I like to keep that higher ground

Along the highway that susurusses into Cape Town, once were, two concrete hunks that tapered fatly upwards that worked as cooling towers for a now decommissioned power plant. "The towers" were an awesome point of reference when you needed to sabotage someone's journey by thrusting them into Athlone, or a mile marker to give them courage that they'd just made it out.

Last year, most of the city perched on high buildings and about the mountain to watch it implode. There's a video somewhere. You had to be there. You had to participate in sharing the moment. You had to experience it. Apparently.

And I watched amidst hundreds of people, as the first tower twisted in on itself, a jagged scar creaking impossibly fast up its side, and then falling like a fat four year old suddenly overcome by a glass door. And some seconds later, like a wheezing Toyota Conquest in a convoy of cars owned by far too wealthy relatives, the dull boom washed lethargically across us.

The twenty or so seconds that it took watching, whelmed me. Not overly, or underly, just sufficiently to say "oh, that's something". And that's what it was really, something. Some thing. A thing, of which it made up some.

I looked at some of the photos afterward, mid-fracturing, and it overwhelmed.

More than being a part of it. Which was peculiar. Second hand, sense-limiting captures of the event were more satisfying to see than having been part of the raw and unfiltered experience.

Which is out of the vein from what (I'm supposing) other "people" use to weight the satisfaction of experience. A feeling of authenticity - having been at the soccer match where you couldn't see the ball for spit, having stood in the crowds at the concert where you were jostled in the kidneys as distorted speakers argued with the screaming tits around, and other such fluff.

Part of the reason I mercilessly taunt with the economics of filtered authenticity, a DVD rather than a concert ticket say, is mostly because crowds of people upset me, and partly because it doesn't make sense, as a connoisseur of soccer, to want to cede the experiential indulgence of television, with its incredible definition, picture and replays, for the misplaced sense of participation sitting in an uncomfortable seat in an obscure corner of a stadium.

It's most likely all of this is an elaborate and over-rationalised argument that masks a stubborn streak of small-mindedness, cynicism, and agoraphobia. Still.