The Indignation!

As Charles and I sat in his Norman dining room last night, a fire roaring behind us and a bottle of Bordeaux on the table, we played music on cassette tapes and caught up on life. At one point he popped in an old demo he had made with a friend in London back in the eighties, an experimental guitar track featuring Charles yelling in German, which I countered by pulling my self-produced solo record from 2003 off my portable hard drive (both Charles and I originally wanted to be musicians). We then reminisced. After recalling our former lives, we shared stories of the somewhat naive visions and dreams of our youth, and of course found commonalities immediately from the wine and spirits world. I started talking about how useful indignation used to be, and how as a teenager I would often try to impress people with my knowledge of music by pointing out how one song was just a copy of another—"that's just a rip off of (fill in the blank)!"

"Getting mad about music seemed like a great way to look cool," I said; "You could point out how a song sucked or why it was lame, but it was really just to draw attention to your own more cultivated taste. Looking back on it now, I'm sure I came off as a giant, self-absorbed douche. That's how I view similar personalities in the booze business today, at least." 

Indignation is a big part of being young. Most of us begin to rebel against the comforts of daily living as adolescents. You discover what you think you stand for by denouncing what you hate. Bold critical statements become a great way to draw attention to yourself, but it's not until later you learn what people are silently thinking about that sort of behavior. It's easy to believe the world agrees with you when no one argues back. Silence is not acknowledgment, however. Just because no one publically challenges you doesn't mean they agree (by the way, there's a great Mr. Show sketch about that phenomenon).

Most of us eventually grow out of that phase. Some more quickly than others. Girls definitely much faster than guys.

Some people don't, however, as the internet so often reminds us.

-David Driscoll