The last time the date felt right

like it was really that day

was around 1994,

before time sped up

Is it any wonder that 5 minutes is forever to a kid?

Five minutes in proportion to the rest of a life,

it’s a much bigger piece to the very young

the mind is a glass of water and every memory is a grain of sand.

no wonder the tiny pieces get harder to locate

when there are more all the time

of course memory is finite

of course it can be full

of course it ends up mud.

It’s only logical.

Things seem like institutions

until they disappear.

They seem permanent

when nothing else was ever known

until something else is known

and another something else is known

and we learn that there is no such thing as permanence.

The man who built the Whoopee Bowl didn’t want a flea market

he wanted an amusement park

and now even that is gone,

even that bonanza of the absurd is a vacant building painted beige.

When I turn on the news I still expect Peter Jennings

but Peter is not there any more.

No one else will ever be able to do the news right ever again

the news was supposed to be done the way Peter Jennings did it

The young mourn rock stars

I mourn news anchors.

Jimmy Page wrote a note to Neil Young

that note’s enshrined in Cleveland. 

People were once made famous in limited ways.

It was a light that shined on them

there were only so many lights.

We cared about the things rockstars did

what they said to each other

and the objects they touched.

As the pool of collective memory fills

with the last fifty years

archived by our advances in technology

importance weakens, the material dilutes, dissolves

and without a finite number of lights to shine

it’s all just floating junk.

A “water-washed diamond” is just paper

and the crust to Elvis’s sandwich is no more important

than Nelly’s band aid, Bieber’s sweatshirt, a piece of lint,

a cigarette butt that passed near someone famous.

These things are made important

by the love of a vast number of people

who now are fickle with their affections.

With so much minutiae and focus so divided

the lights flicker past

and nothing will be this important ever again…

which is probably good.

It’s rather unsettling but maybe

the beginning of a pendulum swing towards loving

things that are real, relevant,

immediate.

…and all the example stuff is gone.

I think I need to stick to facebook because I have absolutely no idea what’s going on here.