I want to be wrong

AKA Notes in a conversational style (can I get back to formal writing? stay tuned and find out!)

1.

I mean, ok, so I will never be 100% satisfied in Providence. Just because I like big cities. It's just who I am.

But.

This is supposed to be a place with a great art and music scene. I know I won't fine much cutting-edge techno or house here, if there even is such a thing, but, now that I feel that I must be closer to the end than the beginning, I'm also thinking about how much I haven't done, how there must be something I am missing.

It's not like all people here are racist or anything like that. Far from it. It's just... more that... many of the times I go out, I end up being disappointed. And not in the same way I was in New York (it's the difference between a restaurant that tries to come up with innovative flavor combinations and mostly fails versus, say, a Thai restaurant that serves decent peanut sauce with their satay - not bad but - one starts to think about other Thai restaurants). But I have to consider that I am going to the wrong places, that there is some parallel life here that I could be living.

For all of my social awkwardness, I have always been able to find some sort of place for myself in the past and now I seem to be failing. I am trying to take responsibility for my actions, to try and understand my interactions with others towards improving them, towards expressing myself better, towards finding my place. But there's a limit, isn't there?

2.

It's like with painting. Cezanne was Cezanne and I guess I am a Modernist at heart in the sense of, well, Cezanne had his time and then people built on his innovations and now there's no reason to paint like Cezanne anymore. But of course, people do.

And it's like that with music, too. There are good bands here, but the ones I know are working in established traditions. And not the ones I care much about. Yet I buy new house records that don't sound like they were made in 2013. And yet, it feels different, still, then seeing another guitar band.

Most of it has always been crap, really. Cultural production, I mean. Cezanne is just one painter. How many other people were painting at the same time? How many of them had ideas, influenced others? Very, very few.

I'm always holding out for the big ideas. And there are never really that many to go around.

I guess it's the critic side of my personality. I've never really been a fan. There's always a time when a band stops doing the thing I think makes them interesting, and I move on. People who accuse critics of merely trend-hopping may be right at times, but they are also missing this other point, the search for ideas, the search for cultural impact, for narrative. The desire to make sense of the world on a grand scale.

People with that desire tend to leave places like this, don't they?

And yet I can't help but feel that there is a certain arrogance to waving one's hand and saying "got it" and leaving (though it is natural - every tree is unique and yet they are all trees).

Another conjunction.

I will always be crazy.
This world will always make me crazy.

,which is it,