This is the best life I can possibly imagine for myself. Married to a woman who (it’s true, I didn’t make it up) loves me and who I love back. Living in a pretty nice apartment in a bit of a rough neighbourhood with access to all the amenities we want. Need a coffee? Walk over and get one. Need some groceries? Five minutes down the road. Want to rent a video? Basically across the street. Want to buy Chinese rice and fish heads? Asian supermarket around the corner. Want cheap (in every meaning of the word) furniture? Ten minutes away, an Ikea. You get the picture.

I mean, I can imagine living in a swankier place, owning a house with a backyard and all that jazz, but I don’t think it would make me any happier. It might be the icing on the cake. But right now I have everything I need and more than I ever thought I could have.

That’s good. I don’t miss my subterranean existence in that miserable hovel of an apartment I used to have. I don’t miss being precariously poised on the edge of infatuation and incandescent disaster. I don’t miss the restlessness of wanting something or someone and being constantly outside looking in. I don’t miss much. Maybe, sometimes, I miss the way there were only two bus stops between me and work, but that’s it.

It was never the best of times. It was almost always the worst.

Yet there’s still something about being young. Or younger. I’m pushing 30 here. I don’t feel it at all and I wonder if anyone ever really does. At 20, 30 seemed so very far away. Now, at 27, it feel right around the corner. There was a time when I counted hours in a day. Now I count days in a week. Soon, I suspect, I’ll be counting weeks, and then years.

I miss being a romantic. Not the action of being romantic, not the things I do to make Laura feel loved, but actually being a romantic. I think it was being on the other side of dreams coming true that made me feel as if it must, must happen. As if getting there was the reason behind so many thing. Now that my dreams have come true — in ways different than I could have imagined — I can’t help but notice all those people whose dreams, whatever they are, have not and may never will.

You may always find yourself chasing a dream and never getting anywhere, feeling like you were destined for something bigger than yourself and falling short of your expectations. Or you will fall in and out of love like a person breaking the surface of an ocean and going under again and again. You may never get there. Maybe you will find it and it will leave you.

I’m not a romantic anymore. Oh, I fall for a good love story like anyone else — Endless Love was almost too good to be spoiled by its awful ending, for instance — but I’m not enamoured of the concept that life works out all the time. Maybe that’s because mine seems to be, so far, despite me. I don’t know. God works in mysterious ways, as the song goes, and despite what you may think about God, I’m pretty sure some of those mysterious ways are to teach concrete lessons. Sometimes people get what they don’t deserve, and sometimes they do. Either way.

Tonight I can’t sleep. I think it has something to do with the coffee I had three hours ago. I know, drinking coffee before bed, not a good thing. I used to be able to do that.

To all you people I used to know: Congratulations. At least five or six of you got married. This is good. And to those that I still know: Double congratulations. You’re great people. I hope very much you remain happy.

There’s so much to the creative process I don’t understand. Why two people’s art can look and sound so different, yet be distinctly theirs. Why when you seek to imitate it you feel like a forger and your art like a forgery, no matter how remarkable the result.

I can’t count the number of songs I’ve written and the number of poems I’ve pulled out of my head. I don’t think I’d want to. They come and go in phases and shifts. I could never count on a living as a musician: I simply can’t turn it on like a tap. I can sit at the piano and write fifty different phrases and attach fifty different lyrics to those phrase but they won’t satisfy me. Thirty minutes or two days later I sit down and the first thing I play is magic.

There are so few chords and combinations of notes, really. There are only so many ways to put them together before you run out and have to start recycling.

Sometimes you can want desperately to write about something but find yourself unable to write about it and instead spend a half hour writing about something else when you should be sleeping.

Playing old songs is a challenge. I can never remember exactly how they go. Maybe I’m making them up as I go, again, and I have no way of knowing. Only the few I record I know for certain. The rest are possibly recent.

Isn’t it strange how music can reach out and tweak something inside you that logic and facts and science can never explain, much less themselves touch? I played a song the other day that made me feel sad in a way I haven’t felt for a long time now. It made me feel something. This amazes me.

Thinking back, my former art was a shallow imitation of feeling, a tissue-thin façade less tangible than those things I professed to know and write about. If you had to hear them, I am sorry. If you felt a remarkable kinship for me then, even more so. I should be forgiven, I think, for those songs and the words to those songs. We all should, who wrote like that. We were children. If we had a grasp of irony far in excess of our years, we squandered it on songs we thought were about love. We were obsessed with love and being in love and writing about love and being in love. When you are in the desert you write songs about water. We are adults now and instead of obsessing some of us have moved on and are actually loving and being in love. That’s a much harder thing to write about. There’s almost no way to do it properly.

If I’m being too subtle in my lyrics, I don’t apologise. If you can mine seventeen different meanings or none at all, I couldn’t care less. These songs are for me, not for you. These things are the most intensely selfish things I will ever produce, the most tuned to myself. They can’t help but be. They’re my intellectual and emotional children. That you hear them, some of them, is a raw vulnerability I can’t help but shy away from. This is the singer/songwriter curse, of course. These are not songs written by a group of people in a room. They’re not statements about politics or revolution or technological disorientation. They’re songs that bubble to the surface in privacy, when alone.

I have become too verbose.

Not to say he wasn’t right about some things… but who isn’t right about some things? Buddha, for instance, was right about something things. As ad Hitlerum teaches, simply agreeing with something the Fuhrer said doesn’t automatically make you wrong.

Of course, I was a pretty bratty kid. I think I still am. I’m waiting for ten years down the road when I write a blog post (if we still have blogs) about how I would go back and knock the N.T. Wright out of my (younger) self.

Also, if I could go back in time, I’d not stop the piano lessons. And I’d buy a better guitar than I have now. And I’d wear more funky hats (can anyone find me a sombrero?) instead of trying to be cool.

Among other things.

It’s not that hard, is it? The names roll off my tongues one after another. If you’ve been exposed to the world outside your own borders at all, you’ll recognise them. They have existed, and they exist right now, these places.

There’s so much evil in the world. So much injustice. So much stricken poverty and horrible injustice. There’s so much evil that standing before it makes me feel powerless, unable to help. I’m just one man. What can I do?

It’s always been here: the scale of our atrocities as a species increases, but it’s the same thing that’s been happening since the first humans sinned. It is not right that some go hungry, but some have always gone hungry. It is not right that some die in genocides, but some have always died like that. It is not right that brutal dictatorships flourish while the church is poised at the brink of the abyss, but this awful balance has always just been kept.

So going forward, what now? What is my posture towards these things to be? How do I, as a Christian, effect change in this world?

I don’t have a very good answer for that, I’m afraid. I don’t have a grand revelation. I haven’t had an epiphany or seen a blinding light. All I know is that I am convinced that what I do matters, not simply in the sense that people are important and I should care about getting their souls into heaven, but in the sense that the physical world is important, that taking care of it is important, and that justice here and now is something God speaks of over and over in the scriptures.

All I can say is, keep plugging. The church has done an amazing amount of work in the world. It has done some evil, some grandly evil things it should never have done, but the unspoken kindness and grace and justice it has visited on mankind is a testament to its greatness, its transforming power. The church is a beautiful thing with a great opportunity to do work today, here, now, on this physical planet. We have the keys to the kingdom in our hands, so to speak.

We work in the hope that at the end of this earth, this earth will become something new, but yet not new. That when we rise to life again after the brief sleep of death we will rise to a world without injustice, as God judges and begins to set things aright.

I know judgement is not a particularly comfortable thing, and our culture is decidedly MPD about it, but it must be done. Evil must be identified and pronounced against and rooted out. Jesus will do that when his kingdom comes in fullness, yes, but I am his agent here and now, part of his kingdom or revolution that exists now in bits and pieces. Should I not do the same?

Should we not all do the same? Should we not identify evil, judge against it, and proceed to root it out wherever we can?

It’s C.S. Lewis saying that Aslan is not safe, but he is good.

We love safety so much, don’t we? And there’s nothing wrong with that. I, for instance, feel incredibly safe with Laura’s love. I don’t feel like she’s going to blow up any minute and abandon me. I know what that’s like, and trust me, you don’t want a relationship (God forbid a marriage) that resembles more a landmine than a safe harbour.

You can find in God that incredible safety as well: no matter what you are going through in your life, if you’ve bought into his grace, if you’ve been granted that faith, you are above all safe. As Mrs Elliot used to say, Underneath are the everlasting arms. From our seemingly impossible disasters to actually impossible disasters, there is hope that will not leave you ashamed for having hoped. Or assurance. You may lose your lover, you may lose your health, you may lose your house, but you will not be ashamed of finding refuge in God. He is a strong tower. You are above all, safe.

But there’s safety and then there’s safety. God isn’t bound by your desire to be financially secure. When Joel mentioned how so much preaching is geared towards a better life now, I wanted to stand up and cheer. (Not to mention that Mr Osteen reminds me of a smarmy used car salesman and I would very much like to punch him in the face, with all Christian love.) Or maybe God does care that you have a better life now, but we’ve simply got the frame right and the picture all wrong. Maybe your better life now isn’t about being financially triumphant or well-loved. Maybe your better life now is about crossing a wilderness and getting to a promised land. The trip isn’t necessarily going to be cushioned. Maybe it will be. You don’t really get to know that.

Laura and I have been very tight for money since we’ve been married. We have one income and some debt from her schooling and from my life as a bachelor. One of the things we’ve been really convicted about, ever since Joel talked about giving, is separating a portion of my income and giving it to God. We do this in several ways, but primarily it’s giving to the church. We don’t have a lot to give, and common sense says that what we do give should be instead squirrelled away for a rainy economy. Yet it seems better to me to live outside of that small comfort and safety zone by obeying God with our giving than using it for ourselves. I’m not going to spin a sob story here: we live very well on what we’ve got, but there are a lot of things we have to forgo whilst living this way.

This is a small thing. There’s a couple from Imago Dei who essentially walked away from a comfortable life to work in the Himalayas with an unreached people group. Joel moved to Mississauga and started a great church. Paul was whipped and beaten and shipwrecked ultimately killed. These are not small things, and they are not safe things.

But they are good things, and things that will ultimately be blessed. Because in following God, sometime you end up dying on a cross. Look at what Jesus did: was his life at all safe? Yet here we are, millennia later, still looking at his legacy and seeing it change the world.

Maybe this is why when I expect messiah to be a military leader, he comes and conquers things I didn’t expect, using methods I hadn’t foreseen. Or when I assume Jesus will validate my holiness, he exposes me as an illusionist, as a fraud. Or when I show him my methodology, he tells me that true religion is taking care of widows, feeding orphans, that sort of thing.

Jesus is almost maddeningly different from the world I live in. Sometimes he makes me crazy, because even at the best of times, I’m a Pharisee whitewashing my own grave. He asks my why I call him master, even though I don’t do what he says. He tells me that I am blessed if I hear his words and obey them.

He wants me to become like a child. Or a servant. Or a sacrifice. Naturally, I don’t really want to be any of those things.

There’s so much of the old me to toss in the trash. I am supposed to don humility and slough off pride. I have the Holy Ghost working in me, powering me.

I’ve been a Christian for ten or so years now. Why, then, does this all still feel so strange?

You’ll convince them that another way is indeed better, and they’ll agree, but later be back to the original idea. After a while you sort of pick your battles, but even then it’s not really worth it.

Every age has its deep-seated conceits. Are ours better because they are newer? There. That’s one.

Draw a picture of a 5-year-old boy and state in the title that he is a 76-year-old man. Which will the viewer believe? If I can see that the boy is five, why should I not believe it? There. That’s one. The artist may lie. The creator may deceive. The emperor may not be wearing any clothes.

Will you know?

My generation looks back on events only fifty years distant and marvel. Our parents’ parents were simpletons, we say, because they had a cold war, and because that cold war landed men on the moon, and because at the end of it all there was a void waiting to be filled. Someone had to create a new monster.

They did. It was easy. Here, this is a cathedral. There, those are the Turks. We are good. They are evil.

It’s all a lie. The scarlet spires of today are the hubris and manipulation of the past. We are them, in blue jeans, with iPods. The brief flourishings where men understood freedom have died out. You are slowly being starved to death while the architects of your hunger whisper that your belly is full.

I have become convinced that incessantly asking questions is a defence mechanism. At least a certain kind of questioning. After all, what better way to ward off the truth than by constantly prolonging your journey toward it?

You can easily be a deist and deny free will. You have to, of course, believe that the seeds sown at the beginning of time inevitably lead to the same conclusion, but you can do it if you set your mind to it. (Now you have that song in your head. Ta-da!)

I say this all merely to point out that nothing is entirely certain about anything I see. I appear to have free will, but do I really have it? The fact that I can ask that question is interesting. In a way, asking this question is merely a function of following a bunch of hyperlinks. The hyperlinks were a function of my predisposition to read this or that type of article or blog post. My predispositions are a function of the way I was brought up, the people I knew in my youth, the sort of music I was exposed to, the men and women I admired, my social inclusion or seclusion, or whatever innumerable factors you can think of.

In some way, I can look at the universe both ways, and believe both things at the same time. That I do have free will (I have to believe that if I am to function at all), and that I do not (I have to believe that if I am at all intellectually honest). That is to say, I am a study in cognitive dissonance, except that I don’t believe in cognitive dissonance.

You can view this post as my predisposition to ramble. I like tangents. Who doesn’t really?

On Sunday, I had opportunity to think of the universe as a place that invites belief and disbelief at the same time. An interesting concept. The near-void of space, the loneliness of it all, begs at once faith in a beyond and a rational scientific measurement of what can be felt.

The whole ball of wax seems to designed like that. As if God is saying, Believe or don’t believe, the evidence looks both ways depending on what you look at, and how.

The sum of God’s will is laid out in a book. How silly is that?

I believe that book, the scriptures, at face value, when possible. How stupid must I be?

I am convinced God controls things all the way down to the quantum level. I can’t see him. I can’t feel him. I can’t reach out and lay a finger on God. I can’t even begin to understand how God can relate to a person and yet be the brains behind redshift, gravity, strong nuclear forces, dark matter, black holes, spacetime, quantum entanglement, probability, neutrinos, and a billion other completely and ridiculously amazing things I can barely appreciate, much less understand.

But I can write long sentences about them anyway. But in a way, God’s sentences are much longer than mine. The universe is, by any reckoning, many billions of years old. My life, in that expanse of zeroes, is barely a flicker, barely an eye batting, barely an electrical storm somewhere in my brain.

I cannot tell you how pleased I am that God notices me. That he slows himself down far enough to give me the Book, to let me know what precious little I can grasp, to work like a Ghost in my being and bring me to faith.

But there are countless millions who look at that expanse of space and its intricacies and see nothing at all except what is there. This seems to me unspeakably sad, but also quite normal. Gut-wrenching but mundane.

It’s the way God set it up. The most awkward of manoeuvres, creating men and women, seeding the world with us, sending us a Christ to save us from ourselves. The strangest of procedures, to work through the screwed up psychology of humanity. The oddest modus operandi, to pick the weak, the gullible, the broken, the few.

Isn’t that a weird way to go about things?

I remember once saying that I found belief stupendously hard. I always have. Belief; obedience moreso. I cannot have stumbled into this on my own. No way. My head’s too thick. My tendencies too backwards.

You can look at the universe and see a set of laws that just are, or you can see a Glue holding it together. You can see anarchy or design. You can see free will or guide rails or constraint.

The book says this is the Holy Ghost at work. I believe this. I can’t help it. How odd is that?

Look, dude. If it’s that difficult, something is wrong.

Can you go on like that for ever? I doubt it. No-one can face the same problems day in and day out, never resolving them or accepting them, without going crazy. No-one should ask themselves — or especially someone else — to do that.

I’m not saying you should drop it at the first sign of trouble. I’m not saying that God can’t stick a finger in an swirl things about. What I am saying is this: don’t actively seek to martyr yourself on a cross of love.

It isn’t worth it.

Your friends can provide you some perspective on this. I’m on the periphery of your acquaintance: I don’t expect you to listen to me. But ask yourself, ask them to be brave, ask them to say what they’re surely thinking.

They’ll probably say that it’s not supposed to be totally easy, but it’s not supposed to be that difficult. It should be a labour of love… not just labour.

You need to decide that for yourself: I could be dead wrong.

Am I?

Admit you’re the problem, see how that feels, see if I’m right. Look at yourself as clearly as you can — and let’s be honest, not particularly clearly even then — and you will notice this. You’re the problem.

You’re not always the problem, of course: there are genuine instances where you’ve been acted upon and had no fault in it. I’d guess that those instances are rare.

If you call it fault, or blame, or something like that, fine. Call it that. But in doing so, don’t reduce everything to a set of sums, to percentages, to balances and counter-balances. Have you found a way to rightly apportion that force of will that entangles us all? Congratulations; in thinking flawed so deeply, you’re the problem.

But what came before? How did you get to this place? And even, if you could see all the connections, tenuous or otherwise, would your trifling intellect begin to comprehend the permutations? The primaries, the secondaries, the tertiaries (or the framework of numbers forces upon them)?

Sometimes I imagine the world like strings, every man and woman trailing them wherever they walk. Like marionettes with countless hands pulling in countless directions. Like a fabric, maybe, shifting in the present, reaching hesitantly into the near future, somewhere into the far, being laid down in the past.

Can you control the things that come before, that determine what comes after? Can you identify them and disentangle yourself?

Do you have free will?

Sometime in the future you may admit — privately, publicly, it matters not — that you’re the problem. That there’s an answer you need to find to yourself. That you are the only thing you can change. And that when you change you, you change the future.

Or do you?

Maybe you’ll admit you’re the problem and see a tiny gossamer strand reaching back to these words.

But you probably won’t.

Then I got into work to discover everyone calling for their tools, and every tool not done or done wrong. Hyperbole, but it stands. In the midst of this I discovered that money is going to be a little tight for the first few months of marriage because OSAP — predictably, I might add — thinks that we don’t actually need any money for food and whatnot.

Of course, some of you are going to be saying, “Well, then you shouldn’t have bought that bed and that furniture.” But of course they were both a donation from my parents, bless their moneyed souls, and not a cash donation. And I will not beg money from them; things tight, but we’ll survive just fine. For the first time I understand why finances are the ruination of many an otherwise sound relationship.

We will find ourselves, after the honeymoon, in a house full of semi-nice things, with a few thin dimes to rub together. At least for the first few weeks. Add to that the inevitable tension of getting used to — for me at least — having another person around the house whose needs I have to consider, whose well-being I am entrusted with, and you have the makings of a rocky road. It’s scary too: are my shoulders broad enough for this?

Something is going to blind-side us. The time is ripe. I mean, me and Laura love eachother and we’ll make it through whatever comes, but it’s all too simple right now. The challenges seem straightforward, and life seems to generally dislike being straightforward. So I’m waiting to get hit by a bus.

All this to say that I may well be fraying and wearing thin, but this is going to happen. It will, and if I find myself taking a bus in the chest, it will be for love. I’m a big ball of hope that no bus will come, and that the rewards of the tension will be legion, and that in all of this there will be a knot of blessing.

But I still can’t wait for it all to just be… over.

It’s easy enough to say that scripture is the rule for life, that there are things in it that are hard to understand and that sometimes don’t come close to making sense.

It’s easy to say that, and I suppose it’s true enough. You submit to it, you put your mind underneath it, you humble yourself. I’m not good at it, but I try to find my intellect keeling, as it were.

I’ve recognised in myself — ever since I was young, even — a talent if not for obfuscation and dissimulation then for at least finding the smallest point of chaos in the most dreadfully ordered patterns. For making even those blisteringly clear things seem a bit clouded. For saying, “Well, it’s not quite that simple…”

So here you go.

Is it really that simple? Is it really this act of will where I take my intellect like a burnt offering and hold it up on a silver platter? Or is there some kind of interplay between the mind and the scripture? There must be; we interpret and equivocate, don’t we? It’s not at all obvious what it all means, not without some clarification, much like archaeology, or some other arcane art. Compare, contrast, dust, tug, push, dig, all these things.

There’s a dialogue there. The mind creates structure — isn’t that what we do with everything? — when reading the scriptures. It’s part of what makes people people, that they find all sorts of patterns and structures and coherence; not to say that scripture doesn’t have any, not at all.

Worse yet, the brain needs to understand the way the brain works. I can recognise that there’s some interplay there between what I read, what I understand, and how I can humble myself before the one who made me to read and understand. But which one is under and which one is above? It’s a good question. Am I humbling myself in front of something I have constructed? Or am I humbling myself in front of the real thing?

This cognitive dissonance is not easily resolved, and probably wouldn’t be, if there was this giant vacuum in which to read the scriptures. Of course there isn’t, though. There isn’t some magical island where you can open up the book and just read free of prejudice and all those other things that come with being a part of the world.

Lots of different things intrude, but maybe the most important is that holy Ghost. Can I say he is the resolution? I believe so. He is not a construct, that much is clear. He is the person above personhood that, when you ask, shoves the right building blocks in the right hole.

That so many of us come to different conclusions when asking for his help is a mystery, isn’t it? You’d think he’d just blind his followers with light and lead them by the hand. He exists, though, and he is near. That much is clear.

You may say, I will listen and you will speak, and you may find the jumbled bits of your thinking falling into place. He is at work, not only there but in other places at well.

You may find that it is, after all, quite simple. Not this mumbo-jumbo about dialogue and over/under. And I may wink and say, We all get there in the end.

But I won’t tell you where. Not here. Not now.

I wonder sometimes if stupidity is a disease, or maybe some sort of meme. Yeah I understand that expecting everyone to be smart is a bit of a tall order, and that even the smartest people have issues on which they’re pretty boneheaded; but is it so much to ask that people pay attention to something that actually matters?

Every time I see one of my sisters, especially, I die a little inside. I ask myself if my caring about things is an anomaly. Am I the freak here?

This is why the conquered must be assimilated. Not simply ruled, but assimilated until they have accepted the victor’s version of events, until a few generations forward, their children don’t even know their stories.

They must share your narrative. Or else your narrative is in danger, and if your narrative, then your empire.

This is why we lie to ourselves, sometimes. Because we are inventing a story about this and that to make sense of it, to put it in a particular order, to calm ourselves and believe in structure.

There is a structure to things, yes, but very rarely is it obvious; even then it is good to doubt your own perception. Structure is a thing of belief, yes, despite what you see.

Empires, nations, states, cities, and people all share this. The narrative that we suggest is the cause when really it is simply the effect.

The founders of the USA, for instance, are not the godlike figures that grace history books today: they were complex individuals with mostly economic motivations. The Boston Tea Party was not some great moral statement: it was an instinctive lashing out against monopoly. The War for Independence was not a sweeping revolution borne of righteousness and godly vigour: it was and always will be just another war in a world with a long history of wars, and like every war, it changed the face of history.

The founders of Rome, to give another example, may have been bringing culture to all points of the world, and peace, but their unshaken belief in the superiority of the Roman way of life was, simply, misplaced. They went their way and now the barbarians rule the world.

And no matter what they may have thought of themselves–along with the Egyptians, the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Japanese, the Germans–history is unerringly critical. We do not share their narrative.

The spoils are short-lived.

Personal narratives have, in my experience, an even shorter shelf-life. When you ask “why” and invent an answer to that question, remember this; remember that there will come a day when all illusions fail, like you always knew they would.

I can answer to this, because I have created many stories. I’m good at it, really. I may not have the patience for writing anything longer than a few paragraphs, but I am possessed of certain ability to obsess about motivations.

My own, for instance, are not often clear. There are things I suspect, and other things that I have just begun to smell out, but they are like looking in a mirror and not understanding what I am seeing. This is my face, yes it is, but the cone of vision is not large enough: I can focus on a point and it escapes me quickly.

This itself is my narrative, you see. I am telling a story where I am good at telling stories about everyone but myself. But again, this is not entirely true; I am, like the Romans, not quite what I say I am.

Once, when I was young, I punched a hole in the bathroom wall. My parents have laboured under the delusion that I slipped on a wet floor ever since it happened, as that is what I told them happened, and despite themselves, they believed me. This is, of course, not what happened. I simply saw a wall and punched my fist through it.

Can you imagine the stories I came up with? I do not like things that hold me back. I abhor boundaries. I belong in the outdoors, a noble savage. I was angry and could not contain my rage. I went momentarily insane. I will become a boxer. More.

In retrospect things become increasingly twisted until they become suddenly very simple. There was a wall. There was a fist. I wanted to see what would happen, to test the limits of the drywall.

It was not very strong.

That is a story I’ve never before told anyone but Laura. But I still find it interesting. I remember punching it like an experiment, as if I this were some sort of obscene science. Mostly I remember the hole I left and how after I had tried to patch it up it was never very strong, how it kept collapsing in on itself.

I suppose the next owners of that house found that place by accident one day. I don’t know. At this point, I don’t really care.

To the victor, the spoils, then. There’s always this question who’s won and who’s lost. Whenever anyone asks me this question, I always point at them. You.

You have won.

The only problem is that the structure — or lack of it — that they represent is inherently anti-censorship. Meaning that in order for something to be outrageous, is needs a status quo to provoke.

Yet, how often don’t the rebels become the status quo themselves and prove to everyone that they’re just another note in the same old song?

Most art, however, with the exception of films (and let’s be honest, most of them are pretty bad as art), is pretty cheap. I know, it’s not the usual perspective on art, but you can make an album for under $5000 these days. And things like that.

I think that the record companies realised that modern music especially has a low to-market cost and therefore should not cost much money, not really, as music is a basic human thing. People will keep making music, even if it’s given out for free.

Record companies, then, exist to foster two things: scarcity and cults of personality. Scarcity (in the form of physical distribution) makes an item more valuable to a potential buyer. A cult of personality makes an item more valuable because the more people in the cult, the larger the potential buyer pool.