Gimme now, later
Savor the flavor of now, in the later.
“Give it me now.”
We are toddlers. Small angry animals with destructive hooves and insatiable appetites. Hands out and rude ruddy faces, we are moments away from implosion. Are you ready for the cataclysm?
“Give it me now.”
These words erupt from the minds of those who have never been told no or simply don’t know the pathways to heaven in the valley of wandering. They don’t know the difference between the heart-thumping immediacy of Now Mountain vs. the overwhelming deliciousness of Later Peak.
Scree fields become instant whee! fields and before you say #NotAllTalus let me just say this: The talus is callous and this stuff breaks ankles.
Must have, must see, must touch, must own.
In an On-Demand world, we must possess all.
And then what? Absorb and forget? Move on to the next? Stuff that tiny plaything into the shelf of our memory, to be recalled infrequently if ever at all?
“Give it me now.”
It is a pity.
We, who have forgotten how to stretch things out, are shortening our artistic athleticism. Hobbling our receptors to beauty. Anesthetizing our capacity for surprise and delight.
Hey.
We are not the sum of our Netflix algorithm.
We cannot binge a lifetime in one weekend.
*Sigh*
No one has patience for the wait anymore. This is a gross overstatement. See, what I did there was throw a blanket over you all and the #NotAllHumans will be out for my blood.1 Yes, I know some of you are very patient but perhaps this is one of those cases where not everything is about you? Where perhaps I’m talking about the pandering to the shortening attention spans of us as a collective? I know, I know. #NotAllAttentionSpans
Let me pause briefly here to shake my fist at a cloud.
Tangent time.
When I was a youngling, movie trailers were often quite vague. #NotAllMovieTrailers of course, but many. Blissfully short with little information. They were the very definition of a tease, and I believe were called teasers for this reason. But today they are give-it-me-now people pleasers. Like mini-movies of the movie.2 Why do they give so much away? What happened to the tease?
The tease is in the toilet because we must know everything, now. 24/7 news. Trailers with longer run-times than the movie. Message boards with fan direction for how stories will go—should go. There is no patience for the wait. For the chance at an unexpected surprise.
We’ve become a civilization of skip-to-the-last page-rs.
Give it me now-ers.
We can’t be turned around.
Can we?
They need us streaming.
They need us consuming.
They don’t care if it’s good for us or not.
Again, #NotAllProviders, but this is not about them, this is about us.
We binge-watch because we can. It’s so easy.
We harass creators because we can. We feel entitled.
None of this is really new, just the mechanism has become more insidious. High speed, on-demand. Civility flew out the browser window long ago.
I bet you’re wishing the point of this would come now.
That I’d stop teasing this out like a bad perm.
Well…
Disappointment is a thing to be processed and nobody processes it anymore. They just soak in it and broadcast it out on all channels. Nobody wants to feel or when they do, they want you to know that they felt and they don’t know what to do with it. #NotAllNotAll. I know.
Learn to deal, people.
For when we deal with the feel we heal. For real.
It’s good to love things. To obsess over a band, a book, a character, a story. I’m not saying don’t love the thing with your whole and fully beating heart—please do. But it’s also good to have to wait for the reward that love can deliver. To even MAKE yourself wait for it, and while you’re waiting, to accept that there is a chance that it might never come. Or the movie won’t live up to the trailer. Or the story might not go the way you want it to.
Disappointment is the risk you take with love.
I saw an old thing recently where George R.R. Martin was asking Stephen King how he wrote so many books so fast,3 and it reminded me of a story I’d read forever ago about fans harassing him to finish Game of Thrones. This was years ago and he’s still not finished, as far as I know. Fans were—and still are4—angry. Like this is something they are owed. I don’t know if it was because he was talking with King, but I was struck with the vision of Kathy Bates taking a sledgehammer to James Caan’s ankles5 in Misery. George is in the bed. Fans are holding the hammer and fansplaining to him how it should go, threatening to keep him in the bed until it’s done.
“Write the story or the lateral malleolus gets it, George.” #NotAllAnnies
Just because we want it now, doesn’t give us the right to demand it with a ten-pound hammer in our hands. It also doesn’t give us the certainty of ever having it at all.
Because it might never come.
IT MIGHT NEVER COME6.
Get used to it.
Authors die. Actors get fired. Shows end. New writers come in and change trajectories. Musical tastes skew. Artists seek to push their own boundaries which reshape ours.
We need to adapt. To grow. To enjoy this process more.
Much like we should all learn how to be alone—how to enjoy our own company—we should learn how to wait. Learn that not everything needs to be heaped into our greedy gobs with an industrial shovel as soon as it comes out of the oven.
The teachings of patience. The teachings of civility. The teachings of how to be a human. This is what we need.
In the dash for the stash—to own all the things, to devour all the creations—we skip straight to the end and lose all the gooey joy from the middle.
Someone took time to make it. Take time to enjoy it. Instead of a quest to own all the things, quest to own the emotions attached to those things. Learn to wait, to savor, to enjoy.
I’m not saying don’t binge.
I’m not saying don’t watch the thing the day it comes out.
I’m not saying hold back on everything, either.
Just a thing here and there.
Take a couple of days to open that package you’ve been waiting for.
Watch one episode a week, like they used to do in the olden days.
Exercise your patience to enhance the pleasure of the thing.
Build your landing strip to the enjoyment terminal and guide those planes to earth.
Don’t always be that little piggy with your trotters in the trough of culture, your mouth covered in the slop of “couldn’t wait, me first.”
Don’t be that toddler kicking your legs wildly in the “give it me now” aisle.
Hold yourself back.
Make random days like Christmas Day.
Savor the wait.
Let us be the fine and delicate vessels of appreciation we are capable of being.
Purveyors of the slow consumption movement.
Wait to open your presents.
Give me now, later.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
This week’s amends…
“That’s the way with any new idea — takes the hoopleheads time to adjust.”– Al Swearengen, from the HBO show, Deadwood
I mean, he’s not wrong.
On Rotation: The Velvet Underground, “Oh, Sweet Nothin’”
On the subject of The Velvet Underground, if you haven’t watched the Todd Haynes documentary on Apple TV, you are seriously missing out. It is so SO good.
As a side dish, Open Culture shared an hour-long documentary (available in full on YouTube) about Maureen ‘Moe’ Tucker, the Velvet’s drummer, and man, what an absolute boss she is.
The video below is essentially a slideshow of photos from the photographer, Carla Rhodes's “Beneath the bird feeder” project, but with a song/lyrics written specifically to go along with the photos. Some nice closeups in there, and you can read about the project here.
Via Kottke
I would use this.
Via Boing Boing
Did any of this spark a tiny thought of your own?
Newsflash: It’s old lady blood. Only good for spells and weak cursing potions. You don’t want it.
Or sometimes of a completely different movie than the one you get, but that’s a whole other story and I’m not getting into that.
Case in point. Bob Dylan’s teasingly titled Chronicles Volume One. Chronicles Two? Hello?