Remakes...

Radio has made a drastic comeback in my life. It makes me think of when I was 12 and I would lock into some random Red Deer station with my $100 Amway CD/Tape/Radio "blaster". Only a perfectly mellifluous alignment of body, antenna and radio waves would yield a signal discernible to the human ear. Like that episode of the X-files where the alignment of the planets for 24 hrs gave two girls born on the ame day supernatural powers, which they naively use to exact revenge the boys who spurn their advances and the popular girls in their high school. I digress...
When the signal would come through my fingers would fly to the 'play/record' buttons and I would begin my mix tape of Central Alberta's Top Ten hippest songs. The tape would invariably be played and replayed over during the course of the week until the process would be repeated the following weekend. Such was the life of the pre-teen Hannanite.
Although my tastes have matured a tad since those days, occasionally I catch what's playing on Vibe, Amp and the other stations that try to make 14 to 30 somethings in Calgary feel like they are plugged into the heart of pop culture (I'd love to see how many of the artists they play could find Calgary on a map... or Canada). Is it just me, or has there be an inordinate amount of remakes lately? All you need to know how to do is add a thicker baseline and some auto-tuning to Debbie Gibson and Wham and you have a lucrative career in 2011? And it's not just the music industry that's to blame - look at the film industry. This trend has morphed from a pleasent exercise meant to pay homage to creativity into what seems to be an ever growing apathy towards ingenuity.
But who is to blame? Sadly... not the entertainment industries who are so easy to target. It's us. It's the people who lap it up like mindless Pavlovian dogs and beg for more. In the words of Edward Rooney... I weep for the future.

I never started counting - but I guess it would be pointless to start now. How could the flash of a little, red LED light symbolize so much? My eyes glance over to that un-illuminated black bulb cover; so dark that it could easily blend in with the sheen of the coal-like cover surrounding it. But having looked at it so many times, my eyes are drawn to it like magnets. A few seconds go by... and the light sleeps on.
Have you ever really thought about how sick your attachment to your cellphone is? I mean, honestly - how have we become so subjugated to an inanimate object no bigger than the palm of our hand? Who maintains no loyalty to us other than storing phone numbers and finishing our words for us while we text. What's even worse is the animosity that we feel towards those that haven't succomb to the cellular leash; those from whom we hear phrases like, "oh, I left my phone at home" or "sorry, I never check my messages". It's like saying something like - "oh, I just don't really eat food" or "sorry, I always forget to sleep". At least that's what it feels like to us minions of the cell phone.
The next time you're walking down the street, waiting in a mall or in a movie theatre take a look around you. Cell phones have become the proverbial security blankets of society. The vulnerability of being in public alone has warranted the creation of an unwritten set of rules which forbid intrusion of one 'loner' into another loner's space. You may not realize this, but those we categorize as being "normal" maintain a healthy shame of public solitude. The "non-normals" are the ones who dare to defy this solitude by having the audacity to engage strangers in conversation. But no matter what stigmas we imagine upon ourselves or, heaven forbid, others assign to us a cell phone seems to reciprocate "I could care less".
So here I am at work... waiting for that red light to flash... desparate for that light to flash... if only so I can 'care less'.