actual shafts of sunshine. We were the energy of the afternoon, as we often are – “a much welcome jolt amongst folkies”, or whatever our quote is. We’re working our way back home by now, struggling through the battered roadways and watching for flood waters now receding. Working our way past an accident at five miles an hour, I have the rare opportunity to really appreciate the worn concrete of the bridge we’re under, the pitted asphalt.

We’ve built amazing things, put great effort into them. We’re in a time where unfortunately we’re also getting to watch those great things crumble around us. An amazing time to be alive, a period of very violent yet somehow silent revolution. We circulate in a community of artists and like most such communities, this one has its slogans – “kill your television” “stop bitching, start a revolution” etc etc, mostly being proclaimed by people not really saying or doing much outside of the system they claim to despise so much. The revolution they’re calling for, deposing of despots and the reconquering of America is failing them every day they fail to start it and probably the extent of their fight against the Man will be forgetting to pay taxes – but in the meantime there’s something wondrous happening.

It’s slow – a true grinding change. Information age, digital revolution – it’s a hard time to be a young country without a true national identity. I don’t blame our failures on “being American” – I had a friend complaining that it’s taken only 200 years for American culture to become the sordid thing that it is today – and I completely disagree. Our culture is under attack from information overload and we’re simply too young, to unrealized, too divided and unevolved to handle it. I don’t think decadence has anything to do with who we are as a nation, some failing of our founding fathers or anything of that sort, but rather it’s a function of the times and technology being a very invasive force in a culture too uncemented to deal with the incursion.

And so we come apart in pieces. Many great things are implemented, but either left incomplete or unkept-up. Our infrastructure is amazing and conceived on a scale grander than most people can conceive – but BECAUSE it is so vast, it’s impossible for us to then conceive of the necessity of upkeep. We only know that it works, it’s too big a concept to believe that someday it won’t. Traffic overload, energy dependence, the sheer physicality of our highways, the stock market, our school system. No-one really understands how much it will take to fix it because most people’s brains can’t comprehend the problem as a whole – and beyond that – though we gripe about the everyday effects of this slowly faltering tiger we’re riding, the delays, the cost, the kids kicking our chairs at the movie theatre – there are very few who understand how truly vast the problem is. How through our inability to ride the ongoing difficulties and ever growing structural deficiencies of our increasingly organizationally-dependant world, we are in a very real danger of being crushed by its collapse.

And how do you go about making anything change? The spiral of the problem is immense. Take just the idea of outsourcing our jobs. We can’t outsource the bottom and we can’t outsource the top. The designers and architects and managers and artists – they’re here and likely to remain here. The trash collectors and food service people, the maintenance men and those who work with their hands – frankly we can’t export that to India either – but everything in between can be vanished. Frankly, that middle class that everyone’s worried about? They’re right to – I mean, that’s what’s in danger of being eliminated in it’s entirety and they’ll have to move up or down or overseas and there’s not room for them in any of those locations.

So, save our jobs? Save our factories? Raise your hand – who’s willing to pay twice as much for their cars, their cat food, their books and their computers, simply for sake of paying American workers what they’ve come to expect, simply so they can afford the prices that our commodities have risen to simply because that’s what they’ve come to expect to go for.

I apologize – I’m grumbly and difficult and perhaps cynical. But what an amazing time to be alive. We’re watching things change like they haven’t since the Industrial Revolution and just like then, we’re facing a massive change in how we Live our Lives. Whether for better or worse, I’m all for evolution and survival of the fittest.

When the world ends, after all, Sharif’s on MY team.