Context: I work at a radiostation at our university and we have monthly staff community hours we are required to fulfill.
CONVERSATION BETWEEN MONK AND ME
A: Oh, i almost forgot (opens laptop)
M: Why do you feel the need to type that out right now?
A: Because i transcribe my staff hours to a google doc, to keep track of them.
M: but there are so many other important things today that you forgot/chose not to keep track of originally. what is so different about this?
A: they're my staff hours; i have monthly requirements to meet
M: this month, yes, but then they will just Vanish into the past like everything else.
A: yeah but not immediately. they might cause a fuss at the station and it would bite my ass for like a little bit before vanishing. i'm doing this to avoid that potential ass-biting, in case I forget about these hours; listen, it's purely a practical issue
M: what do you do in a given day that isn't "purely a practical issue?"
Practicality is assumed.
We live in an era of dreamers trapped in a duty, a perceived obligation to be practical, functional, tangible (and therefore "real"--the ultimate religious copout, a claiming to the "real"). everything should have a tangible result/object. no one treats life as an absurdist canvas, an art portrait to create a story with anymore; we are shrewdly ends-oriented. we are increasingly mechanical. And I call us dreamers because I do see and feel the yearning in us for something more, something different. We are just so entrenched in the modern belief in practicality; i mean it's practically self-evident that we need to do practical things which have real functionality, self-evident tasks which must obviously be done (it's just the most practical and useful thing to do...see the dogmatism here?). we dont question it, we laugh at those who do (laughing at something with great confidence and certainty is always a sign to be worried about, a sign of ideology). i go from my job which makes money to my house which provides shelter where I watch TV to entertain myself before eating to nourish my body and falling asleep to regenerate my cells. i have sex with my wife to maintain our physical relationship and satisfy my libido. i smoke weed to get high and forget about shit. i only think of things to do, things which have an end. what isn't a purely practical issue these days? i think this is an important question to ask. artists need to hone efforts on politics to maintain any relevance (it's the cool thing now to take art out of abstract realms and hone it in on brute, obnoxious practicality). poetic terrorism--trapping the absurd in the relevant, the tangible. Ironically I think this ultimately stifles the creativity we need to achieve a truly paradigmatic, "tangible" change in our current "tangible-change" oriented society.
The question also may be, why did I decide to pause and write this instead of scramble to write hours down right now like I normally would have?
perhaps that's where "I" step in,
away from the humming machine of the masses.