LUDIC LOG

Judging from the songs I downloaded today, it seems apparent that I will listen to anything. And I don't mean this in the "I'm an eclectic hipster" sense; I mean it in the "I have completely lost my critical facilities" sense.

I guess it's inevitable, given the growing distance between me and that signpost marked "Coolsville, This Exit" that I passed about a decade ago, but it seems the older I get, the more postmodern my thinking gets, and the less certain in the rightness of my judgements I become. None of which is to say that I don't have incredibly arrogant, bullheaded ideas about esthetics, or that I won't force them on anyone who wanders across my path; it's just that I seem increasingly incapable of settling comfortably into a style. It's hard to say whether this is an embrace of a egalitarian "everything is worth something" critique, or simply an inability to sort the gold from the dross, but I'm not sure it's a good thing.

At any rate, the question "What kind of music do you like?", once answered with relative ease, is now an imponderable, a Brandoesque "whattya got?" the only answer I can come up with. The soundtrack to my life has ceased to be a tight, tidy little punk setlist, easily marketable to the skateboard-and-ska set, and transformed gradually into a schizophrenic melange of wheat and chaff, produced by a strung-out studio hack who's certain he's going to get fired tomorrow and is going out burning. Goodness knows who's going to buy this thing...probably people who have just moved to this country from somewhere that they don't use the same alphabet.

When did my taste in music become so junkified? While others settle comfortably down with a bong, I am licking toads, chewing nutmeg and drinking maraschino cherry juice. It's a good thing I'm so poor, or I'd surely be one of those demented bores who lives in a giant house with a bedroom, a half-bath and 11 rooms full of LPs from 1957 to 1964. God help me: I'm like Dr. Demento, without the talent.