The Age Of Epic

a mission statement

"I tell you this. I don't know what's gonna happen, man, but I wanna have my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames." -- Jim Morrison

Fig. 1: Lunch.

Welcome to the Age of Epic.

No, not this blog. Not anything as ultimately unimportant as a blog. The age itself.

Time alone will tell whether the word "epic" will stick around as a general expression of approval, like "cool" or "awesome" or "amazing," and not fade away into bell-bottomed obscurity like "gear" or "hip." But the age we are living in does not care, and has decided to be epic anyway.

Note that epic, in the classic sense, doesn't necessarily mean good. Just big. Unprecedented big. Big that has left human memory, and is boomeranging back. We are living in, as the Chinese curse says, interesting times. You don't need to be told about 9/11 or Katrina or tsunamis or Goldman Sachs or other major disasters occurring with a frequency or on a scale that hasn't been seen in a hundred years, if then. And you certainly don't need another self-important asshole telling you the world's about to end. Worlds end all the time. The earth just adjusts. And so does humanity.

What I'm talking about is the individual human epicness we all strive for. The freedom to throw off the chains of age and gender and race and sexuality -- and, for that matter, nutrition and comportment and taste and good breeding -- and just embrace our potential to be bigger than ourselves. To make ourselves whatever we want to be. We are living in an age where everyone wants to be famous, where the lowest rung on the social ladder is filled with people yearning to be not just somewhat upwardly mobile, which was the dream of our fathers, or to live comfortably, as our grandparents strove to do, or just to stay alive, which is what our great-grandparents had no choice but to settle for. We all want to be President Rock Star Thug CEOs. And we want it now.

The lines are blurring, and at a rate that is itself blurry to watch. The future of man will be a 55-year-old Brazilian-Paki Super Bowl quarterback who is also a respected authority on anarchist thought, who has a prosthetic foot and a chip that controls his type 2 diabetes, and who directs gay porn on the side. Yes.

Fig. 2: An Athlete.

The American Dream, as Eddie Izzard once lovingly described it, was "to be born in the gutter and have nothing. Then to raise up and have all the money in the world, and stick it in your ears and go PLBTLBTLBLTLBTLBLT!! That's a pretty good dream." Yet today's privileged snotnose, against all evidence of human history, wants more. Every generation wants something better, and for us that means, at its best, finally and once and for all mattering as individuals. (At worst, it means, you know, Snooki. Reading this in the future? Don't know who or what a Snooki is? My point.)

Innovation may have left America, but our greatest gift has always been in inventing ourselves. All else follows. This was America's last great gift to the world.

That this is happening in a world gone to hell is not as ironic as you might think. WWII was a literal battlefield that created the Greatest Generation; the idealists of the Sixties, beaten down with clubs and firehosed onto the pavement (and worse), mostly survived to see those ideals become law; bitter Gen X cynics somehow wound up with a wife and two kids any damn way. The fact that the powers that be are currently attempting to undo the past century of human accomplishment, are indeed dismantling America and selling it to the rest of the world for junk, is not an indication that all is lost. This is merely your battlefield. Without Darth Vader, after all, Luke Skywalker is just a whiny blond farm boy in a tunic.

Oh, and the planet's decided to pitch in, too. It wants to kill you worse than ever. To be fair, it's revenge. Americans respect revenge, too.

Said dying planet is now filled with eight billion people, quite a number of whom actually believe they have the right to be famous for being who they are. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Like evolution, the social network weeds out the slackers with no real individuality or purpose. Mediocrity rules Old Media; the rest of us know epic when we see it. No Snookis.

What's left is the sideshow. This blog will attempt to celebrate the former and mercilessly mock the latter. You don't have to agree, or even care. I get to say whatever I like here; I've already won.

As human beings get closer and closer towards merging with the great Singularity, developing into a new form of cyberlife entirely, and as knowledge gets passed on at a rate and in a scope unheard of in human history, the potential for greatness becomes exponential. Like the generations before you, all you have to do is take the playtoys created to pacify smaller minds, and the technology created to further the corporate hegemony, and use it to find your destiny. These tools are more powerful than ever, which means you can be, too.

Fig. 3: A Song. 

Of course, they'll be trying to push back this tide of change, too. But you and I actually have less to fear from The Industry, that mindless, bloated, terrifyingly adaptable human millipede, than ever before. It fucks up, frankly, It always has. If Jews can escape Nazis, you can beat the mortgage crisis.

You don't have to have money or fame to be someone anymore. You can be a true individual, a self-made man or woman, or as my friends and I used to call them, Exotics. And there are only two rules:

1) You don't have to do anything you don't want to do.

2) You do have to do everything you want to do.

Believe it or not, the second part is much harder. I, personally, will be starting here.