Singularity

Sometimes I stop what I'm doing long enough to examine exactly where I am. Who I'm with. What we're doing. Sometimes I try to do a reverse of the age-old interview question in my head: "Where did you think you would be now five years ago? Fifteen? Thirty?"

Sometimes I think about why people tolerate me in their general vicinity. Why I'm invited to things, why I'm sometimes included with others that have no apparent connection to me other than that we may both know the same person.

The idea of "Cool" is very strange to me. I've been labelled before, third person of course, as being both pro and con "Cool"; as if the beholder had some sort of power over whether I could be allowed or denied access to whatever the topic of conversation reveals. My completely bat-shit crazy taste in music has been considered cool for a short time period, then shifted to meh, then to uncool without any variance or addition of new terms. My kids think of me uncool when they don't side with a decision I've made, but cool when I let them get away with something other parents ban from their own children.

I've sat with famous people before. Well, famous meaning that they can claim that more people know them than they know themselves, I suppose. Or maybe it's that they have some sort of physical proof that they were there, they did that thing, you know? that _thing_ whether it's a song or an album or a canvas with ink and mud scraped all over it, or a set of words imprinted semi-permenantly in a book of papers. They're famous because in a hundred or a thousand years someone will be able to find their book or their song and know without a doubt that someone with that name did that thing. Anyway, I've sat with famous people, not knowing the thing they did, and didn't really bat an eye when the thing was presented, either in the present or at some future time, hushed in whispers or proudly shouted and proclaimed. I guess some famous people like that sort of apathy, as I have sat with them since, and was considered cool.

Some people, though, some people don't need cool. Some people just are, and I secretly love these people. They do their own thing, they write things without needing a book with paper, they sing songs without needing a wax with grooves to be pressed. Even if they don't do anything at all, sometimes, they get my adoration without having to do anything at all. Sometimes those people are better than all the others, truly, and I don't know if I would be the same person I am today without those silent towers of awesomesauce.

Maybe that's why people sometimes let me hang out with people they consider cool?