No Wonder Lennon was a Miserable Prick
Tom 'definitely not like that guy' Waters
June 1 , 2007Ignorance is bliss, and sometimes I wish someone would take an ice cream scoop and plant it through the frontal fucking lobe of my brain, scooping out a sizeable chunk of the gray matter that gives me the ability to question life and find dissatisfaction with it. Stupid people have it easy. They stumble and bumble through their existence on disability checks or stink up their relatives houses fitting the bill as the 'funny uncle' letting those around them worry in their stead. Stupid people have litters of watered down imbeciles with their stupid spouses, duck-walk in unison to sporting events and laugh at drive time local radio shows. They tune in to network situation comedies, phonetically sound out the books that Oprah tells them to buy, and they're easily flummoxed with the number combinations at drive through restaurants. There are far too many stupid people on this planet. It's discouraging, it really is. The flip side of that turn of phrase (ignorance, etc) is this: other people's ignorance is my absolute, blood pressure boiling, hair graying, rage-inducing agony.
I have zero tolerance for stupidity, and even less for stupid questions. If you don't think before you open your mouth then get the fuck away from me. Don't waste my time with a conclusion you can arrive at on your own if you took the extra five minutes to engage the moth eaten cat box rattling around inside your dumb fucking head. It's a mantra I have at work. The prime directive of my underlings is as follows: Keep me away from stupid questions. I'm not a fan of banal small talk with no driving narrative, either.
People who run their mouths without a motive, conclusion, or the slightest goddamn idea of where they're going with the nonsense falling out of their heads deserve a sock in the mouth, woolen or of the fist-filled variety. Pleasantries are one thing. Fifteen minute diatribes to total strangers are neither warranted or enjoyed. I save my diatribes for my essays. If you don't like them, you can stop reading at any time and kindly piss off. That's your choice. The laws of etiquette require me to sit and put up with some idiot's observations for upwards of fifteen minutes before I feel vindicated in clubbing him over the head with a brick and walking away. Life is precious, and every second should be cherished. Don't waste my time or your own with rudderless small talk. There are better things to discuss and silence is golden. I've got enough noise pollution in my life without having to endure the fog horn of bullshit issuing out of your pie hole. If I want your opinion I'll hold up a sign with pretty pictures simple enough for you to understand welcoming you to run your dummy jaws. Until that point, shut the hell up.
I've always said that people aren't designed for free time, but this isn't true. People are conditioned to feel uneasy with unstructured blocks of free time. Without somebody telling us what to do, where to be, how to feel, or what to buy, we're confused. And what do we do when we've got an extended recess? Shop where commercials tell us to shop for things we don't need or things we don't want. Go to formulaic movies that everyone else tells us are entertaining. Spend money, check our emails, throw away more countless hours on cell phones babbling about weather and the price of gas. We are bred and beaten into a hive of consumers and conformists. We consume with our free time because we've forgotten what else to do. Toys buy happiness and they make that niggling confusion and unhappiness that silence and a lack of scheduling bring. Have we gotten that far away from free thought?
Before the internet, there was tv, and before that, radio. Can you remember what people did before that? They read books. They had discussions about the books. Or they just sat around like a family and talked about lofty things like values, viewpoints, religion, philosophy, history, you name it. They questioned the nature of things. They learned about themselves by pondering their existence. They bettered themselves by putting their urges and distractions on a shelf and (wait for it) thinking. Thinking is sort of passe in this day and age, though, isn't it. Free thought is almost extinct. Going over the cliff with the dodo and our legion of lemmings shuffling into a Wal-Mart and right off the fucking brink of a civilized society. Now we've got toys and gizmos that chew up the idle moments we used to enjoy. They devour any chance we ever had to better ourselves with hollow entertainment, flashing banners and more avenues of commercialism and materialism.
I can't stand crowds. I never could. Wanna know why? Odds are that you don't want to know anything anymore. You'd rather let the breeze blow between your ears and not have to suffer the anxiety of processing an idea. It's not your fault. We're a pack of sheep, too retarded to break out and forge a new path. That's why I hate crowds. Nine to five traffic. Sold out movie theaters. Christmas shoppers. A mass of conformity, chugging along to the beat of somebody else's drum. And we're usually right in the middle of it. When I drive home at five o'clock with seventy five percent of the populace, there is nothing original about me or what I'm doing at the moment. I'm not leading or opposing. I'm following blindly. And crowds are, by nature, very, very dumb and misguided. It's a cross section of the common denominator. Damn the lot of them.
I'm not much better than the dolts I complain about. I have my toys and I laugh at some of the less insipid sit coms and I'm victim to sales marketing. I keep trying to buck the trend but it's a lot harder to take the road less traveled. You swim upstream against a nation of ignorance, and year after year, it wears you down. On Sesame Street, they had a game called 'Which One Of These Is Not Like The Other?' Four panels with four people and you had to figure out who strayed from the pack. Life isn't that cut and dried. There are a million panels and if you're lucky, a hundred of them hold free thinkers screaming their fucking heads off from the strain.
Once a year I vacation at my cabin in Rushford away from most of the distractions and my brain clicks into gear again. There's a joy in quiet meditation and a peace in turning your thoughts over that has no equal. Try it some time, I'm begging you. You might just like it. Do something original, chew on a sentence before you spit it out, offer up an idea that isn't a rehash of what somebody told you or give me an emotion that isn't regurgitated by a thousand other idiots. Make a little peace with yourself or think for a while about how you can better yourself. Think, for fuck's sakes. I promise you won't end up in a crowd. Turn off the tv, set your cell phone to die a horrible death, close your mouth, sit down in a quiet place and think. At the very least, you'll be one less ignorant consumer pacified with the status quo, incapable of being a higher life form. After a few million years, we're capable of more than a monosyllabic 'baaaaaah'. Write me when you're done and I'll send you some food pellets.