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So lacking any apparent sense of gravity today (or ever) I’ll do humor. Let’s hope it’s cheesy.
Allegedly, for this is what I will call it. Humor.
Gravity out the window.
Besides, I don’t do gravity well.
I wear gravity like a bad hat and inevitably I come across as a sophomoric fool when I try to be serious and mature. For what is gravity but a sense of refined and self-conscious maturity? Lacking a sense of maturity that our common social structure presumes as a requirement for those wishing to indulge in “modern” society, I am not a natural wearer of this “gravity” suit.
Wow I just threw in some astronaut humor.
I can see where this post is headed.
Humor.
Back to it.
Well there is an email making the rounds, perhaps you have been unfortunate enough to receive it like I did a couple of weeks back. With the subject “Ingrish,” I found it in my inbox and discovered wrapped inside its pretty package a series of photos lifted off a humor website called Chairman LOL, which purports to post pictures of epic Chinese to English translation failures in the form of print ads and signs spanning the repulsive to the mildly offensive. The email houses a mishmash montage of 31 images of laughable and cringe-worthy malapropisms courtesy of someone whose English is not their first language (and by the looks of it, not their second or third or four-hundredth).
So then. My comic post. What do I do now?
I have a 31 hilarious photos. How do I add anything further to increase their amusement factor?
I suppose I could list each photo individually and follow it with some smart-ass imbecilic comment which would further heighten and feed the humor element of the adjoining photo, but that is lazy. To make individual comments about each individual photo (which are all funny in and of themselves) is like shooting fish in a barrel. How can the comments not be funny? To pass off these comments as “humor” strikes me as a bit complacent and lazy.
Nah.
I need to challenge myself and put my much-touted (by myself) authorial skills to work.
There are 31 photos in this montage. I’m going to write a story. A sequence of events and all 31 of these photos will be brought into play individually during the narrative as a means of capturing and explaining the story segment where it appears. Starting with number 1. I’m not shifting the photos to accommodate my story…my story will work around the order the photos appear in the email. Why make this easy? I’d like to think this is a little more creative than unimaginative humorous comments about something that is humorous already.
These signs are obviously Asian in origin but many of them look like they are not strictly Chinese, so in order to ease the flow of my story, I will refer to an imaginary Asian land with imaginary Asian names, a real melange of Asian motifs which will come together in my tale as laid out by the Ingrish snapshots.
Now the tale.
Most of the geographical names are purely fictional, so hands off Wikipedia while you read.
____________
After deplaning and claiming my luggage at Porteporn International Airport in Themia, I tiredly walked through the doors into the stifling 95 degree humidity and looked for Mi Li. Or looked for her car; I had no idea what she looked like in real life but she told me she would wait outside by the curb in her Gold North Korean made Ilsong convertible. I scanned the street lazily and saw the small, jelly bean-shaped car immediately. I walked toward it, and as I drew closer was dismayed to note that Mi Li, rather than being the 115 pound, ivory-skinned brunette I envisioned, was in actuality about 220 pounds with a muddy, cratered complexion which I imagine is what smallpox did to its victims before the advent of internet dating sites.
I shrugged privately, resigned to making the best of this Asian trip.
I’d flown thousands of miles, I wasn’t about to dump her now in this strange land. I walked to the car and squeezed in after first unloading my luggage. Mi Li drove aggressively through the Porteporn streets, dodging stray pedestrians and animals alike.
We traded small talk about my plane trip and she gave me a rundown on life in this sweltering sauna of a city as we headed toward the first of her promised treats. I was only going to be in town for 10 days and she told me she had arranged a compact schedule that would expose me to the many varied delights of Porteporn’s underground culture and vibrantly perverted nightlife. Food, women…it was all in store for me, she had laid out a calculated schedule for me. Judging by her rotund appearance, I began bracing myself for lots of the former and hopefully a bunch of the latter from various sources as well; I shuddered to consider that perhaps Mi Li was lumping herself into that category. For my taking. 220 pounds of hot sweaty pleasure.
This trip promised to be something. Not sure what.
The Ilsong sputtered like a tired golf cart and every windowed opening in this little vinyl interior-decorated car was fully drawn in order to allow the hot sultry air to rush in and bathe our bodies in smoky urban Asian grit. The car was so sparse that it didn’t even attempt the facade of comfort. There were no vents or the vaguest gesture of a climate control system. Just a block of solid plastic dashboard looking as utilitarian as a Korean schoolmarm’s sensible uniform.
The “convertible” designation, as I would learn, was rather laughable for all Ilsongs were convertibles. They came out of the factory minus any roof whatsoever to speak of…a cost-cutting measure by the carmaker. Questionably “great” during hot summer days, scary and uncomfortable as shit during the winter and monsoon season.
Convertible. Ha, yes, my 10-day Themian hefty girlfriend/tour-guide drove a “convertible.”
After some time, we left the madness of the crowded city behind and embarked on a long stretch of bumpy and careening 2-lane State-unmaintained highway. The air seemed to cool just a bit as we entered a region where the road was lined by lush green vegetation. The sky, visible through the Ilsong’s roofless headspace, was golden blue, and the car sounded silent as we left the honks and shouts of Porteporn behind.
Out of the corner of my eye I noted Mi Li turned her bulbous face in my direction while driving and she did this repeatedly for a stretch of 10 minutes. I began to worry about her driving. A few times the Ilsong strayed into the opposing lane but nevertheless she continued to disregard the incidental fact that she was driving this tin bucket at a dramatically quivering 100 kph. She seemed drawn to the scrutiny of my face. If I wasn’t so flattered, I might have chided her driving.
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
Now there was a loaded question from my furry “little” Culinary & Sexual Asian Docent.
Unsure how to answer.
“Uh…not very. I had a large meal on the plane and this weather…” I lied.
“OK,” she answered in a subdued tone. “We’ll be at the club in about fifteen minutes,” she promised as a car headed in the opposite direction (also a convertible Ilsong) beeped helplessly and caused Mi Li to correct her trajectory by jerking the car back into the correct lane. Listening to the other Ilsong honk futilely reminded me of a Chihuahua’s overly-bold yapping.
As if enlivened by our proximity to the club, she seemed energized and smiled.
“You will loooove this club. It’s very special to me.”
“I can’t wait,” I uttered.
She refused tell me what was so “special” about this club despite my repeated requests for more info. She would giggle and merely tell me “It’s very special!” And the name of the club, Fistful of Dollars, sounded mysterious, and indeed, intriguingly frightening.
After the last exchange, Mi Li appeared to calm down slightly and finally concentrated on her driving. The thick humid air streamed over the car and it even sounded sluggish and dense, a deep baritone monotony of road noise.
The final stretch of our trip was a small gravel road which Mi Li turned onto from the main highway. The road was covered with stones and dirt and I could hear the Ilsong’s thin tires burst fragments of stone and scatter sand as it made its way anxiously toward the distant shape of Fistful of Dollars. The structure grew rapidly in size as we approached, a large, plantation style two-story mansion. After parking, we stretched our legs and made our way into the lobby where I was astounded to note one of the walls was lined with glass cabinets filled with all manner of apparatuses that all shared one commonality: they were all slenderly shaped handles that culminated in a large protrusion on one end and they came in various guises. For instance, one appeared to be a shovel stick but instead of a scoop, there was a plastic ball covered with protruding spikes (also plastic) and another looked like an axe except at the end was a plastic monkey head.
“————,” Mi Li shouted in her native Themese language. The elderly gentlemen struck me as a Walmartian fixture here in this most remote and unlikely of all places. He barked back at Mi Li in the same language and rushed to the back room.
“You ready?” Mi Li asked flirtatiously as her eyes sparkled dangerously.
Two hours later we were back on the road.
Having just endured the gravel road (which seemed twice as long on the trip back), I retreated into the door panel and waited desperately for the ride to be over. My guts screamed in agony each time Mi Li, merry as hell, swerved jerkily to correct her wandering heading. She whistled a very annoying Themian folk song that sounded vaguely like Cindy Lauper. Whistled it into the open friggin’ air. I was doubled over and tried to ignore her effluent cheerfulness.
“You enjoy?” she asked.
I half-heartedly faked a nod.
“I enjoy, you did wonderful with the hockey stick. MMMMMMM,” she hummed ecstatically. “Very good job. She rubbed my leg carefully. You OK? You like Monkey Pole?”
“It was alright,” I mumbled quietly as my guts and ass screamed again in response to her erratic driving and the mention of the dreaded Monkey Pole.
“Mi Li?”
“Yes honey?”
“That sign, the one when you leave. Was that a mistake or did they do that intentionally? Thank you for ‘fisiting.’ Did they put that extra “i” on purpose? A double entendre so to speak?”
“Entenld? What is that honey?” she asked and began whistling when I failed to answer.
Absorb the Pain. Feast on it.
Devour it.
Let it become One with you.
Fret not. Fear not.
Embrace and greet it with the voracious and courageous jaws of your soul.
Embrace the pain. Welcome it into your parlor. Make a bed for it, feed it. Smile at it and stoke a fire.
Make it welcome.
Then devour it. Seize it by its slimy tendrils, strangle it. Snuff it out. Pummel it against the ground.
The battle is invariably brutal and bloody and the emotional wounds cut deep and wide and the inner sanctum of your soul will spill out like hot oil.
Back in the 70s I saw this horrendous odd movie, I forget how the title was spelled.
It was “Ssss” or maybe “Sssss” or possibly even “Sss” but you get the point. It was a movie about snakes.
King Cobras to be exact and about a mad scientist who transforms a man into a snake, but I think the most fascinating thing I learned watching this agonizing attempt at entertainment was the fact that a mongoose can eat venomous snakes.
Now this may have been Hollywood junk science…the kind of crap scriptwriters take liberties with. I have not bothered verifying this mongoose factoid. But that is what I learned from the movie “Sss” or “Ssss” or “Sssss.” That is the prized knowledge I took away from this waste of celluloid. I was rather impressed with the common mongoose. You have this deadly serpent which can bring any man down but which is easily conquered by the innocuous and lowly mongoose.
The beastly subdued by the invisible…
You aborb the pain whole.
Your soul, fanged, aggressive, does not shirk from the menacing Pain.
You must allow it to rise and encircle the pain. Inhale the pain into its fleshy spirit and cast it to the discarded, empty fields of your psyche.
The pain will always hurt.
Do not seek to escape its effects. That is counterproductive.
Seek instead to escape the influence of pain on your peace of mind. Sit back, allow strength to rise, to suffuse your essence and prepare. For the pain.
Whereas others crumble; whereas they destroy themselves. They let the pain feast upon their soul.
But not you.
You confront the pain on a common ground and wrestle it to the ground. It is shocked.
Bewildered in the face of a worthy competitor. A rival. Unsurpassed tough.
A rival which does not bear Pain’s relentless degradation.
Pain shall be experienced.
Experience the pain and let it flood into the channels of your body. Let it fill the your last breath. But as it does, relish the sensation of embrace. Choke its throbbing lifeblood dry.
The pain wanders helplessly by the tentacles of your physical and emotional existence, but you control the walls. You are the host and the pain is gripped, controlled. Disquieted in the face of your fierce mental opposition.
The pain is never allowed to grow larger than you.
Your territorial walls are the outer barriers.
The pain cannot cross the perimeter of your being.
Pain, invited in, trapped and denatured
The pain, grown weak and tired, will subside. Will relinquish the battle.
Pain subsumed into the suffocating channels of your overpowering presence.
I’m about to let you in on a frightening fact.
Frightening to most because it robs us of a timeless crutch.
I believe life is intrinsically very fair.
Life, as we know it, has no ulterior motives and it is the ultimate arbiter of checks and balances. It will sieve through your every move, every choice and decision, whatever, and compute some instantaneous formulas and spit out a result quicker than you can alter the question.
The answer it spits out?
Why, you.
Your life. As it stands now. This minute, all its conflicts and inconsistencies and voids.
That is the answer.
I thought of this because of a trite Facebook encouragement I read; the sort I hear too often. It’s mindless inspiration recited emptily in order to ease feelings of self-doubt and lack of control. It’s verbal busy work and people re-hash it when they have nothing useful or insightful to offer. In other words, it’s an ubiquitous exaltation making the round in our simple-minded society.
In other words, I don’t have the vaguest idea what to say that might be critically constructive. I have nothing useful to say because none of this is your problem or fault. Your situation, this futile escapade, was forced upon your unwilling hands. Nothing you have done in your life through this point in time, none of your choices or lifestyle decisions, had anything to do with the fact that you are in this rocky position. It’s fate. It’s chance. You’ve been wronged by the cruel hands of fate! Your life sucks but you are exonerated from contributing to its creation. Life is unfair!
Because You Deserve Better.
Yes, you do.
It’s so much easier for me to sit here and lob empty niceties your way which will do nothing to open your eyes or initiate a kernel of truth from flaring to life in that head of yours.
Nope the truth is that fate is horribly FAIR. Fate has no favorites. Well, if it does, it favors those who have their shit in order. It favors those to who resist succumbing to egotistical or sensual short-sighted rewards. Fate doesn’t give a crap if you sabotage your own dreams and aspirations. Fate only cares about what it does best: handing down your sentence. You call it unfair, you say you deserve a better decision.
You Deserve Better is garbage.
It should be restated: you deserve what you get.
This little spot you find yourself mired in?
You created it through the sum of your life’s choices. This is no accident.
You deserve what you get.
This is a distasteful truth for it relinquishes blame on the part of all except the person at the center of this dire situation. You Deserve More essentially falsely assuages your soul and ego by reinforcing your deep need to be cleared of culpability while placing it squarely in the hands of all external elements beyond your control.
Life is very fair. Oppressively fair.
I’m sure if you extend the concept to extreme dogmatic lengths, it’s possible to conclude you are born into this life indebted for decisions you’ve made in previous existences. Of course life offers many rebukes to our complacent expectation of “fairness” but where do we draw the line? If someone contracts lung cancer after a lifetime of smoking, we don’t openly express the undignified and ruthless “he deserved it” sentiment, we merely think it. And of course it’s most likely true. But conversely, if a healthy young person contracts the same disease without ever having lit a cigarette in his life, who do we blame then?
The victim?
Probably not, but this is only because the blame we direct at the smoker is excused and structured by the scientific communal knowledge we have of smoking’s effects. It’s within our realm of comprehension and understanding that smoking leads to lung cancer. It’s a simple life fairness we can put our fingers on.
But what of that oblique and blurry world outside our common knowledge? Do we know it all? Or rather, how much do we not know? Can we know each and every facet of reality which fate gathers in order to pronounce its verdicts? We’re aware of the rudimentary cause and effect world of science…however, beyond that, there is a universe of causation we do not understand.
Is it truly within our ability to recognize when and where and how the lines of culpability and personal responsibility start and end?
Perhaps life’s strains of fairness extend beyond that which we can comprehend with our present knowledge. Fairness can only be easily deduced in some “obvious” instances which reside in our present field of cognitive skill.
Life’s fairness is unfathomable and this is ultimately why it is so frightening. If it were possible for us to account for all blame, the burden would be too great for man.
We cannot account, so we squirm.
Damnit. You know, sometimes a day off is nearly impossible to finagle into turning badly.
Enlivened, refreshed, you bounce out of bed and proceed to embrace the day with gusto; with a furiously optimistic zeal. Freed for the next 8 hours from the tethers of wage slavery.
Or so it should turn out, normally.
Today should have turned out this way.
I had it all planned. Last night I asked my son if he wanted to go eat breakfast at _ this morning and he said sure. Awesome man, I penned that sucker in and looked forward to it since eating out has become a novelty for me. There is very little more rewarding than going out for a nice, mellow breakfast on a day off while the rest of mankind is gearing up for another daily rat race. It’s very liberating and sets an awesome tone to kick off a vacation day.
I began this morning by dragging my butt out of bed on the heels of a 4.5 hour night of sleep. Tops. I went to bed very, very (uncharacteristically) late and I had no energy, mental or physical, as I clamored through my morning routine. I warmed 1/2 a cup of groggy coffee since I knew I would be drinking a lot more at _ but I needed some now in order to kickstart my lagging mind to life. I wasn’t in the best shape but the prospect of a delicious breakfast out with my son on a day neither of us had normal daytime obligations was enervating enough to sluggishly propel me through the morning paces. He woke up gingerly as well (the morning was shaping up to be hot and stuffy, L.A. in August, blah). We eventually dried off our post-shower dampness and jumped in the car. I stopped first to put gas since the fuel needle was dwindling near the bottom of its range and I doubted whether I had enough juice to even make it the couple of miles to _. After pumping her up, I drove to _ and parked in the half-empty parking lot. That’s another benefit of weekday morning dining: the crowd is sparse. The only other people you share the restaurant with are geriatrics, and during summer, school-aged kids accompanying parents or grandparents. I was so ready for breakfast. I had decided much earlier that I would have an omelette. Of some sort. I needed to check out the menu.
The waitress took our orders, and having noticed that the omelette I was contemplating came with mushrooms, a “food” I despise more than anything. I often wonder who in the hell first laid eyes on these fungal nightmares and thought, “Hm, that looks awfully delicious, let me try cooking one up!” They look terrible, they smell terrible. They are fungus. Mildew. We have special cleaners to clean that shit off our shower walls. There is absolutely nothing redeeming about mushrooms and I always ask restaurants to leave them out of any dish which includes their putrid chunks. If I find mushrooms have infiltrated my dish in any form or shape, I will disrupt my meal as I individually fish out each and every mushroom particle from my food and send it into orbit circling the outer perimeter of my dish rim. Once segregated into “do not eat” land, I ignore their filthy, earthy grayness while I enjoy the rest of my sane meal.
After the waitress brought my first heavenly cup of hot coffee, my son and I chatted. We got on the subject of pies since I was planning to order a whole one to take over my parents later in the day. He asked what my least favorite pie is since it is widely known that I will eat just about any pie that comes my way. I worship pies. “Hm, I would have to say peach,” I told him. Peach pies bore me. I don’t even care for peaches. Putting them in a pie is a waste of dough and corn syrup as far as I’m concerned. We continue chatting and I notice that a woman, 50-55ish, is walking briskly toward the restrooms (which are not double-layered behind another door in this section of the restaurant, by the way) and she is coughing, gagging up a storm. She sounds like she’s in the midst of a choking fit. She darts into the women’s restroom and the sounds of her bellowing gagging are disturbingly audible to my son and I at this table since there is only one door separating us from the catastrophe unfolding in that bathroom right now. I have no fucking clue what is going on in there nor do I want to, but it sounds like she’s coughing up a lung or two. Most likely a good portion of her guts as well. This is one of the most revolting sounds I can think of, especially while you wait patiently for your breakfast. Gag. God, now I wanted to gag. And of course, the timing was im-fucking-peccable because right at this moment our server brought our plates out. Ugh. Now if that woman would finally just patch it up, swallow down the loose bile and be quiet, I might be able to concentrate on my hunger again….or maybe not. Finally she walks out of the bathroom and I notice that she is slightly haggard/gross looking. Her legs look marked up and her overall physical presentation is slightly disturbing. Ugh. I dig into my omelette and realize I forgot to tell the waitress to hold the mushrooms. I forgot.
So my breakfast is helplessly hurtling toward the realm of epic failure.
The presence of mushrooms accompanied by the sound effects of faceless projectile gagging behind the thin restroom door have certainly splashed buckets of cold water on my appetite. I dig into my omelette half-heartedly and now it’s a struggle just to eat while circumventing intrusive mushrooms while simultaneously fooling myself that I am enjoying this for fuckssake. My son is bothered too. We both have that unnatural vomit aversion and we are not doing so well. He doesn’t finish his meal, but I do. We ask for a box to take his leftovers and I order a Dutch Apple Pie which the waitress brings in a box. I down the last of my coffee and we split. I feel as if my breakfast was tasteless and devoid of pleasurable sensation. As if I’d eaten that omelette intravenously.
We still had the pie. Perhaps there was still a chance to rescue this shattered breakfast dream…
Later this evening, I took the box happily over to my parents. I boasted of Dutch Apple joy, and my mom sliced it and commented oddly that there was pink coloring.
WTF?
Sure enough, much of the filling had a reddish hue. We began digging in. The texture was grainy and crunchy.
“This is peach,” my mom noted. The waitress had brought me back a Dutch Peach pie. Somewhere, there was a misunderstanding. Or something.
And I thought of what I told my son about Peach pies earlier at the breakfast table before the lady with the seasick stomach gave us a concert. Some things were simply not meant to be. I commented that next time I go to _ I will 1) ask for a seat away far from the restrooms, and 2) remember to ask them to hold the mushrooms.
Maybe then my breakfast will live up to its billing…
I saw a couple of items last week during my routine trolling of the internet.
After I read them, I was bursting with opinions. And doubts. Thus began the unraveling of my mind yet again. I find my strong opinions are always neutered by a stubborn persistence to see that damned “big picture.”
On the surface, the 2 items don’t appear to share much in common. In retrospect I suppose they both affected me adversely, but I noticed a common denominator. They share a quality, one which doesn’t quite make itself obvious.
Upon contemplating, this is how my mind unravels.
In stages of instinct and urgency.
First to last.
Bottom to top.
1) Womanhood is in a pathetic state of disrepair today.
But wait. Hmmm. That Big Picture begins seeping into my consciousness like trickles of murky water. Damn it.
2) The modern human animal is in a pathetic state of disrepair today.
And that big picture forms and takes shape. I contemplate further. Opinions are dulled with treadmilled reality.
3) Pathetic is ultimately a judgment call, prone to my archaic outlook of how I “see” things, and worse, how I instinctively believe they should run.
Fuck again.
I had opinions and now I realize that against the backdrop of the entirety of time and space, they are such a blip on the ass of reality that for all intents and purposes, they may as well not exist because in a few decades things will be more fucked up than today’s seeming dystopia. And in that future, kids will grow up learning what they believe to be the world for it is all they know and evolving human minds will create societies that have no relationship to this disaster we are currently maintaining in this day and age, much in the same way it has very little relationship to antique society, even that of only 100 years ago.
But this is a blog and opinions are their lifeblood.
So screw it man.
Opinions it will be.
First, the dust up between Bill O’Reilly and Jennifer Aniston that stemmed from a press conference she gave to promote her new movie, “The Switch,” in which she portrays a single woman who decides to become a single-mother through artificial insemination. During the press conference, Aniston, of testosterone-driven mega-jawed fame, made some choice comments about the state (and extinction) of the traditional nuclear family. Among them, in her best dull-witted Hollywoodese:
“Women are realizing more and more that you don’t have to settle, they don’t have to fiddle with a man to have that child.”
…
“The point of the movie is, what is that which defines family? It isn’t necessarily the traditional mother, father, two children and a dog named Spot. Love is love and family is what is around you.”
…
“I don’t think it’s selfish. It’s quite beautiful because there are children that don’t have homes that have a home and can be loved. And that’s extremely important.”
…
“Of course, the ideal scenario for parenting is obviously two parents of a mature age. Parenting is one of the hardest jobs on earth. And, of course, many women dream of finding Prince Charming (with fatherly instincts), but for those who’ve not yet found their Bill O’Reilly, I’m just glad science has provided a few other options.
Bill O’Reilly fired back.
“She’s throwing a message out to 12-year-olds and 13-year-olds that, ‘Hey you don’t need a guy. You don’t need a dad.’ That is destructive to our society.”
…
“Jennifer Aniston can hire a battery of people to help her. But she can’t hire a dad. Dads bring a psychology to children that in this society is under emphasized. Men get hosed all day long in the parental arena…Any man who leaves their children is not a man. Let’s make that perfectly clear. But the fathers that do try hard are under appreciated and diminished by people like Jennifer Aniston,”
Jennifer Aniston is guilty of that self-consuming sense of badly worn female power predominant amongst today’s short-sighted female. They bask in owning a parcel of the cultural and societal real estate they never did before and in typically feminine “disthought,” they foolishly believe the world can revolve entirely around female desires and instincts. As if femininity, conducted in a vacuum (ie, without Man) can function just wonderfully and afford to children all that they need in their young lives. Aniston is guilty (as are so many of her modern Oprah-munching cohorts) of a tragically disassembled sense of future time orientation, a trait which women generally lack. For the most part, women are focussed on the here and now practicalities, a mindset which obstructs their vision of the “big picture” and I mean big, very big. Bigger than having extra money to go shopping at Bed, Bath and Beyond next week or bigger than buying Christmas supplies in June. I mean bigger in the cultural and generational sense. Of future generations and the effect our middling choices of Today will have on our children. And their children. Aniston’s attitude and estimation of familial structure is reflective of this.
If you have the stomach to pound out logic from the imbecility of her statements, you’ll note that elemental to her attitude is the oft-repeated sentiment that children have a “home” and are “loved” now. Aniston is utterly incapable of comprehending what effect a fatherless environment will have on son or daughter when the full span of their lifetime is factored in. And beyond that, failing to take into account that our little fatherless child will one day grow up and have children as well and pass along that fractured mentality along to his/her children. And thus you’ve initiated a wildfire with the most insignificant of matches simply because you wanted a glimmer of light now. Aniston’s sole consideration is that the child is happy and loved now as she displays his little swathed body to the cooing of her similiarly tainted-girlfriends. (And being that she’s a high profile celebrity, the media accompaniment she would receive as she parades around her fatherless but beloved baby would be nauseating beyond pale).
Today’s woman, empowered and liberated as the tethers of traditional society are broken, believes that since she can remodel a house on her own, attain a degree on her own and land a well-paying job on her own, is thus able to raise a child on her own. Science, having given her the ability to give birth to a child on her own and free of the unwanted male baggage, has released her from the moral and social duties of a modern mother. Her baby will be happy and loved today, and in her narrow-minded perspective, tomorrow’s emotional world does not matter. For she can only consume herself with the child’s happiness as it exists, now. Her tomorrow only encompasses the material well-being of the child…will he have a house, a nice job, a family. Women are the ultimate purveyors of materialism and it shows in their inability to consider the social implications of a fatherless generation.
And while I broadly agree with Bill O’Reilly’s statements, I do believe there is a tremendous element of short-sightedness that is also observable among many men who share similar attitudes. Namely, that a fatherless society will no sooner destroy society than shitty hair will cause a windstorm. There are deep and underlying forces at play in our world which we cannot begin to even digest or compartmentalize into convenient chunks of malleable dysfunction which would allow us to apportion blame, so we don’t… Instead, we blame the symptoms. It’s much easier to blame the symptoms because we can wrap our heads around those concepts because they are hideous in an everyday, pragmatic way. Of course I find Aniston’s views moronic; however, I find it difficult to blame her or her hordes of female adulaters. We are but pawns of the massive continental shifts in social structure brought about by modernity and technology.
And the next exhibit I bring you from this week’s round up of culture’s intellectual dissolution is a link to the Season 2 trailer of Jersey Shore in all its depraved splendor. I can barely sit still through its entirety for the pain is too intense, the disgust too consuming. How can there exist in this world such a thriving subculture of superficiality and simple-minded plasticity? I have absolutely zero in common with the mentality portrayed on that show. If you plotted the whole of the human race on a graph, my placement would occur at a spot as far away from the tattooed whores of self-gratification seen on there as I could possibly be from anyone else in existence. Granted, they are artificially selected for their outrageous demeanor and the exaggerated behavior is certainly encouraged and most of it is likely showmanship. I doubt they represent much of a reality as represented in the “reality” of reality TV (at least as we know it) but the point is that this is what passes for “entertainment” to today’s MTV-consuming zombie generation. Despite the apparent “sub-niche” the Jersey Shore cast represents, many younger, and not so younger, viewers find an entertainment value in such aimless misbehavior. That in itself speaks tons.
Once again, there may be the instinct to blame such entertainment for the decline of our civilization (and believe me, I’m ready to pitch in my own admonitions) but once again, I can’t honestly lay the blame on these trivial and inconsequential children. They are children, immature and clownish. In fact, our younger generation have become what I like to call the “Culture of the Clown.” Dressed and permanently marked as clowns, acting like buffoons, any sense of stoicism squashed beneath coats of hairspray and suntan lotion. As such, they really have no great cultural influence, but they are a symptom of an underlying malaise that is consuming our society from the very lining of its guts. These kids are a foreshadow of our future.
This is the commonality between these two “news” items.
The malaise.
Rather than lapsing into one of my typical anti-technology tirades, I’d like to offer a more specific observation that ties the Bill O’Reilly/Jennifer Aniston affair and the cultural depravity of Jersey Shore together. Still existent is the concept of technological progress…I still stand by that concept, but I’ll be more specific here.
Our world has become too visual.
We can now glimpse the inner soiled, cobwebby, recesses of random lives, and behaviors we previously had no awareness of are now viewable. In the past we were spared the disconcertingly blatant knowledge of such. Some might argue this is a harmless byproduct of technology and that this behavior exists despite its exposure. It’s not the behavior I have a problem with, however. It’s the exposure and the effect it has on our collective mental health, its ability to manipulate our cultural perceptions and influence the expectations and narcotic effect such “entertainment” has on our psyche.
The visual is everywhere. We see so many manners of derangement we were not intended to know. This voyeuristic mentality creates a shared attitude of judgement and callous assertions based on absolutely nothing other than the superficial input of appearances and flaunted behaviors markedly influenced by exposure to cameras, and hence, the global audience. People acting like hams and fools and amping up their scurrilous exhibitionism.
In other words, the Clown Culture, this visually fixated world we inhabit, is inherently feminine. All the attributes and traits elicited by the technological progress that allows us to see all, hear all, speak to all, are those that the female mind finds most magnetic. Women, acting up and defiantly flaunting artificiality and conflict as a response to attentive eyes, seem the more natural (albeit exaggerated) at absorbing this mentality; men, acting similarly, seem unnatural and unmanly. Manhood, the steadying backbone of our world, is slowly giving way to this engulfing clownmanship.
Wasn’t the historical nature of man to rise to the noble occasion in order to secure the safety and procurement of Woman in ancient times? Now man sinks in order to comply with the self-gratifying and hollowly sensual nature of woman.
The Culture of the Clown.
Deriving such an abundance of pseudo gratification, behold as Man plays the role of easily discarded incidental plaything
What might that world look like?
Even if we don’t care to know, the cameras will always be there to remind us.
All living lifeforms walking this planet are like tightly-wrapped sausages.
All that pulsating, flowing liquid life, blood, bile, water…the pressure flow is equivalent to outward expansion.
A living being, sustained by the flowing liquids, is a pressure chamber.
Living life forms are balloons, expanded against their epidermal barriers, waiting to burst.
This was perfectly illustrated to me back in the 3rd grade during one of my morning walks to school. Seems a little kitty decided to cross the street at a most inopportune time. Just before it reached the median a car must have barreled through and equatored the cat right through its fucking guts.
Pressure chamber.
Flowing liquids.
Tissue and goo, unable to resist the multi-tonned force. It sought the easiest escape route.
In a living being, the open unguarded orifices: the anus and the lips.
The poor kitty, its life blood extinguished in an arrow-like spurt of internals out both ends. Out its ass shot a flow of intestines and brown liquid shit.
I’ll never forget. I must have been traumatized, for that image persists in my memory. The squirted innards literally sprayed against the curb.
The kitty’s compression chamber burst, expended beyond physical law. Physics dictate that mass must counteract force in order to exert a shaky equilibrium. In this case force won.
I’ll never forget that cat.
Ruptured. Popped.
Since then I’ve been very sensitive to the concept of living creatures expanded against their natural berth. The thought is a compulsion.
And for this reason, I’ve never been comfortable squashing bugs.
I either vacuum them up, throw them out the window or wash them down the drain. I cannot squash a living pulsing creature. Not even an ant. The concept of squashing and splattering the internal mishmash of any living animal sickens me.
Speaking of which, I’m reminded. One more traumatic dissuasion.
In middle school, 6th or 7th grade, I was walking home with my friend Victor. A slightly creepy Japanese fellow who liked playing “death tag.”
We stumbled upon a pregnant caterpillar. We didn’t just walk by it, sorry. Nope. Victor observed, begged me to witness as he stomped on the fucking insect. Watch. He brought his foot down on the squirming, writhing thing and I never saw so much yellow/greenish goo in my life. Bad enough, right? No, in the goo were swarms of unformed baby worm-shaped fragments. But I was young and that shit didn’t affect me until years later, for it stuck in my mind, waiting; waiting for the day it could release its haunting memories into the sea of my present world.
Pressure chambers we are.
So today, with that bothersome concept ingrained in my mind, I drove into the parking stall of a local Mexican mini mart.
Goddamned pigeons.
They test you.
They test your reliance upon their ability to dodge and scoot. As you drive along the street or parking lot, you assume the birds will sense the your hurtling steel missile. Don’t know how they do it, but they do… Birds always escape your deadly procession. You rely on their skill.
You pull into a parking stall as I did today and expect that the pigeon will be gone. Somehow.
It will.
Like an incontrovertible law of nature, the pigeon will know when to flee.
So you pull in. And the bird doesn’t move.
But it always does.
You pull in. The bird does’t move.
The tall, long-necked shitass pigeon dares me. Because pigeons are not suicidal and I knew it would flee.
There was no fleeing.
And as I pulled in, a horrendous POP, a muted explosion of sorts.
I thought of pressure cookers.
I thought of that pigeon with its upright and bloated vest.
The surging blood vessels, the liver bloated with life, suddenly squashed by a tire carrying 1.5 tons of force.
My blood froze.
I was afraid to exit the car.
Such a pussy…I used my left rear-view mirror to check out the splattered damage…but it was just a plastic nacho case I had run over.
The pigeon was happily jerking about in the next stall.
I think we can happily establish for certain…
I have a tendency to be all bark.
Sometimes.
If you spend even small amounts of time around here you’re probably familiar with my anti-consumerism tirades and subsequent sermons bemoaning our fixation with buying, buying, buying and the soul-devouring effect all that buying in order to acquire happiness in all sorts of guises and packages leaves on our soul.
And, as I opened, I frequently contradict my own shit. As in…this past Fourth of July weekend, in addition to the cash outlay for fireworks, I also took the opportunity to throw $200 toward the purchase of a new Amazon Kindle from Target. You heard right, damnit. Dog-eared paperbacks are no longer good enough for my high-tech ass. Who cares how innately wasteful a 3G-capable E-book reader essentially is when you think about it. The reality is inconsequential. Instead, let’s dazzle ourselves with new technologies and revel in the wondrousness of electronic gizmos which ultimately afford no special advantages or usefulness-es that we couldn’t eventually perform in the old-fashioned manner if we so choose.
Who cares that I can cart this little Kindle everywhere I go and buy a copy of “The Overton Window” while sitting on a grassy hill overlooking the freeway? (Illustrative example only. I didn’t do this. I don’t believe I’m capable of bringing myself to directly line Glenn Beck’s pockets with anything that might encourage him to thrive). Of course I can lose myself in the misguided (and sorta exciting) notion that by investing in a $200 paperweight I will be able to purchase any (not really) book, magazine or newspaper with the simple click of a few recessed white buttons while I’m sitting on the crowded bus during my morning rush hour commute. That’s an awesome capability, isn’t it?
C’mon, admit it.
Theoretically, I can even surf the web although the graphics and interface are at best rudimentary. I can even listen to mp3′s in a section of the Kindle suspiciously called “experimental.” Yes, it’s awesome in theory and if I was honest with myself I might be able to admit that this is just nerdy folly and that those $200 will not accomplish much nor improve my life greatly. If I could admit this I suspect I would be a much happier man by virtue of surmounting any remnants of self-delusion.
There.
I spent $200 on an E-book reader and what were the first works I downloaded?
Why “The Scarlett Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne and “A Hunger Artist” by Franz Kafka. Since these works pre-date current copyright laws (at least that’s what I think), they can be offered for free as they are now public domain. Convincing me to spend $200 is a feat, much less convincing me to spend $10-20 on books I’m not interested in just because I can wirelessly download them to my Kindle, which is pretty awesome in itself.
I lie. I could not find A Hunger Artist in English but I decided $2.86 was not a terribly bank-breaking amount of money to pay for one of Kafka’s greatest tales of darkest surrealism.
The normal Kafka library usually includes The Metamorphosis, The Trial, The Castle, which are all splendid sojourns down the dark path of Kafka’s examination of our private natures. His stories blend nightmarish fantasy with the inner demonic depths of living human futility and abstract misery. Before “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, before “Brave New World,” there was Franz Kafka whose body of work spawned the signature Kafkaesque designation to describe a narration of events which baffle normal logic of right and wrong, cause and effect, of an unfolding series of events based on literalistic but absurdly manifested qualities which conflict with our safe sense of reason. I thought it was fitting that the first story I read on my Kindle was one of Kafka’s. I wonder what he might have thought of the fact that in less than a century after his death, his artistic achievements would be transmitted via airborne signals magically into a piece of equipment absent any visible physical medium, such as wires. And that this plastic portable device would thus display his full work from behind a small book-sized screen. If he knew that many of his stories would be available for purchase in such a manner…the king of inner torment might have had found it tricky comprehending such an ethereal concept.
“A Hunger Artist” is one of his shorter works and not nearly as well known as some others. It is the first story I read on Kindle.
How to explain “The Hunger Artist?”
Firstly, when one reads Kafka, one must suspend disbelief and the rigid rules of reality and perception. You must accept the narrative without trying to poke holes in the story. When reading Kafka, symbolism is the preeminent quality to keep in mind when transcribing his narratives to your mental stage and subjecting them to your deliberative interpretations. Accept his stories while refusing to be drawn into skepticism or disbelief. Enjoy the unreality and shrug off the urge to “figure it out.” These are your goals as a Kafka reader.
Our Hunger Artist is a faceless, voiceless and nameless “performer.” The story sorta follows the trajectory of a historical retrospective as it details the lifetime of the Hunger Artist. This man, the hunger artist, is a performer in the strictest sense of the word. In his early days his offerings of “fasting” entertained audiences far and wide. He is locked in a cage (my interpretation) and sleeps on straw. A sparse, captive, even ascetic, existence. His performance consists of…fasting. For 40 days. People flock to watch him as he lies in the straw, famished and emaciated as his skeletal frame slowly dissolves to bones. His fasting performance enthralls audiences.
The ultimate in non-entertainment. Beholding a man who willfully deprives himself of food strikes me as a rather perverse form of reality television and ranks just above soccer in terms of outright entertainment value. But this is what the hunger artist does and this is his path to acclaim. The story recounts how in his early days, this brand of entertainment was in high demand and he was able to carry performances alone without any peripheral performances from others to offer his audiences (who didn’t need that).
Over time, his fasting performance begins losing luster. It draws less attention as the audiences dwindle. His former art, that which brought him fame and admiration when younger, loses its appeal as the older generations spawn younger. He finds himself banished from his former headlining role and he joins a circus where his cage is placed just outside the area where the (more popular) caged animals live. The animals with their simplistic and fantastic ferocity and wildness draw the large crowds now. The hunger artist has demeaned himself and his memory by allowing his “talent” to be absorbed into common circus, but the truth is that his sole reason is his desperate hunger for an audience, any audience. He is old and falling out of fashion. He doesn’t even demand audiences in the circus any longer. The only attention he receives is from the passersby on their way to visit the caged animals. Out of boredom and fleeting curiosity, they may stop and watch him for a few minutes before quickly resuming their journey to the animal cages. He descends into irrelevance. He retreats invisibly into the straw. In the distant past, a number was posted on a table near his cage which signified the number of days he had fasted thus far, but it is no longer maintained or updated and often the number is not changed but he continues fasting and inevitably his fast streak exceeds the number displayed on the table. Before he was not allowed to fast beyond 40 days but now he routinely surpasses that and no one notices. With dejected irony, he notes that many onlookers scoff at the number and vociferously doubt its veracity, even though, in fact, the number displayed is often much lower than the number of days he has actually fasted. One day, a supervisor discovers the cage and wondering why such a nice cage is being unused, discovers the hunger artist inside languishing skeletally on the straw. He confronts the hunger artist:
“Are you still fasting?” the supervisor asked. “When are you finally going to stop?” “Forgive me everything,” whispered the hunger artist. Only the supervisor, who was pressing his ear up against the cage, understood him. “Certainly,” said the supervisor, tapping his foreheead with his finger in order to indicate to the staff the state the hunger artist was in, “we forgive you.” “I always wanted you to admire my fasting,” said the hunger artist. “But we do admire it,” said the supervisor obligingly. “But you shouldn’t admire it,” said the hunger artist. “Well then, we don’t admire it,” said the supervisor, “but why shouldn’t we admire it?” “Because I had to fast. I can’t do anyything else,” said the hunger artist. “Because,” said the hunger artist, lifting his head a little and, with his lips pursed as if for a kiss, speaking right into the supervisor’s ear so that he wouldn’t miss anything, “because I couldn’t find a food which tasted good to me. If I had found that, believe me, I would not have made a spectacle of myself and would have eaten to my heart’s content, like you and everyone else.” Those were his last words…
And with this, the hunger artist dies a tragic and Godly Melvillian death.
I believe that Franz Kafka, having lived at the turn of the 20th Century, was privy to the exponentially changing character of society. He witnessed a pattern that was taking visible shape during that era. Undoubtedly he watched as successive generations gradually eschewed the quality of “deliberation of thought” and he saw that the shifting collective mentality of the masses spelled doom for the brilliant performances of Man who found himself still constrained by the aging strictures of simplicity, stoicism and discipline inherent to the pastoral pace of previous eras. Man’s evolving nature, apparent to Kafka, was increasingly focused on the superficially captivating and wild-natured enticements of the advancing age of modernity. The arts of fasting and self-denial, representative of bygone eras celebrating man’s strident ability and strength to deny himself the barest of pleasures, were losing their appeal.
The Hunger Artist’s illustrious reputation in tatters or forgotten and buried in the straw, had become an obsolete relic. He was finally free to practice his art of self-denial, unencumbered by previous limits, but concomitantly, unable to elicit much concern either. Popularity and acceptance also implies duty, but a man alienated by his own quest for excellence in a society where excellence was largely defined by the collectively cheapened perspective of the masses is thus rendered extinct.
Individuality sloughed off as the Hive’s gathering force imprisoned adherents.
This afternoon I engaged in some of that trite and mentally squeamish Facebook sparring.
She said: “happy friday the 13th” on her wall.
Barely missing a beat (I was at work), I replied, “i think it’s really sunday the 15th that is bad luck but people always blame friday” in my best uncapitalized grammatically rushed and overly-cool and nonplussed manner.
I didn’t think much about this exchange until a little while ago when I revisited it from the relaxed comfort of my apartment on a cool Friday the 13th evening. My mind is a different creature when I’m not mired at work, untangling clerical and financial obstacles on the behalf of Big Employer. The minute I walk out the building each evening, I suspect my Creative Quotient rises 50 points. My mind is unleashed, barriers torn down, mental springs replenished. On my own time my mind resumes its normally scheduled program and I can actually divert a large portion of concentration to impractical and esoteric bullshit.
Like that thing about Sunday the 15th.
I suppose I should take some (very little) pride in this cognitive twist. After all, this is what I train my mind to accomplish. I strive for such “fresh” perceptions. To observe and perceive normal and accepted verbal and mental interactions from a radically uncommon perspective, even for something as trivial and ridiculous as Sunday the 15th.
Disregard the facetious nature of my quip.
Forget it; look at the mechanics of my sentiment.
There was a movie quite a few years ago called Saturday the 14th which was basically a really bad spoof of slasher horror movies, circa 1980. The point is that someone did extend the concept of Friday the 13th before; they elasticized it and squeezed out an alternative viewpoint of the mythical day. It’s not the height of originality.
My retort to my friend’s wall post was spontaneous and hardly a dose of genius insight. But the thought does nag.
How often do we, in this culture, mythologize an inconspicuous fact or event (or a very conspicuous fact or event!) until it loses all traces of warranted legitimacy because popular attitude inflates it with purely people-driven nonsense; and the numb-minded reflex to embrace such superficial ideology diminishes our ability to “unaccept” or view the quality in question as anything other than what common consensus dictates it should be.
Common perception instructs us that Friday is the culprit.
Friday the 13th is the reason ill-fortune befalls us. But we don’t pause to question because skepticism dilutes fascination. But fascination is what our bored souls crave and thus we persist in proliferating as much superstitious fascination as possible.
So focussed on the pinpoint of light we don’t even take note of its origins.
Actually, that was my favorite part of the silly observation. Friday has become the fall guy. Friday takes the mob mentality’s blame. Friday wants to be left alone; it wants to live the simple life of just another weekday, but it’s not likely! Not as bad luck abounds and Sunday sits quietly in the shadows invisibly causing a ruckus. Because everyone is so fucking fixated on Friday for no other reason than that everyone else is blaming Friday, they have been for centuries and this spurious belief has acquired a life of its own and not one goddamned person considers it a worthy endeavor to question Friday’s culpability.
Perhaps Sunday’s gift of misery is instantly transmitted to Friday in an act which defies the laws of physics.
Faster than the speed of light, in fact. In the same way physicists have noted the ability of a natural quantum particle to affect another particle at an enormous distance almost instantaneously, quicker than can be explained by the speed of light, theoretically the fastest speed at which matter can move.
Damn it all.
Theorize with me. Step in and join my mind experiment. Watch your step. (My team of free legal help sucks.)
A conjectural and extremely hypothetical situation.
Think of an immensely incomprehensible global game of musical chairs.
As in: the music is playing (loudly enough to be heard in every corner of the Earth.) Every single living inhabitant can hear it.
The music plays, fills the biosphere with its tune…
…and STOPS.
At that precise moment, everthing must freeze.
We will use this freeze frame moment to take a full accounting of every man, woman and child alive. At the instant the music stopped.
Everyone is counted, from the old and most decrepit centenarian to the youngest infant who was just squeezed out the birth canal and the very second he becomes a living citizen of humanity.
All living and all counted at the instant the music stopped.
Everyone must grab a chair.
The one person of the billions who doesn’t grab a chair is the one who will incidentally live for a longer length of time from Now than any other counted person on the plant. They take the honor.
Quite a momentous “accomplishment,” is’t it?
Consider the billions of people on this planet now. One of them will outlive everyone else; at this fleeting instant. This frozen snapshot of existence. Who will it be?
It’s quite possible that in the next 30 seconds a baby will be born who will live even longer than our test subject. The recognition and honor we bestow on that person is only good for the instant we froze, however. Like a cosmic rain check. It was only good for then, but in the 30 seconds since, hundreds, thousands, more babies have been born and any one of these might easily skew the previous accounting. And we would need to freeze time again in order to update our mind exercise.
Today, yesterday. Everyday…I see you all.
All of you involved in this game, including the ones who shared this split moment in time. We are all on a furious pace to outlive as much as possible, aren’t we?
The odds are stacked against us.
On a bus I play this game privately.
The bus is half filled with tired souls headed home from work, headed somewhere. It’s a mystery, we don’t know where any one is going or where they’ve been. But we do know… We are all dying. Slowly ebbing away like a weakening candlelight.
One of the riders on this bus will outlive the other passengers. Maybe it’s the driver. And one of these riders will also die sooner than the others. Once again…maybe the driver, and hopefully not while he’s driving this bus. Maybe as early as this evening after they exit the bus. Perhaps, on the short walk to their house they will drop dead of a heart attack.
We all share this common plague. Of death. We march en mass toward the collective destination. A curse we all share equally, one which can’t be escaped by virtue of means or status. Or poverty or sorrow. As we cross paths throughout the day, there is recognition and foreboding in our averted glances as we sympathize our common descent into the abyss.
In each unsure glance there is the familiar flicker of doom; the persistent doubt of when and how it will all end. In comparison to that person who obstructs our path. Who will win? Who will we outlast and who will outlast us? As we grow older, the puzzle becomes less hazy, more distinct. As we grow very old the most hesitant glances issue from ourselves as others behold one whose journey is nearing a culmination.
Death greets us all. It spurns us. Turns us loose for a while, lets us play until the day it decides to return and retrieve us.
And the black veil shrouds us as we flounder along the path. We share the burden and if the music STOPS now, who will be the last one out the door? This is what we await. The grand exit, hopefully deferred as long as possible and our neighbor is our contender.
So many deaths and tragedies and loves lost and promises cut short and so many tears and broken hearts and ill-formed dreams. Each of us, in our upright and life-affirming stance, represent an untapped and fetal form of grief and abandonment. Subverted, hidden, vestigial, promising to sprout like butterfly wings. Metamorphosis from life to nothing. Rivers of sadness awaiting our demise. So that others may fulfill a longing for despondent dismay.
A huddled mass the color of dark night gathered around a coffin before it descends into the ground a final time.
STOP the music.
I’ve always enjoyed being at the center of mystery, or at the very least, of the unknown.
Or unknowable.
I don’t let too many people into this barricaded mental compound.
I’ve alway been prone to shy away from full disclosure and effusive self-confessions. You won’t find me sitting on a trashy Dr. Phil or Oprah guest panel (sorry, that’s the best I can do, I don’t spend much time in front of daytime TV). In fact, I relish the act of not being easy to know. Mystery is our greatest tool for the attainment of anonymous social power. The less people know of you, the more (assuming you don’t come across as a raging psychopathic creep) they are likely to fill in the blanks with all kinds of cool bullshit as they handily sketch your character by filling in all the blanks you don’t. It’s human nature, of course. We tend to elevate that which we don’t know. Often, we elevate it to a much higher level of intrigue than it deserves. The unknown is actually mundane. We substitute heroic and lofty qualities when the void of mystery is presented to us. People, lacking clear or observable knowledge, tend to quietly perceive and absorb extra doses of non-verbal cues when the entirety of the picture is lacking. For humans need the whole picture or they are incapable of resting. If there is any question at all about you, we will resort to formulating an opinion based on everything we can see or hear….your clothes, your hair, your speech, your expressions and affect. All this data are processed through our interpretative sieves and we spit out a rudimentary personality sketch that tells us all about you. Its accuracy is dubious but occasionally we may even surprise ourselves.
If you can create mystery while simultaneously transmitting a meta-vibe of coolness and casual aloofness, better yet. The opinion and impression others construct of you will be heightened!
That is my simple game.
I hang back, try not to say much, try not to commit to self-revelation, yet still carefully weave an illusion, a web displaying certain elements which hopefully lead others to a hypnotic image of myself which is not entirely accurate, and in fact, probably very inaccurate.
No one knows me. Not even I.
I play my cards so well I even have myself fooled. Sometimes I wonder if I have the slightest fucking clue who I am. Funny that for someone with such mysterious affectations, I choose to blog about this shit. My guess is that I live out everything on this blog that I fail to do in real life. I write too much, I say too much…I am shameless. It’s astounding and a bit eerie, especially those moments I realize I’ve written something that leaves me wondering where the thoughts originated and if I am who I really am.
Has my mysterious facade become untenable? Is it alive and rebelliously resisting my control?
I wonder if I am the Dr. Frankenstein of my soul, this hideous creature, this patchwork of learned and abhorrent behaviors manifested as a quiet guy hiding behind a sullen blog which allows him to express his demonic turmoil?
Has the mystery become a marauding life form of its own, trampling over the citizenry of this quaint hamlet that I call my psyche. Have I fed it too well and created a HAL computer which threatens to commandeer this vessel and send me adrift into the nether regions of infinite nothingness, beyond the planets and the stars?
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