Bears

Not quite the sense of menace I was
hoping for, but that'll have to do...

One of the effects of this new Internet wonderland of information is that now everyone feels they are in competition with everyone else, everywhere in the world. It's as if every famous drummer who has ever lived, and an endless parade of seeming child prodigies, are now poking their fat noses into your studio and saying “Yeah, but can you do this? Or this? How are you going to make it if you can't do this? Or this? All of us are doing this— why aren't you doing it? What about this?”

The reality is, it's just you, the gigs available to you, and the other people already playing those gigs.

There's an old, dumb-ass, redneck joke about two men in the wilderness, who encounter a bear. One of them begins preparing to do some running— in the usual inane telling he puts on running shoes. Whatever. The other says “Bill, are you crazy? You can't outrun that bear!” To which the first guy replies, “That's OK, I only have to outrun you.”

Haw haw, that guy's going to get mauled by a bear! It's easy to mock the savagery of these frontier people, but now imagine the bear is Vinnie Colaiuta... no, imagine the bear is the abstract concept of career opportunity... no, imagine the bear is a call for a gig. The non-running redneck is “eaten” by the call for the job— he gets the gig in other words— while the other, who has been wasting his time learning to sprint (which, it turns out, is not a primary wilderness survival skill) ends up alone, naked and afraid...

That's not it, either.

It's more as if every bear/drummer in the world has been air-dropped into your back yard, and whatever you thought was your life/career has been instantly transformed into a frantic, futile, and very short, scramble for your life, before being engulfed and ripped quite literally limb from limb. But what they didn't tell you is that the bears are all holograms piped in from zoos around the world, and none of them can actually hurt you.

Grasping that, you go about your business building a shelter, finding a water source, and gathering pine nuts, and are able to survive quite comfortably. Our character with the running shoes thinks this is the way the world actually is, and now puts on a bear costume in hopes of blending in and moving up the bear hierarchy; but since the bears aren't real, and himself having no actual survival skills relevant to his true environment, he soon starves to death.

...

Yeah. This bear thing was just supposed to be the preface to something else, but it kind of got away from me. We'll delve into this subject with a little more discipline soon...