All things bound for disaster

Life can be accused of several things, but lack of a well-timed sense of humor isn’t one…. Life can be accused of several things, but lack of a well-timed sense of humor isn’t one. This week I had been thinking about the idea of transience a lot, and how that plays out in pop culture and life, the universe and everything. And then my computer blew up.

Now, by “blow up” I don’t mean that Antonioni movie, nor do I mean my computer quietly died. No, I mean the thing (expletive) blew the (expletive) up. Seriously. My girlfriend, who was home at the time of the incident, described it as being two sounds, the first of which was a short buzzing noise. The second was a prolonged white-noise-type incident best represented by a cartoon swarm of bees. This second noise, which I think probably sounded similar to the Second Seal being opened, also came with the stench of burning computer circuits.

When I came home, despite the open windows, the apartment still smelled like shop class after a solid soldering session. So, to make a long story short, we bought a new computer, and it’s super cool and neat-o, but I’m an idiot and I didn’t back up my files, so a lot of the stuff I wrote is gone.

“These are the breaks,” is what Kurtis Blow said about stuff like this. He also said stuff like, “Basketball is my favorite sport/I like the way they dribble up and down the court,” and praised Willis Reed’s tough defense a few lines later, but that isn’t really as relevant to this column. The idea of Mr. Blow’s that I found interesting is that sometimes things just fall apart. In other words, he was talking about the inescapable transient quality of life, which I’ve been thinking about ever since I heard an R.E.M. song on the radio that I hadn’t heard for years but always absolutely loved.

Everyone might think R.E.M. is an absurdly boring band nowadays – a guy I worked with snorted when I told him I used to love that band, saying with disdain, “My parents really like them.” But back in the mid ’90s, R.E.M. was wicked cool. They had an amazing back catalog, they put on a wonderful live show, and they still put out quality albums. And then Bill Berry quit, and the band was sucked into a vortex of mind-numbing suck from which they never have and tragically never will recover.

Was it just Berry’s departure that caused them to put the terrible in terribly bad? Or was it something else? This was a band with critical and popular acclaim and then, just like that, people laugh when you say you like them. This isn’t just reserved for R.E.M., by the way. A lot of bands fall into this trap, or at least seem headed blindly into the abyss of irrelevance. Radiohead, I’m addressing this directly to you. The vast majority of bands get worse the longer they’re around, thus supporting the “old dog = stick with old tricks” cliche and arguing against the wily veteran theory.

Entropy is defined on Wikipedia as linked to the assassination of John F. Kennedy as well as his brother Robert. Oh, no wait, I’m sorry. That’s not it at all, and the actual definition on the site has all these numbers and equations and stuff, so I just gave up on trying to figure it out. I got a C+ in Physics 0089, so it’s not like I’m good with that sort of thing. But what entropy seems to be about – as far as I “understand” it – is that over time, systems produce disorder.

So, is this why bands suck? Are they just systems, and as such, subject to the laws of thermodynamics that may or may not involve the delta symbol in the equation? And if that’s why bands fall apart, is that why life always seems to collapse as well?

Think about it: Computers break, people get divorced, friendships lose all sense of urgency and insurgencies just get worse. Is life simply a paradoxical structure made up of collapses? Is it that the longer we exist, the more things fall apart and the more that Yeats poem makes sense? Will I always be losing all my files because I’m a non-backing-up fool who always thinks that things are going to work out fine?

Sometimes I do think that things will always get worse, as if they’re not bad enough already, and all I can do is accept the various indignities, slings and arrows as if they were completely normal. Sometimes, though, I try to not look at life as if it were an ever-accelerating collection of failures and instead see those moments of collapse as, strangely enough, positive things.

So I lost files. So R.E.M. sucks. So what? If you can only look at the ending of things, you’ll never notice how wonderful beginnings are or that amazing moment in your car when “Gardening at Night” comes on the radio and you smile, because it still sounds amazing and wonderful as you turn up the radio and sing along, driving under skies that are, at that moment, dazzlingly blue.

Let’s hear it for that second Stone Roses Album at kjs34@pitt.edu.