Obsessive Component

Word.

I have to give a personal narrative in my speech class today. I'm supposed tell some tale significance to my family or culture. I struggled for a while with the idea, because as a white male athiest raised in the bible-belt, my cultural history doesn't extend much further back than Thriller.
Here's what I threw together. I think it's just obsessive enough to be a componant. Peas.

I thought hard about what to speak on and only drew blanks.

I thought about embellishing some scrap of family history or making something up completely.

I'm sure there are many wonderful tales of family tradition and the hardships of immigration hanging on the branches of my family tree. But neither myself, my parents, or my grandparents have heard or choose to remember anything notable.

I doubt that my situation is uncommon.

Unlike the close knit immigrant neighborhoods of Chicago or New York that have celebrated their old world heritage with pride. I was born and grew up in the cultural vacuum of Middle-America that consumes the other 98% of the nation.

Some people have taken to calling it the Heartland, but any heart is purely artificial.

The view of American heritage presented to me was one of fast food chains, strip malls, and pre-fab trailer homes.

Every construct in my environment was designed to be cheap to build, quick to throw up and quicker to tear down.

I saw my small town's quaint downtown area turn into a ghost-town within a year of the Mall opening.

While our downtown wasn't Budapest, it was made up of locally owned businesses housed in well constructed buildings

Some still in the late displayed yellow and black metal signs showing that it would be used as a fallout shelter if the commies nuked us carrying out their insidious plans of world domination.

In the years before I left, that Mall became unpopular and the corporate chain stores fled back to wherever they came from. Most malls built in the 70's and 80's are empty. Consumer tastes changed again apparently.

Super Wall-Mart, Borders, The Gap built Lots on the other side of the freeway and put up tacky grey concrete and painted aluminum stores waiting to be torn down within 10 or 15 years.

my point is that it's no surprise that with the temporary nature of my community's surroundings and the near-sighted dedication to "progress" that any "antiquated" notions of heritage would be forgotten just as quickly.

Within less than 200 years, the "culture" of small towns like mine has become homogenized into a tangable sense of pride in the collective ignorance and xenophobia of the citizens.

Any cultural family ritual that doesn't begin in an automobile and end at Denny's is considered suspect.

Jews, Hindus, Catholics, Islamists, and atheists are well advised to begin worshiping our federally approved deity at the new high-tech mega-church conveniently located just off I-40.

This way the other citizens won’t worry about you holding any funny allegiances to some backward foreign land that would rather not be modernized by America’s gracious corporate representatives.

I never felt happy with this arrangement. So I have left the bland wonder bread safety of middle-America and moved into a large culturally diverse metropolitan city. I feel more at home here than I ever did in the town that I was born.

A steadily growing number young people who grew up in my situation are doing the same and many smaller cities are driving away the young talent they will need to grow economically.

The importance of cultural heritage, art, music and ceremony respected and practiced by generations for hundreds maybe thousands of years is huge and should not be lost to ideas of nationalism or progress.

I may never know where my great-great-great-grandparents were born or of the rigors of the frontier that they helped build, but the lessons I’ve learned about the fragile nature of society could be just as important.

I read that Hemingway said that it's always a mistake for a man to write about one's father. I can't recall reading if he thought it was a good idea to write about your mom, but Hemmingway was a total fucking asshole so who cares?

This week my mother is visiting me for the first time since I have lived in Chicago.

I think it's best I keep that statement concise, because I've been sitting here for twenty minutes trying to write a sixty word opening statement. Mom comes to us live via frequent-flier-miles from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (the city so nice they named it one and a half times) near where she has lived since my birth. She is, like most all mothers, the sweetest, most beautiful, absolutely perfect product of genetic coupling in natural history. Mom is extremely bright, free-thinking, culturally aware, and socially conscious. These are all qualities I hope to have myself someday. She is also, I must add, great fun to spend time with, a wonderful conversationalist, and possibly the least obtrusive houseguest to have ever guested a house. I love her unendingly and am forever indebted to her, not only for her deciding to allow me physical existence, but for allowing me to develop with her guidance the thought-tunnels that I can now perceive my universe through.

Hmm, that last sentence really just makes her (or maybe me) sound like some mud encrusted hippy with no aspirations beyond bong ownership. That is defiantly not the case, as hippies are not allowed to own property or to show themselves outdoors after mid-day without the escort of an elder Christian male captain in all of Oklahoma and most of Kansas. So forget that bit about the tunnels and shit.

Not my mom.

Robocop stickers: $1.00 - Bought at Quake Collectables. I waste too much time browsing in Quake and always feel like I need to prove that I haven't been shoplifting by spending a buck or two before I leave.

Ministry "Twitch" LP: $2.99 - I walked over to Lorie's Planet of Sound with this album in mind. It holds a lot of high-school nostalgia for me. I sort of re-discovered it a couple weeks ago through Soulseek and haven't listened to much else since. I was happy to find this unplayed copy of Al's 1986 pre-heroin masterpiece priced just shy of $3.

Infra-Man VHS: $5.99 - Also from Lorie's. The Shaw Bro's hallucinogenic Hong Kong take on Japanese masked-rider superhero flicks. I have always wanted a copy of this. A shop in OKC wanted 80 bucks for the same damned thing. Awesome.

Conspiracy Journal: $3.00 - Apparently, "they" are all out to get me. I had no idea.

Damn, it seems the last time I updated this thing was over a year and a half ago. I am completely amazed I remembered the login. Yes, the ancient god of the internets is surely watching over me tonight. And thus, it which must be done shall be done. Until ye golden trumpets toot from on yonder holy golden arches above ye promised kingdom of Jerusalem 2.0.

They ask, “But why?” Why resurrect this half-assed stab at a blog after letting it spin around Sol de la Tierra nearly 1.5 times untouched and unloved? Well friends, this week I started attending class full-time at Columbia College Chicago. You know, it’s that other art school downtown on Michigan Ave. The one where you can get work after graduation. My major area of study is audio production; however I still need to get some of my general education classes knocked out. Apparently our education in American high schools is a bit too general, and we must pay a college great sums of cash if we want to learn to write and comprehend a single language or perform long division. Anyway, my first intended GE KO at Columbia is English Comp II, which requires all students keep a journal. This caused me some anxiety at first. Must I suffer the disgrace of scribbling my secret crushes in a pink Hello Kitty diary adorned with a shiny gold lock? Thankfully, our most gracious instructor will allow the journal to be kept online. I assume that she knows someone who owns a computer with a dial-up modem or perhaps uses a public web access terminal at the airport or something. Well friends, no better excuse need I to don my bathrobe, sandals and crown of thorns and play amateur Jesus to this digital Lazarus.

Unfortunately, The whole point of keeping the journal is to practice writing, so ObCom can no longer just be my HTML driven letter to Santa (It seems Santa hasn't updated his site in quite some time either). So apologies in advance if either of the two people known to have visited stumble back to this site expecting more links to the greatest Korean vaporware of spring 2004. As for now, http://obsessive-component.blogspot.com will mostly be me attempting to coherently string together three-hundred words per week to fulfill my journal requirement. Count on learning the tedious minutia of my day to day existence, brilliant ideas for recording and electronic media projects that will never exist save as electro-chemical impulses waiting out their time on the death row that is my cereberal cortex, and witnessing how what used to be a cute "Gen-X disillusionment" has mutated over the last 10+ years into paranoid delusions of global Illuminati conspiracies and federal mind control devices. Damn that was a long sentence. I bet my instructor puts a big red circle around that one. Oh well, it will have to do. The backspace key on this computer has stopped functioning and I can’t afford to have it replaced until the college cuts me a check for the remainder of my student loans (8.3 million USD). God speed SFS, god speed.