THE ROAD

I was reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which I intend to read again if only to figure out how he did it. Some people call the setting of the Road "Post Apocalyptic" which is interesting since basically if you want to be pedantic about the whole thing we are living in the post-apocalyptic time given that John the Revelator was revelated to, a long time ago, the dog of of the vision of the end times has done hunted and in fact went home to be set down in manuscript form like 1900 or more years ago.

In any event, and this is important kiddies, everything else flows from this insight, this entire project as will become clear I hope etc. etc.

Here it comes the insight destined to take the place of both the circular motion and the mud shark in your mythology:

I noted that when the protagonists of the book came upon a roadway of cars filled with scorched bodies, the natural tendency of myself as the reader was to identify with the protagonists who came upon this horrible scene, not the burnt corpses in the cars. How friggin' narcissistic is that? By the way I think THIS RELATES TO YOUR JUDGMENT IN MUSIC. I know it does to mine.

The above only occurred to me as I attempt to get a handle on a few of the threads at OJ, question why I would even want to write about them, or think that what I thought would be of interest to anybody, and basically evaluating whether I am too much thinking like the main characters in the road and not like the corpse upon which they stumble which I suspect I most likely would be, and dipping into Steven Shapin's The Scientific Revolution wherein he points out that we look back on the work of seventeenth century "scientists" and think they revolutionized the way "we" look at the world, when in fact the vast majority, the vast vast vast majority of people on the planet at that time had no idea they even existed and looked at the world in their own particular ways. But that sounds too much like I am saying that these few words will be significant in the future although very few people read them now. Quite the opposite-- I am trying to assert something like solidarity with the vast majority of the people in the seventeenth century whose words were no where recorded, but said a lot of things none the less. Let us strive then to view ourselves as post-apocalyptic corpses!

For surely here in the mad max world of the post catastrophic post apocalyptic landscape we hear rumors that someone named Lach is holding a contest and we could make $100, but that complaints have been made from a competing camp. What campfire will we attempt to sit around tonight? That $100 sounds good but will it help us on the Road? And on what foundations will civilization be rebuilt?