LP

So maybe you've noticed that the subtitle of this blog is "Short Attention Span Theater." Or maybe you've been too rushed to take the time to read down that far. Which is understandable. This is the age in which we live. It's a "don't bother to read the subtitles kind of world" in which we live. It's hard to keep up.
Until now.
All of a sudden we have been gifted with all this extra time. Time to learn how to play guitar, as a friend of mine from work has done. He's got the beginning part of Bob Marley's "Jammin'" almost down. And he continues to work on it.
Because he's got the time. My wife and I have completed watching three seasons of The Good Place. It's a show about being trapped somewhere between heaven and hell and it's entirely relatable currently, but of course back in the days before Quarantine we didn't have time to watch. At least that's what we told ourselves. And best of all, Netflix takes the commercials out. Saving us all that time to learn how to play guitar.
And set up Zoom meetings.
It has occurred to me that back in the day there was no producers or disc jockeys telling Beethoven that that Ninth Symphony is really boss but does it have to be that long? Like the scene in Bohemian Rhapsody where resorts to going to a radio station to personally invite them to play his band's six minute song. Take this to the current status of pop music where songs are released and albums are rarely created to be taken as a whole. We simply don't have the time to listen to anything for more than two minutes and forty-five seconds. During this isolation period, I have been listening to Pink Floyd records start to finish. Sargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is a long title for an album that should be listened to at a sitting. Just your luck! We happen to be sitting for forty to fifty minutes at a stretch these days. Why not enjoy a little extended play?
My sainted mother and I were talking movies the other night, as we have done straight along, but I confess I reach out to her a little more often these days. I wanted to know how she enjoyed the last Avengers movie because I needed validation for my nerdiness from my mother. And we agreed that it was quite epic, which had the subtext of meaning "long." Not that we didn't enjoy it. When I watched it the first time, I was ready to do laps. Yet I am still willing to participate in our culture's obsession with keeping it short. I make my share of jokes about Martin Scorsese's The Irishman. "Oh, it's so long! Why can't it be shorter?" Okay. Maybe they were more whines than jokes, but seemed important to diminish it because of the time it took to watch it. Shameful, when I consider how I reacted to a friend of mine complaining about Peter Jackson's King Kong going on for more than three hours. I was agog. King Kong? Peter Jackson? Why couldn't it have been six hours?
These are unique times. Time to reflect. Savor. Enjoy. Between the mounting fear and depression. And I could go on and on about this, but you've got things to do.