Once, five or six years ago, I woke up with a discomforting thought: if they arrest me for life or else I get hit by a bus, I might never watch The Godfather. I remember strolling outside my house that day, walking an imaginary dog and thinking I have to do something about it. Obviously, the easiest thing was to buy a bottle of red wine and watch The Godfather and The Godfather II in one sitting. Which is exactly what I did next. The experience was intoxicating. In fact, I was fully prepared to take on The Godfather III in the early hours of dawn. Something I never did.
Thoughts like that have appeared throughout my life with depressing frequency, and each time I felt a mixture of guilt and excitement that made me drop everything and rush to doing it. La Strada. Hopscotch. Einstein on the Beach. Etc. etc. Sometimes, however, the intoxication was wearing thin, and thrill gave way to boredom. Much of the culture that my life had to contain (or so I believed) was not worth waking up to in the middle of the night.
An obvious thought, of course, but you need to come to it. You do not just overthrow those cultural imperatives - you have to live them down. There is no question that they contain millions of fantastic discoveries, and Infinite Jest might be worth it in the end (who is there to find out, anyway?), but equally, there could be more sense in rereading a childhood favourite you had long forgotten. Just the other day, I thought of Lulu, that hopelessly maligned last album by Lou Reed I had never heard. I logged onto my Spotify account, but something distracted me, and next thing you know - I was crying to "Heavenly Arms". Again.
In other words, fuck the bus. Yes, sure, once in a while I still wake up with a thought that I might never watch Lawrence of Arabia. But the thing is - that thought is no longer discomforting.
