BEYOND ETERNITY                                  ISSN 1203-5416
                 Episode 06 <-->  May 1996
Sanjay Singh                            eternity@cyberspace.org
_______________________________________________________________

     "Welcome to prekindergarten!  You will not die if you
     discover that there are more lines out there than just
     your own.  In fact, you'll discover that you will have an
     advantage if you know more of them!"  [Bernice Johnson 
     Reagon]

     I don't really want to apologize for last month.  Last month
was not a mistake.  But I know I've promised to at least try to
answer more questions than I raise.  Last month, that promise fell
flat on its face.  Questions galore, but not many answers.

     I guess that means that this month should be spent
overcompensating for that.  I'll just stand up, clear my throat,
and start revealing all of the universal truths.  Alas, it just
wasn't meant to be.  Just more questions...

     Overall, this issue is short.  I had to make the tough call
and choose between three decent articles, or five quick and lousy
ones (slight overstatement, but you get the idea).  It was entirely
my fault, but everything should return to normal next month.


Contents
========
   - Introduction (you just read it)
   - Always Asking Questions
   - Everything Old Is New Again
   - Anatomy Of A Decision
   - Administrivia
   - Rules Of The Game


Always Asking Questions
=======================
     "The moment one accosts a stranger or is accosted by him
     is above all in this life the moment of drama...  Whoever
     we meet watches us intently at the quick, strange moment
     of meeting, to see whether we are disposed to be
     friendly."  [Haniel Long]

     I got a question for ya...  Why do people confide in total
strangers?  Why do people talk about their personal problems to
people they hardly know?

     I remember when I was working at Dairy Queen.  One day I was
coming into work and this old man just started talking to me as I
was locking up my bike.  I was confused, but even back then I was
a good listener (or at least in search of a good story teller) and
listened to him talk.  I don't even remember what he was talking
about anymore.  Probably because I just have so many more vivid
memories from that time of my life, but what I do remember is that
I had never seen this man before and here he had opened up to me
for at least five minutes.  A stranger.

     I was talking to a friend about this.  Not just this one
incident, but the entire idea of strangers opening up to people. 
He told me that when he's having a conversation, he likes to try to
get everyone involved in it.  So if he walks by someone on the
street that's not doing anything, he'll talk loud enough for them
to hear.  I think he really hates feeling left out, and to make up
for it he tries to let everyone feel included.

     So where did I fit into this.  I'm just a listener.  But then
I remembered a little thing that happened in my first year at
university.  It was the night before our first 'big-league'
university midterm, a friend and I were in the checkout line at our
residence cafeteria.  Our conversation was about the upcoming
midterm.  We didn't know what to expect and we were trying to
figure out what they would ask and how the exam would look. 
Jokingly, I told him that "maybe they'll just have one big question
that tests everything."

     When I said that, I noticed that the guy next to us in line
shuddered.  It seemed that our conversation was not a private as
one would imagine in a cafeteria checkout line.  I turned to him
and flashing my 'I come in peace and mean you no harm' smile, I
asked "math 137?"

     I think it was the smile that did it.  Universal sign of
friendship, or at least that I wasn't going to trip him so his food
will fall all over the school thug (like in any movie about
highschool).  He returned the gesture and nodded.  And what was
once a duet was now a trio.  Even after paying for our food, he
followed us to a table and we sat and talked about more than just
calculus.  Opening up to a stranger or just making a new friend?

     The circumstances were different.  I wasn't relating a my past
to a stranger.  I was predicting the future with a friend while
someone was listening to our conversation.  But at DQ, a stranger
accepted me into his own world, and we did the same thing in that
checkout line.  And I'm sure that the one common thing was that
both times, everyone knew that we would never talk to each other
again.

     This all seems to go against things I believe in.  Don't talk
to strangers (thanks mom); never expose yourself to someone you
don't trust (borderline paranoia?); and never let anyone into your
life if you don't know where they've been first (variation on a
theme).  It could be that there is some safety in anonymity.  Tell
me a secret, and if I don't know who you are, I'll never be able to
tell anyone who told it to me.  If you need to get the story off
your chest that badly though, shouldn't there be another option? 
Isn't there always another option?


Everything Old Is New Again
===========================
     "We think we're creating something new and different, but
     really, all we're doing is just repeating the same old...
     nothing.  We're all copycats."  {Homicide]

     "So are you happy now?"
     "What are you talking about?"
     "You finally got what you wanted.  New wave is back.  New
groups are saying that they were influenced by The Cars.  That's
what you wanted wasn't it?"
     "How do you figure that?"
     "You wanted something new, now you have it."

     Sometimes I feel like a character in a badly written movie. 
In one scene I talk about how much I want something, and then later
in the movie it's suddenly revealed to me that I have it.  Dialogue
like that bit above doesn't help to make the gap any wider between
my life and my screenplay.  For the record, it was an actual
conversation, guess which lines were mine.

     Where my friend was coming from on this wasn't quite what I
was talking about a while ago.  I wanted a second renaissance,
where revolutionary new ideas would be magically appearing before
me.  Instead what I got was a rehashing of an old idea.  Tried,
tested, and true.

     New wave wasn't even new when it started.  Don't get me wrong,
it was good, very good.  But it wasn't new.  It's punk, with a bit
more talent and a lot less attitude.  A reminder that not ever song
with a message needed to be 'spoken word'.  And not every song even
needed to have a message.  But this isn't what I wanted to talk
about...

     Ever since I started talking about 'the revolution' -- I can
normally be heard mumbling things like "you are weak and will be
destroyed when the revolution comes" to people that constantly seem
to be getting in my way -- and the second renaissance, friends have
been trying to point out what's new, what's improved, why I have
what I always wanted... "we're really at the dawn of information
age!"  And feeling badly for raining on their parades, I tell them
that simply "everything old is new again."

     It's not true that nothing ever changes, or that nothing even
happens; but it's also not true to say that new things are
happening all around us.  Of course, this will probably never
happen, my standards for something being new are ridiculously
high... I just want something that no one's ever heard of.  Still,
there has to be something that hasn't been discovered yet... or
maybe something that was always in front of us that needs one
person to realize that it's there (John Cage all over again).

     The problem with asking for something completely new and
revolutionary is that it's really hard to imagine what it is before
it exists.  Every idea that I have, and everything that's been done
recently, is just a rehashing of something old.  Taking a bit of
something from your childhood, add a bit of something that you grew
up with, and then put it in a shiny box doesn't quite make the
grade.

     Computers aren't new, and the internet was there before I was
even born.  It may be bigger now, mass marketing will almost always
do that to you every time, but it's not new.  There's nothing new
in new music, and everything that's considered 'new' and
'refreshingly different' that ends up on a screen is just a
variation on a theme.  Is there such a thing as 'new and improved',
or is that just a contradiction?

                             *   *   *   *   *

     As an endnote for this, I'm listening to the radio, and a
commercial for the movie "The Craft" was just played.  They boasted
a "new and original" soundtrack.  Of two songs that were played
during the trailer, the first was a badly done cover of a Smiths'
song, and the second is a different, but not new, cover of
Dangerous Type, originally performed by none other than... The
Cars.


Anatomy Of A Decision
=====================
     "Every decision is liberating, even if it leads to
     disaster. Otherwise, why do so many people walk upright
     and with open eyes into their misfortune?"  [Elias
     Canetti]

     Ahhhh, summer time is here.  School's out, and I'm free again. 
Free?  Well, if I'm really lucky, maybe everything else will be
free too...  I don't have a job yet.

     Other than the employment scene, summer is great.  We're on
vacation.  Hanging out with some friends, bouncing off the fences
at the local tennis courts, running the bases in a pickup game of
baseball.  And the one other thing that always seems to come with
summer.  Decisions.

     Now, when I say decisions, I don't mean the big "what am I
going to do with my life" or even "what am I going to do this
summer" type of decisions.  I'm talking about something far more
basic than that.  The big question that's looming on the horizon is
this:  "where are we going for dinner tonight?"

     Yes, the dinner question.  This normally gets asked somewhere
around the "what movie do you want to see" question.  And oddly
enough, the more people that you have brainstorming for the big
answer, the less your chances of actually doing something are.  Of
course, if you catch onto this trend early enough, and are willing
to fight off a weak salvo of "oh, I don't want to go there", you
get to eat where you want and watch the movie you want to most of
the time.

     Unfortunately, always seeing the movies that you want to see,
and eating at the restaurants that you want to eat at gets boring
after a while.  You're just not being exposed to anything
different.  You're just sitting in this stagnant universe, and
nothing's changing.  You can try asking if your friends know of any
place that's different, but normally they come back with, "whatever
you decide will be fine."

     Somewhere down the line, we decided that we didn't want to
offend anyone... and that was the last decision that we made, but
at what cost?

     A friend of mine plays this game when we go to a theatre.  He
looks around at the audience and picks out couples that are on
their first dates.  His main criteria is that if the couple is
being far too polite, having a conversation like:
     "Where do you want to sit?"
     "I don't know, where do you want to sit?"
     "Wherever you want to sit is fine with me."
then they'll be pointed out, and he'll get a point.  I've tried
playing against him, but I'm better at finding couples that have
been together for a while.  My antennae pick up tension much better
than they do tranquility.  Again, I want to know where the middle
ground is.  I know there are people out there that are comfortable
enough around each other that decisions are easy.

     "Pick a movie."
     "Shallow Grave."
     "Great, what time is it playing?  And do you want to go to the
Pickle Barrel before or after?"

     Call me picky, but with that conversation I don't have to
waste my day with lines like "Well, call me if you think of
something."  Which makes me think that it's all just a control
issue, but that's a story for another day.


Administrivia...
================
     Beyond Eternity (ISSN 1203-5416) is a monthly serial that is
written (for the most part) and compiled by Sanjay Singh, and then
edited by Paul Sheen and Sanjay Singh.  You can find older (or even
current) issues from any of these places...

mail:     eternity@cyberspace.org
web:      http://www.interlog.com/~vash
ftp:      ftp.etext.org:  /pub/Zines/Eternity/
gopher:   gopher.etext.org  (follow the prompts)
usenet:   alt.zines

subscriptions: Just send me mail, I'll add you to the list.  All I
               ask is that you let me know what you think about
               "Beyond Eternity...", and you can even mention how
               you found out about it.  It's a small price to pay,
               but that's all I ask for.

     As always, if you have a question, comment, statement, rant,
or anything, feel free to let me know.  (Who knows, you might even
feel better that you did it.)  There's always room for me to
improve, and there's always room for outside contributions.  When
I say that one person can make a difference, that includes you.


Rules Of The Game
=================
     I take full responsibility of the overall content here.  There
might be other writers but what goes into this is my choice. 
Copyright is held by whoever wrote the article, and if it doesn't
say who they were, then it was me.  I'd strongly suggest asking
them for permission before you reprint anything that was written in
here (this includes my stuff).  Chances are that I won't object,
but I'd still like to know.

     In past issues of The Eternity Articles, I was asked if what
I had written was true.  I'll state this for the record now,
"everything I write is true to me".  As for the other writers,
well, you'd have to ask them.  As a general rule I'm not going to
print pure fiction anymore, unless I think that it has a message
that's worth relaying.

     I think that's all that needs to be said.  Talk to you next
month.

Sanjay Singh (4/29/96)