random thoughts

Sometimes I think if we truly figured out the human brain, it would be the end of humanity.

That’s my deep thought for today.

First, it would be cool, if somewhat corny, if I could play the actual fiddle musical instrument.

Alas, I cannot. I can barely play a kazoo.

But I do like non-musical fiddling, and this occurred to me while I was adjusting the fonts and icons in Obsidian, two things that have no real effect on how the program works, but make it look nicer or more personal.

I mean, I love these little custom icons I added through a community plugin (certain folder names redacted). They’re cute, and also functional, because I am a visual person. And yet I have probably spent way more time fussing over them than would seem logical:

What does this say about me? That I’m a silly person? Probably. That I care about aesthetics? Almost certainly? That I am a fiddler? Oh yeah.

Recently, I’ve been feeling nostalgic and watching old episodes of Siskel and Ebert on YouTube, having regularly watched the various incarnations of their show when they were still new, going back to the 1890s or thereabouts. Siskel died in 1999 (Ebert was felled by cancer in 2013), so it’s closing in on 25 years since they last appeared together reviewing films.

One of the things that struck me in watching them, captured in that timeless way old TV shows have, is how life is as much about loss as it is about anything, especially as you get older. Your life is framed increasingly by losses. Sometimes they are cruel–how Ebert must have felt to lose Siskel at the young age of 53–and sometimes they’re just silly, like losing your hair. And sometimes the losses simply have that weight of inevitability to them, as when an old actor or musician succumbs to old age and your mind shifts from thinking of them as here and now to being in the past, forever locked there.

But the losses can be other things. Your childhood home might be replaced by an apartment building, your old neighbourhood all but unrecognizable as time sweeps away what once was. You realize that the pace of change is relentless, that so many things we take for granted as always being there are far more ephemeral than we realize.

The McDonald’s in Duncan seems eternal, though.

I remember riding my bike through the freshly-paved parking lot with a friend the day before it opened in the summer of 1978. It’s still there today, 45 years later, though it looks contemporary, thanks to a remodel a few years back. No matter what else changes in Duncan–and Google’s Street View confirms that so many things have since I moved away way back in 1986–there are some places that seem to just stay on forever.

I don’t really have a neat wrap up for this, and I’m not saying getting older is a downer because your life becomes filled with all the things you lose, it just struck me tonight when watching Siskel and Ebert dissing on what would be Gene Wilder’s second-to-last movie as one of the worst of 1990, that so much of our lives is impermanent, even as we don’t realize it until much later, when we begin to look back.

Except that McDonald’s, of course.

It’s an actual thing that as you grow older you perceive time differently, mainly in that it seems to fly by faster. Waiting a year for something to happen when you were nine years old felt like FOREVER. At, say, 49, it feels like the proverbial blink of an eye.

A few days ago, Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac died, at the age of 79. This made me think back to the reunion of the classic Mac line-up that led to the live album The Dance, which I bought in the now quaint CD format. The concert, album and subsequent tour all happened in 1997–25 years ago as of this writing, yet when I think back to it, it feels like it happened far more recently, more like five or ten years ago. It’s weird. McVie was already 54 at the time. She rejoined Fleetwood Mac in 2014 at the age of 71, yet in my mind she seems to be eternally around 40 years old. This may admittedly be in part to how music videos “preserve” people as they were, but I think the time thing plays a big part, too.

I don’t have anything more profound to offer on this, only that it’s something that has become more obvious to me after I moved from my 40s and into my 50s. The death of McVie made me think again how my brain doesn’t easily wrap around how much time has passed on so many things.

Although it does feel like it’s been about a hundred years since I had a decent head of hair.

Like, you’re trimming your nails just fine and suddenly sneeze and cut way too close and then for a week you have this painful, sensitive area on the tip of your finger.

I almost did this today, minus the sneezing part, so really, I was just being inept.

Being inept also sucks. That is all.