Prince had everything he needed to express himself.

Your average schmuck may not. A person might be a superb sailor, able to trim, tuck, reef and whatever but he will require a large body of water, a boat, a way to get the boat back and forth or rent a slip. However, kids, college, a low-paying job could intervene.

Just having a talent, or skill set, doesn’t mean someone will have the opportunity to use them. A lot else usually has to come together.

One of my own great regrets is that I could have accomplished so much more, learned so much more than I did.
Now that I’ve retired, I haven’t done any of the things I promised myself I’d do if I had the time. I never wrote that novel, or learned a musical instrument, or picked up a foreign language, or read all those books I never got around to reading (including my old textbooks, which I now look through and they seem impenetrable, like they are written in Egyptian hieroglyphics. I wasted most of my life, never got really good at anything, I’ve always been a dilettante–easily bored, always lazy, I never stuck to anything long enough to get really good at it. Even the experience I gathered in my career is now all obsolete–professionally useless. The industry and technology I worked in for so long didn’t stop when I did.

This is why I admire people like Prince so much. Its not even because I particularly care for his music. My own tastes do not run to pop, funk, soul, R&B etc, they are more into classic, acid and hard rock and blues. But I have profound admiration for his drive and his expertise, his sheer competence. That solo he performed in that clip I linked to was not even in his style, but it clearly demonstrated he could hit it out of the park even when it was not really his best pitch. He shredded that riff, and totally eclipsed a set of genuine rock heavyweights who just barely backed him up. And it wasn’t even what he does best. He just had the chops to do it, without even breaking a sweat.

You gotta hand it to the dude That’s class.

And a good case can be made for not knowing what I’ve missed and being the less for it. All the same I’m glad I’ve taken the lower road and equally delighted others have taken the other.

In the back time, a man’s life would not be that much different from his grandfather’s, and he knew his grandson’s life would not be that much different from his own. Sure, things happened, the king might die, or a war would break out, or a famine or plague would sweep the land, or a great storm. But on the whole, day-to-day life remained pretty much the same. Even the big events that came along, like an earthquake, were just interruptions, islands in the stream.

But today, the changes come faster and faster, and we easily see how different our life is from that of our own parents, and even how different things are now compared to our youth. In my own life I’ve seen many major changes in the common artifacts of everyday life, things that arrived on the scene during my memory; TV, jet airliners, computers, cell phones, the Interstate Highway System, the internet, the ubiquity of plastic as a building material, synthetic fabrics, just to name a few, and those are just technological changes. The social and cultural changes have been just as profound.

I notice this, but younger folks don’t seem to. When I watch TV and movies about things that happened during my youth, I’m amazed how much they get wrong, the clothes, the haircuts, the attitudes, even the rhythms of day to day speech. And I become more and more convinced that people today aren’t any smarter than they were back then–and what’s more, they don’t even realize it. We don’t seem to have learned all that much.

When you’re young its fun keeping up, its part of being hip and aware of one’s universe. But after a while it seems to just exhaust us, we get innovation fatigue, we get tired of fucking with it. The language changes and we become aware how stilted and remote we start sounding to others. We don’t get the jokes, and even if we do, they’re often not funny. We can’t keep up with the slang, the cultural references overwhelm us, its like being in a foreign country where you only know the language and the culture imperfectly. The natives, even if they’re friendly, seem so different, so strange, so alien. And we realize we must appear the same way to them.

I’m sure this has always happened, throughout history, but I am convinced it is happening more and more to everyone now. The speed of change is increasing, and it is becoming more and more obvious. CNN has been doing a series of documentaries on past decades, you know, “The Sixties”,”The Seventies”, even “The Eighties”. I expect its only a matter of time before they do “The Nineties”. And there are kids in high school today who were born in the 21st century. Hell, to me, that was just yesterday.

Human beings are adaptable, but surely there must come a time when the speed of change exceeds our capacity to adapt to it. This must eventually lead to psychological and social problems. Even now I perceive how most of the people my parents knew also knew each other. Now, hardly anyone I know knows any of the other people I know. All the people we’re intimate with seem to live far away, cars and telephones replace daily contact, and we don’t know our neighbors. We no longer live in villages, or neighborhoods. This just ain’t natural.

Surely evolution has done nothing to prepare us for such a rapidly changing universe. I remember my maternal grandparents, my grandmother died when I was a little kid, the last to go, my grandfather, died when I was in my late twenties–a lifetime ago. They were born in the nineteenth century! I heard them talk about the Spanish American War, I heard my own parents talk about the Depression and World War Two, those events were part of my day-to-day memories of shared family history. I know the names and faces of movie actors who got their start during silent films, of comedians and celebrities who worked in broadcast radio, who never made it to the boob tube.

My grandparents emigrated to another country, with all the dislocation that implies. But in a way, so have I. When I was in the Navy, some of my shipmates had enlisted during WWII. One of the destroyers in my squadron had Rising Suns painted on her bridge wings, trophies of Japanese planes she had shot down. My own father was bombed by the Imperial Japanese Air Force. Those events seemed to be so distant in time to me then, but I realize now I’m twice as far away, in years, from my own service as I was from The Big One then. And my own sleek, proud, deadly ship, USS Dewey, DLG-14, commissioned only a few years before I shipped out on her, was broken up for scrap over a decade ago.

History gradually morphs from something that happened, to something that is still happening, something that never stopped happening.