Retrospective of the Future

Here are my Broadway Theatre seats. It really is hard to take a picture that puts them in context. The mantel with the Tony is on the other side of the room, but in direct eye line of anyone seated in the chairs. The pool table is in between so for my less than theatrical friends, the seats are front row center for a 9-Ball game.

As I was cleaning the chairs I found a piece of gum stuck to the back of one of the frames. You can only see it if you are lying on the floor looking up. Unless there is a party that turns into a complete drunken bacchanal no one will ever notice. I started to remove the gum but thought better. What is a real theatre seat without gum stuck to it? It is a DNA sample of an actual patron of the arts.

Some day eons from now when the archaeologist are digging through the site of the Great LA Earthquake they will find the iron support of this chair and analyze the DNA. They will be very excited to actually have a picture of what kind of person lived on this spot thousands of years before. By then they will be able to conclude all kinds of forensic information from the sample. They will be able to read the thoughts the person was thinking the moment the gum was removed from their mouth. They will conclude that some New Yorker with Broadway theater tickets was actually anxious to see a show about a ventriloquist. Or.... Not.

It points out something very profound about us humans. The only value anything has is the patina of our thought that we place there. Unless that thought is passed on from person to person there is no real value. To the uninformed observer this is just a couple of out dated audience seats. Museums are filled with objects that are quite ordinary except for the story told about them. So where is the value, certainly not in the object but in our mind. I guess what we think about ourselves and other things is the most valuable thing in the universe.

So the value of life and all its effects is up to us. If we endow what we are experiencing with value it is priceless.

As you were,
Jay

Monday - "The Bergen Trunk"