Mood: 
Tired
Listening to: Serial Experiments Lain - Duvet (cyberpunk/synthwave 80's remix)
I’ve been thinking about formative experiences for a while now. We usually talk about formative years and experiences that take place early in life, but they never stop. For some people, perhaps, it happens less frequently, sometimes so little as to be regarded as never happening at all. It’s probably not a controversial statement to claim that the first few years of a person’s life, perhaps the first five or so, creates the basis of their being. The next five years or so adds onto that. But I rarely see or hear people talk about formative experiences that happened in their late teens, and early to mid-twenties or even late twenties? Never.
Of course, the way that certain experiences basically carve themselves into your soul when you’re young is special indeed. But I can think of moments later on in life that had similar effects on me – when I was around 18, 19 years old, reading The Dark Tower series by Stephen King rewired parts of my brain, while only a couple of years ago Disco Elysium did the same, on a grander scale. As long as you’re open and curious it’s possible to grow even as you get older. And I’m not even that old.
As I’m writing this, David Lynch just passed away a few days ago. I would say he’s been another formative force in my life, from my late teens/early 20’s to now. As a young person, it’s easy to be fascinated by any weird media thrown your way, but as you get older that baffled feeling erodes, grows a little number, but some things still manage to fascinate you – I did not like everything that Lynch created, or I didn’t like some of his things as much as other fans did, but there was always something interesting. In a creative landscape where the safe, familiar and mundane does numbers it’s like a life preserver thrown my way.
Because there are parts of Lynch’s works that I just get. That I feel in a way that most mainstream media fail to elicit. It feels so pretentious, and it’s not like I don’t like some mainstream things – mainstream does not equal bad – but many of the things that have touched me to my core are at least somewhat weird, obscure, or esoteric. The dreamlike feeling of many of Lynch’s films, the uncanniness… the humanity. People will call his works deep, too deep, and too weird, but – not in spite of this, but because of it, I think he was able to touch upon things few other pieces of fiction have managed.
When the mother cries over her daughter, Laura’s, death in Twin Peaks, it is with such raw and real emotion that I rarely see otherwise. When Laura Dern’s character in Wild at Heart recounts her cousin Dale’s bizarre and gross behaviours to her boyfriend – who exclaims ”hell, peanut” as she tells him how Dale would put cockroaches in his anus – it’s easy to laugh and be grossed out in turn, but there is a rawness to these scenes that can never be replicated in the sterile movie-making environment often characterized by the mainstream. Showing us the lives of very odd, but also very genuine people. The weirdo down your street or, indeed, the weirdo inhabiting your own flesh.
"It's too bad he couldn't visit that ol' Wizard of Oz and get some good advice."
"Too bad we all can't, baby."
This year and for the years to come I’m going to be weirder. I’m going to keep on being weird, and I hope you will too. Your own brand of weirdness.
For Lynch.
But more importantly, for yourself.