I’m so tired of the one-sidedness of everything. Either you’re in favor of something or you’re opposed to it, either you’re liberal or you’re conservative, either you like the Barenaked Ladies or you hate them.

I’m more of a “neither”-kind of person. I don’t hate anything much that I can think of, but I do have some strong opinions. What I have a problem with, though, is society’s desperate need to generalize everything.

If I’m in favor of higher car and gas taxes, I’m automatically a green-minded, socialist nitwit who’s opposed to progress and personal freedom. On the other hand, if I’m in favor of lower taxes on industry investments, I’m suddenly a deep-blue conservative destroying the earth.

But it’s never that easy, is it? I mean, certainly, Charlie Parker was a bop musician. But his music didn’t just pop (bop?) out of nowhere. He grew up with swing, blues… band music for all I know, in the 1920s and 30s. And even if he would distance himself from some of those genres later, they’d still be a part of the fabric that constituted Parker’s musical style - which most definitely is a multi-faceted affair… pretty much like me and you, I guess.

In movies, I love the classic Ivory/Merchant productions from the 1980’s, I’m completely hooked on everything Michelangelo Antonioni and Woody Allen ever did on screen and I enjoy the occasional John Hughes teen-flick.

Equally, I love the scratchy old Robert Johnson recordings as much as I like the tremendous, overwhelming and ultrasmooth productions of David Foster. Not to forget my obsession with Charlie Parker and John Coltrane.

I don’t think any single politician or political party holds the absolute truth. I don’t think of beauty and ugliness as objective terms. For every view I hold, I feel there are a finite or infinite (I don’t know) number of opposing views that drag me in a different direction. And that holds true for all of us, I’m sure.

I know I’d be terrified if I ever met a person and suspected otherwise, anyway.