No matter how many times you look at your designer watch, oblong office or kitchen clock or pet calendar blessed with dogs, cats, fish and deer, each day presented is always going to be a single twenty four hour period. No matter how fast we feel time flies or how boredom radiates enough energy to block the ticks from tocking…there’ll never be more than or less than twenty four hours.
But who believes that on the days you suddenly realize, “I’m how old? I want my life back!”
Bill Conway, a radio station program director told me in 1985, “There comes a time in everyone’s life when a single song is the only way to get them back to a favorite place to run, hide, play with others on the block or burn up gas driving your teenage car round and round the block on Friday and Saturday night. Your job as a radio disc jockey is to make sure their journey toward those days is presented in a way that makes them want to return to you over and over again. Become their H.G. Wells.”
It’s no faded fact; we can’t get enough of our past. Unless you’re a stock broker, play serious poker or pull in cash forecasting a lost souls future, the majority of us find tremendous amounts of comfort in the tales of already traveled times because we not only know the story but believe we can change it.
Computer technology keeps us from reaching the future by making it too easy to live in the past. We are modern day pilgrims in search of a new world featuring less taxes, government control and bosses who bog you down. Two clicks and we become gypsies wading in the waters of yesterday while toiling in the medicines of I feel good already.
Be it Naples, Seattle, Hong Kong, Butte, Montana or Uncle Newbert’s front porch BBQ...Facebook and Twitter buddies lead the pack on taking you back. Facebook features your toothless barely one year old grin…while Twitter allows you to constantly without mother and father interruptions talk to your friends.
It’s as if we’re shouting, “What am I missing?”
Nobody really cares that on June 12th analog television will be no more. After Wednesday night Adam Lambert will become lost in American Pop Culture. Every generation walking on this planet knows or has heard of The Rolling Stones, U2, Elvis Presley, Carrie Underwood and Garth Brooks. The genres once known as the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s and now no longer bear a Great Wall…it’s about feeling good…and somewhere in that mess of sound is always going to be a newly discovered favorite song that happened to be released twenty to thirty years ago.
My good friend Al from Costa Rica said to me, “I didn’t come to America to hear to my favorite radio station play what my parents listen to back home. I want Led Zeppelin, John Mellencamp and Bruce Springsteen.”
If the past is paying off no wonder we’ve taken our eye off time.
We must look like the Ground Zero cities featured in old time news reels that feature manikin families stuck in the fifties. The house is fake, the dogs don’t bark, the child looks like he’s riding his bike for the first time while someone in a very far away place is softly saying, “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six.”
I was deeply touched by a rare shape of reality television this past Friday…Farah’s Story. Not a life and times adventure nor a Biography Channel exclusive set on sharing the lines and dances given to one of the most beautiful women of our time but a solid true picture of someone we know who has cancer.
For two hours time stopped…but her battle to stay alive didn’t. There were days her infamous smile lined the streets of heaven with a newer shade of gold while at times one wanted to reach through their digital fifty two inch screen to hold her in ways that offered tremendous love and comfort.
It wasn’t a networks ego or an undiscovered reach for ratings fame that invited Farah Faucett to open her current chapters but a need to show the world, “This is what cancer really looks like.” What we see on a daily basis are the brave smiles from friends and family members who’ve dared to go against the rules and push their way up a mountain 99% of us wouldn’t recognize if it stood three miles down the highway.
The Exxon employee who visually has lost 40 pounds, his hair nearly gone, his smile not so rounded at the corner but he’s at work still selling gasoline to fast moving people always in need. I asked him, “Are you just as strong on the inside?” He looked at me with his off colored shade of eyes and returned, “Yes I am…thank you for asking.”
A woman writes, “When I’m in a doctors office waiting to hear the word if I’m going to make it another four months…I sit in a type of silence my heart doesn’t like. I come to this web page everyday to read what’s been shared…can you please send more so I don’t have to listen to the sound of my heart beat any more.”
Suddenly it’s not about the single songs that can take someone back to a place of running and hiding nor does Facebook and Twitter have the know how to take a present you didn’t create and bake it into a different cake.
What we invest in the present becomes our past tomorrow. I often wonder how we’d live our lives if we knew the events leading up to that particular moment already written just not yet exposed. Might you have taken a right at the tracks rather than going straight because it seemed to be a shorter way to reach the envisioned destination?
Will you be just as strong on the inside? Thanks to Farah’s Story we are one step closer toward better understanding The Art of Dying. The Dahli Lama penned out a book of the same title…three chapters into the print and every step you take, you’ll be watching you.
arroecollins@clearchannel.com
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