Look at this album cover from 1979's 'All of Me' by Japanese jazz fusion legend Masayoshi Takanaka.
Look at that smile!
Now think of the fact that a smile like that can never be smiled again --
Not since the great sin(ternet) was committed.
We are in a truly torturous time --
Week 1 of the apocalypse, where things don't seem so bad.
Where the past --
A completely different (and overall far superior) time --
is so close,
Yet we are completely trapped away from it, forever.
We even have it almost-mockingly held up to our noses, in the form of the ease-of-access the internet affords.
Hollow convenience, I call it.
When I look at Masa's smile, I basically no longer want to be on this planet as it is anymore.
That doesn't mean I want to stop living -- it means the challenge, the onus is on me to somehow find a way to reconcile the fact that these 'Ghost Years' --
Lingering in YouTube's recommended pane,
Smiling, inviting, but not truly there anymore --
are something to be allowed to pass into the past.
And then I'll swing the other way and say to myself,
I feel like the human race has been given a terminally ill and incurable disease, the internet,
And it's still too early to see the hair falling out.
So when I see the purity of this image, and immerse into the simple carefree bliss of the music,
I imagine what it must be like to be blissfully unaware of life's woes.
Was simplicity, idyllic and light, always an illusion in the first place?