Identity in the Age of Rewind.

We Are the Loops We Live In 

From The Poetry and Lyric Column of the Council-Of-Concerned-Conservationists:

Detritus: Mal’Poetica.

Grannies Just Wanna Have Fun.

Reinterpreted by Black Cloud, Your Despondent Correspondent & Resident Poet Laureate

Time marches on, but sometimes it limps in glitter heels.

It has been 42 years since Girls Just Wanna Have FUN detonated across MTV, scattering sequins, teased hair, and the suspicion that adulthood might be optional. Today, that suspicion has been confirmed in the form of an 81-year-old grandmother caught using counterfeit tickets to ride the Funland bumper cars in Rehoboth Beach.

Yes, there is an official police report. It reads like a minor misdemeanor. I read it as a conservation bulletin: the last of a rare subspecies—Cyndia lauperensis geriatrica—sighted in the wild, still performing her mating dance of pure, uncut joy.

I have long maintained that you are the VH-1 loop you absorbed in your formative years. If you imprinted on Lauper, you will live to a ripe age armed with orthopedic shoes and a disregard for the ticketing system. If, like me, you stewed in It’s My Life by Talk Talk and Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fears, you’ll carry a mind that is equal parts slow-motion defiance and panoramic melancholy—watching the world’s power plays drift past like scenery on an endless highway, cataloguing their weather patterns, but rarely mistaking them for destinations. It shows. We are what we rewound.

GRANNIES JUST WANNA HAVE FUN (Council Memory-Loop Version)

🎶 I come home in the morning light

My children say, when you gonna live your life right?

Oh children dear, this reel still runs—

This granny just wants to have fun.

Oh, grannies just wanna have fun.

The phone rings in the middle of night

My grandson shouts, what you gonna do with your life?

Oh darling boy, my song’s not done—

The video plays and I’m still the one.

Oh, grannies just wanna have fun.

When the chorus comes, my feet still know—

The frame-by-frame from that long-ago show.

I’m not old, I’m just well begun—

’Cause grannies, they wanna have fun.

Oh, grannies just wanna have fun.

Council Afterword: Amusement Parks as Cultural Habitat

At the Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists, we are tasked with safeguarding vanishing ecologies: bog turtles, old-growth forests, and the unmediated laughter of people over 70. If these grannies must turn to ticket forgery to maintain their rightful place in the carousel-bumper car-cotton candy biome, we have failed as custodians of joy.

Policy recommendation: Establish an Intergenerational Play Reserve. No fences, no turnstiles—just the ancient migratory route between the funnel cake stand and the Tilt-A-Whirl, patrolled not by police but by ushers in Members-Only jackets. Because when the last bumper-car matriarch leaves the arena, we will have conserved nothing but the empty hum of the generator.

COUNCIL PSYCHOLOGICAL DOSSIER: BLACK CLOUD

Filed under “Field Operatives – Poetic & Prognostic”

Authored by Dr. Faye C. Schüß, Medical and Mental Hygiene Expert, TIFTS Fellow (The Institute For Theoretical Studies)

Primary Imprinting:

It’s My Life – Talk Talk (Existential defiance; selective engagement with reality) Everybody Wants to Rule the World – Tears for Fears (Panoramic awareness of human folly)

Current Cognitive Profile:

Strategic Melancholy: Approaches the present as a series of déjà vu weather patterns, noting pressure systems of power and ambition but seldom stepping into the storm.

Archival Thinking: Stores mental events as film loops; frames and sequences often replay before conclusions are drawn. Slow-Motion Defiance: Resistant to panic or fad; moves at a tempo immune to algorithmic urgency.

Endangered Outlook: Mind functions as a conservation area for moods, atmospheres, and truths too delicate for daily use.

Council Note: Agent Black Cloud is to be protected from overexposure to trending content, as such exposure risks disrupting his carefully maintained mental cinematheque.