This is from March, 2012. I’m reposting it today because everyone seems to think Mitt Romney is going to save the world from Donald Trump. Or something.
Author: Chris Cocca
I Was a Kid in the 80s
I used to read a blog called Paleofuture. It’s still out there, somewhere. One day, Paleofuture posted a picture of someone’s 70’s vision of an 80’s space station. Sure, every time I see a ’57 Chevy or googie architecture, I wonder why the future Walt Disney invented for the Boomers never, ever came. But I was a kind in the 80s. The picture of the space station was a sort-of writing prompt. This is from 2012, maybe:
I was a kid in the 80’s and got to go to EPCOT. I used to read Popular Mechanics and try to make crap out of batteries and magnets and draw fighter jets and space stations and curvy future cars and build paper ammo wristbows from rubber bands and hangers. I did The Jason Project.
I remember when the Challenger blew up because the lady teacher had a kid my age and my family had an Aerostar the first summer they came out. After it happened Ford pulled the commercials that showed how the nose of their new mini-van looked just like the Shuttle. I broke the sliding door with my first GI Joe and burned my arm on an interior light and it scabbed and cracked and leaked all summer and I’d touch the puss with the fat tips of my fingers to see if it would hurt.
My grandmother made me watch INF when I was 7 so I could say that I’d seen history. She didn’t say it but in 1987 you had no way of being sure you’d see more big human moments. Imagine living like that for 4o, 50 years, thinking about the button, building schools with fallout bunkers, doing drills. I remember the first time I saw a plane, it was Wednesday, 9/19, 2001. I went to college near a power plant with two cement torch chimneys so these things made me nervous. I imagine living like this for 40, 50 years, collecting history for my son just in case it stops. Waiting for the break, the thaw, the perestroika. The Western glasnost Gorbachev and the Dubai-Vegas-Beijing Red Dawn white trash show. Waiting for the INF bombs to come in off the market. There is no end of history, Francis Fukuyama. There is history or nothing.
Obama will close Gitmo but will hold enemy combatants indefinitely without trial on the mainland. Semantics must be justice. There are pictures of Pelosi toasting Cheney and Shepard Fairey laughing, obey, obey, obey, obey the giants and their posses. I was a kid in the 80’s.
I thought we’d have more now: sustainable communities instead of social networks. Colonies in space. We got personal computers, personal accessories, personal devices, vanity, vanity, vanity, rah rah trips to ISS but lazy outward pushing. If Richard Branson brings the heavens we should fill them.
Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong – The Huffington Post
This is a really long read by Michael Hobbes, and there are many quotes I could pull in the hopes that you’ll read it. I’m going with this one, because the issue with our food supply is, in my opinion, the biggest public health crisis we talk the least about:
“Since 1980, the obesity rate has doubled in 73 countries and increased in 113 others. And in all that time, no nation has reduced its obesity rate. Not one.The problem is that in America, like everywhere else, our institutions of public health have become so obsessed with body weight that they have overlooked what is really killing us: our food supply. Diet is the leading cause of death in the United States, responsible for more than five times the fatalities of gun violence and car accidents combined. But it’s not how much we’re eating—Americans actually consume fewer calories now than we did in 2003. It’s what we’re eating.”
Fructose is killing us, and, through subsidies to Big Ag, we’re actually paying it to. Then, when we buy this shit, we’re doing it again. If you’ve never seen “A Place at the Table,” watch it to see just how this works. Meanwhile, foods that make us healthy (fresh produce) remain out of reach for so many, and institutions (the medical community, the political establishment) act like there’s a free market, efficient market with people simply making informed choices based on preference. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Source: Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong – The Huffington Post
Before Clinton, Before Trump: Charles Baxter on Narrative Dysfunction, circa 1997
Twenty years ago, Charles Baxter named the unsettling traits of America’s then-adolescent “culture of deniability” and what its…
Source: On Made Mistakes and Making Making Them – The Writing Cooperative
New Life for Old Classics, as Their Copyrights Run Out – The New York Times
I am all for more access to great things. But somehow, Gatsby passing into the public domain makes me sad. I’m not sure why.
On Made Mistakes and Making Making Them – The Writing Cooperative
Twenty years ago, Charles Baxter named the unsettling traits of America’s then-adolescent “culture of deniability” and what its “dysfunctional narratives” meant for politics and fiction. Click through for my essay, recently published at The Writing Cooperative on Medium: On Made Mistakes and Making Making Them – The Writing Cooperative
The Lunacy of Recognition
I came across this short reflection by Jeff Burton on Medium. I think he asks questions worth asking, and raises points creative people don’t talk enough about.
There’s a degree to which hoping to find an audience for one’s art feels like lunacy. The odds are very much against it. There’s something to doing a thing for the joy of doing it. I think this goes along with the idea that we can produce great art without the kind of suffering that comes from not taking care of ourselves.
That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with wanting an audience. But if you make something beautiful and no one else knows, guess what? You still made something beautiful. I have this idea that people in previous eras were better at getting healthy satisfaction and pleasure from doing things well than we are. We have been taught for the last hundred years that skill and celebrity go hand in hand. We have been taught that celebrity is the highest validation of skill.
We’ve probably been taught wrong.
Chris Cocca 