The Pondering Absurdist

I wasn’t planning on posting today, but my breakfast preparations inspired me. I’m one of those people whose brains are in a constant stream of thought when I’m conscious (and even when I’m asleep, as I have vivid dreams almost every night). These streams of thought aren’t always focused on one particular subject though. They are typically a “train” of thoughts. I’ll start thinking about one thing, then it will remind me of another and I’ll think about that for a little while, then my thought train moves onto something else.

That’s what happened this morning as I started preparing my breakfast. I looked into the pan of food that I had started to cook and noticed that it seemed like the heat wasn’t even on, as there was no steam rising off the food or anything sizzling in the pan. That’s when I said aloud, “burn, baby, burn…” From the title of this post and those three words, you might be able to guess where things went after that.

I looked up “burn, baby, burn” on my iPhone and soon had the requisite YouTube links available to me. I turned up the volume and clicked on the first link. It was some sampled mix of two songs that I didn’t want, so I went back and clicked on one of the links to the original 1976 Trammps version. The loud disco music playing scared one of my cats and she went running out of the kitchen. My train of thought immediately went to the lack of musical taste in my cat, who didn’t want to stick around to hear the classic emanating from my phone.

The Trammps song was over all too quickly, as I had just started preparing my breakfast. I picked up the phone and my thoughts were that I needed to listen to a disco mix while cooking. I clicked on the first Disco Mix video I saw and immediately started playing it in my DuckDuckGo player so that I could avoid all those BS ads that YouTube insists on shoving down our throats these days. For the next Thirty-one minutes and Six seconds, I listened to the songs artfully mixed together by @Alejandro Barrera Dj. Thanks Alejandro! The video ended right as I was finished preparing breakfast, so the timing was perfect.

The whole time I was cooking and listening to the 1970s flashback, I did not once think of all the crap going on in the world today. No DJT pirating Venezuelan ships, and no Russians trying to kill all the Ukrainians and take their land. Instead, my train of thought wandered to the specific point that I was born in the timeline of civilization. Listening to nostalgic music might do that to you. Does anyone else start thinking about different times of their life when they hear or see, or even smell something nostalgic? I’m sure there are many.

Because the music playing was Disco, I started wondering what life might have been like if I had been born a couple of decades earlier. If I was in my late teens or early 20s in the 1970s, I might have been involved in all of that “free love” that was going around. I might not have been a virgin until the age of 21. But then I thought about the “flipside” of the coin. If I had been that age at that time, I might have been drafted into the Vietnam War and either died in a senseless war, or come home missing a body part or my mental sanity. My final thoughts as the music was coming to its end was that I was 13 years old in 1976, and I had missed it by just a few years. But then again, at that point I was already doomed to a chaste teenage life by the church that our family had recently joined.

Have you ever wondered what your life might (have been, or) be like if you were born during a different era in the timeline of human civilization? What if you were born in a time before the discovery or use of electricity in society. Do you think you would have been okay with that, only having candles or oil lanterns for light (knowing what you know now)? What if you had lived during the commonplace use of electricity, but lived your whole life before the invention of computers? What if you had been born in the Middle Ages, when organized religion ruled the world (even more than the influence it has today)? If you were a “commoner” who was too smart, or who had a rebellious streak, you could have been put to death as a witch. What if you haven’t been born yet and will be born in the future, when technology is even more advanced? (presuming that Skynet hasn’t taken over, or the human race hasn’t eliminated itself in a nuclear war). If you have a particular period of time that you think you would rather (have lived, or) live in instead of today, let me know in the comments. If you do, I’ll respond with the time that I think I would like to (have tried, or) try.

This train of thought needs to move along now, out to the garage so I can get some work done on this cold, damp December day in Northern California (happy birthday, Mom… she might have been 82 today had she survived “the big C” in her sixties). Thankfully I have one of those radiant dish heaters to make it a little more bearable out there.