Just My Imagination (Runnin' Away With Me)

Someone said to me recently that i had a "very unique" imagination and it was the semantic howler as much as anything else that started me thinking about the subject. ("Unique" is an absolute and doesn't take kindly to qualifiers.)

Do i have a unique imagination? Well, of course i do -- anyone with an imagination has one that is unique to themself. But i find that very few people these days seem to have any imagination at all and i started wondering why.

Donald Fagen, in his memoirs -- the excellent "Eminent Hipsters" -- called them TV Babies: people born since 1960 who grew up being babysat by mindless programming on television. They never developed an imagination because they didn't have to, they had everything handed to them. I didn't: i watched television, sure, but i preferred reading books. I don't even now own a working TV -- i did, but as i rarely watched anything, why bother to replace it?

Someone, and i wish i could remember who, once said that they "prefer the radio to television because the pictures are better." Absolutely!

(Full disclosure: i do have a few television series on DVD, and i watch those occasionally, but they are mostly series that are pretty insane, like "The Big Bang Theory" and "Father Ted.")

It's not going to get any better. Kids nowadays rarely seem to get their faces out of their phones; well, not just kids!