Ghosts and Skeletons

My friend Mike, whom I've known for more than forty years ( ...! ), is a history buff, and a dedicated nostalgic when it comes to shared memories and our personal histories.  I can always count on Mike, whenever we have any occasion to catch up (which is not nearly as often or enough as it should be), to remind me of some tidbit from not only our childhoods growing up together, but also my own experiential Akasha ... which should never have become wiped away in the first place.

I thought of Mike the other day when I 'stumbledupon' something I forgot even existed:  "(Mostly) Unpublished writings by New York City author, poseur, poet and flâneur" ... JgNYC.

If you click there, you will enter a world of gamely attempted, lame stits and farts, before Twitter or Facebook ... before even LinkedIn!  My first post, an early slice of Slice / Life, dated April 28th, 2003 ... Apparently, LinkedIn launched that May.

first "Contact"

And then I found, resurfacing from the bowels of the deep web, one of the first online formats which granted me publication - an until now MIA zine called Strawberry Press ... which, with Underground Voices and Thieves Jargon, cut my teeth;

then, circling back to my giant, small steps into the early, first "blogosphere" -- that abandoned single page of posts on jglovsky.blogspot.com -- I became further reminded that I was, and still am (if I can find the password!!), a proud member of Zoetrope ("one of the first uses of social networking on the internet") ... a virtual writers' workshop sponsored by All-Story.

Who knew??  Who could remember any of this, when work and life demanded attention and the past four years, especially, have been starting over?

While starting to weep now, I'm actually happy:  to have come across these footprints from a more recent past ... clinging as I tend to, to my longer ago, Gen X sense of self, and the spirit that still haunts those streets and footsteps ...

Not Very '90s

“If you’re really a mean person you’re going to come back as a fly and eat poop.”
- Kurt Cobain (1967-1994)

I have been asked -- my follower sent me an email -- why I never got around here, or anywhere online, to mentioning Kurt Cobain to mark the 20th "anniversary" of his stupid death.  When jazz guitarist Jim Hall passed, I put up a couple of his tracks on SoundCloud.  I nod in respect to dead writers often ... To "celebrate" the 34th year of a world without love, I posted a piece about Lennon here.

But April 5th came and went with barely a pause ... for remembrance ... stage diving ... a global moment of angst or moshing.  No one seemed to light candles, or say much.  The kids in alterna-clothes, spirited teens once, kept creeping up in age, towards forty ... and Courtney Love keeps being dissed or ignored - in short, regarded like she's batshit and kept in the attic.

While a cursory google, if you will, of the phrase, "Courtney Love found the jet", may induce a giggle or two, the fact that EVERY snarky twenty-something with a phone or keyboard picked up on that "meme" to insult the woman, is wholly sad.

That's the soul difference between us and them ... the gaping divide between our Generation X -- Kurt's, Courtney's, mine -- and our Gen Y, Z and Millennial offspring ... younger siblings, cousins, nieces, nephews, eventually grandkids:

Any self-effacement or actual humor is vanished.  Our kids today -- unoriginal, uninspired (except to "share") and largely untalented -- get off on maligning and effacing others ... with no hint of playfulness -- no irony -- and whether or not it's truly deserved, or they have any clue who they're talking about when they're cutting, and pasting ... and narcissistically, or derisively, "sharing".

Apparently, Courtney Love was on the Tomnod website, participating in the online challenge they've got there.  She (now infamously) tweeted,

"Prayers go out to the families #MH370 and it’s like a mile away Pulau Perak, where they 'last' tracked it 5°39'08.5“N 98°50'38.0”E but what do I know?"

According to their website, "(t)he Tomnod mission is to utilize the power of crowdsourcing to identify objects and places in satellite images."  The Search for MH370 would seem to be the perfect measure of that platform, which has previously mapped search campaigns for Super Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines and the ruinous Oklahoma tornado of May 2013.

As far as I can tell ('but what do I know?'), Courtney Love was participating.

How is that batshit (or "deranged", as it's actually been nastily written in some places)?  And why are there literally pages on Google, serving up dozens of this obnoxiously mocking "story" about her participating?

I can't help thinking Kurt Cobain would have loathed what the internet has become for most people:  less an information superhighway, and much more a clogged high school corridor of cliques, desperation for acceptance, intolerance, peer pressure and bullying ... from which even the strongest among us prefer to escape.

The damaged and fragile do not stand a chance.

RIP (GenX) KC

"Fade to Memory (Old School)", ©Jeff Glovsky