Candace is filled with uncontollable & inexplicable rage at the Brooklyn Public Library (shitty hours), & people who drive like jerks (not using directionals).
and it made me think of love. it made me think of all the bizarre standards i have for loving someone that i've never really thought about but know for a fact this person must have in order for me to fully trust them and fully invest myself into them for either friendship or romance or whatever. and one of them is using directionals.i don't think i could love someone that drives like an asshole, and i know they're out there. come to think of it all my friends are pretty good drivers. i'm glad i've inadvertently surrounded myself with people that know what roads are for. roads are for getting from one place to another place. they're the journey, not the destination.
but then i think of all that postmodern bullshit i read (and in general i genuinely adore it) and i think of the way people's minds are changing to be about the journey not necessarily the destination.
because we all know the destination, the destination is death. be it individual or society, we will all die. our kids will die. our grandparents will die. the white house will be a museum or something sillier. maybe we'll still be around but things will definitely be different. we know this because we have the historical context to map the trajectory of a nation and analyze and compare the similarities between the cycles a nation goes through before it's eventual demise.
and that's as far as you can get from pop culture. pop culture can discuss any matter of topic except for those dealing with the ideas that truly engage people's intellect and asks "why are you doing what you are doing?"
i'd like to think this isn't just hippy bullshit. and by hippy, i mean a movement that was once truly inspiring and afforded many young people the chance to get in touch with a more primitive yet intellectually fulfilling experience that was somehow turned into a running joke and a chance to celebrate the ability of drugs to take you out of reality rather than get you thinking about it.
i mean, this is the shit i think about when i get high. i get a little scatterbrained but sometimes it's the only time i can bear thinking about the way things in my life are going and the way things in the world are going.
it's hard to admit when you're projecting your problems onto society and it's hard to know when you're suffering as a result of society's ails. like when i hear about the bad economy and job gloom i think "oh shit, this is what it means to be in a recession. that word i've heard about since i was a kid but never knew what it was."
i mean i know i've been kind of a scumbag my whole life. i went to college and everything, but i had one foot out the door of every class i've ever sat down in and all my favorite people felt the same way. the best thing i can say for myself is that i learned how to manage my general disillusionment and allow for myself to actually do good in school. i did this by seeing the relevance that information and intelligence have and the way people's honest-to-goodness emotions get distilled into works like shakespeare or the jungle or candide or really anything ever written. eventually what i got down to is "OH MY GOD PEOPLE REALLY THOUGHT THIS WAY"
like, people really read and enjoyed henry james' portrait of a lady and they had all the time in the world to read shit like that. i mean, am i just an idiot because i can't read something like that for more than an hour without having to do something else? god, i can't read anything for that long anymore. my attention span has somehow been shortened to the span of like... oh i dunno, just read this thing and look how short the paragraphs are, that's how short my attention span is. i'm not doing this shit on purpose like "oh man look it's a story about a kid with a short attention span look how small the ideas are before he goes to another one" this is me and this is how i write and i'm trying to get better.
i knew my mind was atrophying ever since i stopped using it, and i'm not sure when that was. it was probably around the time i stopped trying to get smarter and wanted to be friends with other people.
i know i'm not fooling anyone, and that's ok.
i've turned into a genuinely gregarious being, and that has everything you've come to know about gregarious beings with it. the good and the bad. yes i am generally friendly and goodnatured yes i think it's important to be considerate to other people and use directionals when driving.
but yes also instead of being individually brilliant or devoting myself to the intellectual pursuits that i know my mind is capable of i decided to go get whatever job would help me do the things i want to do in this world.
i'll tell you something i really think: there's nothing in this world i don't deserve to experience and i'm living the life that helps me experience as much positive and as beneficial as there is in the world and that feeling is a virtue and a sin simultaneously.
because down that road is a threat of evil. the evil of becoming what my friend craig calls a "HUNGRY GHOST". this is a demon that is never satisfied with anything and needs to scour the earth in search of fulfillment that never comes.
so, now that i know i'm not a hungry ghost but a human being capable of feelings and emotions and all that nonsense (NOT REALLY NONSENSE ACTUALLY THE MOST IMPORTANT ASPECT OF HUMANITY) how do i behave? how do i gain what i immaturely presume everyone else in the world has but me? SATISFACTION
ok listen up because me with all my ADD i'm gonna tell you how to be satisfied:
by realizing that satisfaction does not exist. it's not a feeling, it's not an emotion, it's not a state of being, it's nothing. if satisfaction is gonna come from anywhere, it's gotta come from inside.
don't scour the earth looking for a more perfect relationship to it, start where you are. where you've been planted.
but that's not always easy.
one of the reasons i wanna stay on long island is because i want to do it right. there's nothing about long island that i don't deserve to experience no matter how much money i make, right? well, that's not entirely true.
long island is a fucking expensive place to live. it just is. property tax is high, gas is expensive, mass transit is shitty, etc. what this means is that 6 million people who want the convenience of the city alongside the bucolic aspect of the country are willing to pay through the nose for it.
is it really that surprising to you?
it's like the first thing people do when they get serious amounts of money is get a house on a big piece of property on the north shore of long island.
oh but hey guess what asshole, you're gonna have to get gas one day or go to the supermarket and interact with the townies that have lived here all their lives.
you know what i hate? i hate when people who live in western long island think the people from eastern long island are hicks. i mean, don't get me wrong, it's kinda true, and if you threw a rock in the smithhaven mall food court it would strike an idiot dead facedown in his panda express, but let's get one thing straight: just because long island is an island doesn't mean it's the resort paradise you thought it would be when you moved here from queens or wherever the fuck you came from.
the scary thing is, i really think it's possible that long island will one day be a big fairfield apartments and the throgs neck bridge will be for residents who are allowed in residential sections and the whitestone bridge will be for industrial applications like import\exports and letting working class families get to their homes.
ok, let me expound on that.
let's talk about this monopoly tattoo on my arm. what it means is that i think one day there will be hotels on the graves of the pieces and the moral of the story is the people who win monopoly aren't the people who play the game but the people who control the rules of the game.
let's think about this game about money. this is a game that uses the names of real places. monopoly is a game of chance and a game of skill. the endgame of monopoly is one player having all the pieces and everyone else either giving up, playing until they've literally given every dollar to the one player who has won. how much chance goes into winning? how much skill?
i want you to think about every game of monopoly you've ever played. i want you to think about how monopoly is like the real world. you're born into it with a certain amount of resources and it is up to you how to spend those resources when you're given a chance to spend them.
oh look, i've landed on baltic. should i buy? hmm... if i buy now maybe i won't have enough money to spend on a more valuable piece of property like marvin gardens or (should i dare to dream) BROADWAY and PARK PLACE!
good god, i could think of shit like that all day.
ok, i'm gonna start writing something about the game of monopoly. i'm gonna do a little research maybe, learn when it came around, but i want to know the game of monopoly.
board games are important. all games are important. chess, monopoly, video games. they all have something in common and they've represented the same things for years: community, competition, recreation, leisure time, etc.
ok, i want to write a book about games. not sports, but games.
what i was gonna say was that in order for me to love someone they have to us their directionals, like they don't let themselves succumb to the temptation of being a shitty driver and possibly frustrating or harming another driver. i think that's a lovely sentiment. even if they say they're only doing it so they won't get pulled over. i know what they're really saying is 'i am not going to risk my life, your life, or anyone's life just to get somewhere a little bit faster.'
oh, and i agree with the NYS law making cell phone usage on the road a crime in the same way i agree people shouldn't be allowed to drive drunk. but i'd be lying if i haven't seen my friends act that irresponsible for reasons less than noble and i forgive them because i know even if they're drunk or texting they would never intentionally act in a way that would endanger anyone. so i forgive them.
but if they get busted, i don't let them complain. they should have known they were doing something wrong regardless of the merit of their intentions. sometimes i like how ruthless the legal system can be. i have a friend who was forced to take a breathalyzer at a checkpoint three times before it was over the limit. can you believe that shit?
"blow it again, we can't arrest you yet"
are we really fucking serious? can the law not discern between someone drunk and someone sober? if a cop can't tell who is drunk and who is sober, then why is he a cop? if we can't trust that cop without relying on a little piece of technology to show some number indicating how drunk someone is, why is he a cop? why would we give an idiot like this the power to change someone's life so dramatically?
and meanwhile, am i to believe that angry mothers somewhere want to see more drunk driving arrests? what happens when MADD stirs the police into some frenzy where they need to show big numbers and a tough-on-crime attitude to drunk drivers? well, that's when they start making people who can drive perfectly well take a breathalyzer three times.
(no this didn't happen to me and no i'm not telling you who it did happen and i swear on everything that means anything to me it wasn't the girl i mentioned in the beginning. not that i'm ashamed of that person or what they have done. i'm just afraid what a stranger like you would do with that sort of information.)
when i hear of groups like MADD that really exist i experience a very unique emotion that i want to convey with you. it's a mixture of "aww how cute" with "OH MY GOD WHAT ARE THESE PEOPLE THINKING?"
the gentle soul in me thinks 'aww, how cute. these angry moms think they can get their children back by pooling their misery and turning their anger into a platform to cry for justice and prevent personal tragedy from happening to themselves and others anymore'
i mean i guess they should maybe pool their tragedy and make some sort of platform, but in my world that platform is for them to stand all the mothers of dead children on. let the world see what their good intention has done to the world. it makes an angry mother, which makes a cop out for numbers, which makes an innocent person take a breathalyzer three times.
why do we treat drunk drivers like they're the end of civilization? are they ruining the planet? or are they just met with an equal and opposite reaction by a group of mothers who've turned their wailing in grief to a cry for social justice?
you wanna know the degree of a society's compassion? it's humanity? look at the way it treats it's criminals.
http://askville.amazon.com/measure-civilization-treats-weakest-members-accurate-quote/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=4718239
but before you do that, look at how it defines crime.
it ain't supernatural.
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