106) Vonnegut's Exhibitionists

Kurt Vonnegut wrote in his novel Bluebeard (one of my favorites from him):

moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world's champions.

The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each area of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tapdances on the coffee table like Fred Astair or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an 'exhibitionist.'

I normally yield to Vonnegut as the end all be all American intellectual, but for some reason this quote did not sit well with me.  Without a doubt he is talking about me and I would proudly call myself an Exhibitionist.  But he uses the word "worthless" and I guess that is where my hang up exists.  I do not measure the value of my level of giftedness (as a musician, artist, athlete) against top professionals of the Human Race.  Instead, I measure the value against what my experiences in these artistic forms afford me.

The number one thing they afford me is a bad ass song/painting/picture that I get to show off to my friends and family.  Over the years I have shared many laughs over my moderate success in whichever art form I choose to explore, and I am sure we can all agree my work can be characterized as "bad ass".

However, and more importantly, my attempts at art have afford me time with people I truly care about.  Writing music is less about the song for me than it is about the collaboration with a friend on how to make it better.  This includes the connection we have because of that song.  We can listen to it years from now and often remember the circumstances around when we recorded it, where we were and what our lives were like at that time.

So basically I am saying, in this one instance (and so far only this one instance) I am smarter than Vonnegut.