The Sublime of the Mundane

When I was a teenager, I used to collect and memorize Pink Floyd albums.  Yes, this is the third British rock group to be mentioned in this space, so far.  Pink Floyd, with their bluesy guitar licks and over-the-top-sad-white-boy lyrics, was probably my first real taste of that hard to define sublime feeling that is accessible for angsty, hormone filled teenagers that are sad about something, though they are not quite sure what, and can see depth and purity in anything deeper than themselves.   At that age, I could swell up to bursting by feeding on the emotional sap of albums like Dark Side of The Moon, Wish You Were Here, and of course, that magnum opus of self absorbed sadness The Wall.  It was as though I could take my own ill-defined senses of anger, longing, and tragedy, and hang them on every song, lyric, and note- even though my life was pretty stable, I was cared for, provided for, and had never been, say, a lunatic, or a crazy diamond, or the victim of abusive teachers.

As I have gotten older, my sense of the sublime has...changed.  "The real world" has a way of introducing you to a range of grand emotions and experiences that you never paid attention to as a teenager.  These days, I am moved by a profound sense of tragedy by simply taking in the sights and sounds of a Wal-Mart checkout line.  If I want to see the fragile relationship between beauty and revulsion I can study the color schemes of Taco Bell food.  If feelings of deep emptiness had a color palette, they would not just be black, like the wardrobe of black t-shirts I wore in middle and high school, but would be closer to the colors created by fluorescent light on acoustic tile.  Seriously, study these sickly, unnatural colors the next time you are sitting in an office or a hospital.  They are all the better/worse if they are in close proximity to a beige or mauve colored wall, maybe with faded floral prints framed on the wall.  Now, that is what I call comfortably numb.

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