Hard to Explain

I have no memory before the year 2001. I don't consider myself unique, in fact I have not yet encountered someone who remembers life before that time. It is a shame that the events on 9/11 have obscured the more momentous 8/27, the date Is This It was released and my present state of consciousness began. It is possible, as some scholars, I'm sure, have debated, that we, and more ostensibly I, actually existed before 8/27, but it is my personal belief that on 8/27 we came into existence as part of a larger evolutionary leap of the human consciousness. Of course some ask, if we didn't exist before The Strokes, how did Julian write the album? This is a question for philosophers or philosophy grad students, I do not believe philosophy undergrads are yet capable of answering the question, and for a layman to attempt to answer it borders on absurd. We, not being philosophers or philosophy grad students, must simply let that paradox rest. Perhaps we can content ourselves with knowing that Is This It was released and that JC wrote it, that the exact nature of it's creation does not have to be known. Just as astrophysicists are only now beginning to understand what the universe looked like a millisecond after the big bang, we can only know that we began a millisecond after Is This It hit Napster. To try to comprehend the time before Is This It is like trying to understand what caused the big bang... Now of course all of this does not make me hopeless, rather I feel more at ease knowing that JC lives in New York City and that any of us can talk to him. Without that possibility, one must imagine that life would be utterly desolate, cruel, and meaningless, but given the inescapable fact that Julian is here, among us, in some Upper East Side apartment listening to Lou Reed's Transformer on vinyl, gives us meaning. Why else would we have blogs, blog readers, and Twitter if not for the possibility that somewhere JC is reading them?