The Past Is a Foreign City

You reach a point in life where you become sort of embarrassed to be who you are. You look back at your aspirations and wonder if maybe they weren’t yours at all; maybe they were borrowed from someone else, or maybe they were sold to you by a sinister culture industry. I am a product of my time and nothing more. I did not transcend any of the embarrassing pitfalls of my era, nor did I identify any of its obvious dangers. Consider our youth examined through the cynical lens of the present day: was twee indie rock culture something imposed from the top down, a means of getting the American populace to retreat into a fantasy of prolonged childhood and look away from the scandal of the Patriot Act, the Global War On Terror, a Great Recession from which we have not yet recovered?