Anyway, all of that is to say that I know that life is ridiculous, that things tend to work out in precisely the opposite fashion than what a reasonable person would expect, and that if I can't laugh at it it's because I'm a bore who takes shit far too personally for my own mental health. But goddamn if the world isn't testing my sense of the absurd to the very limits lately.
There's the matter of American politics, of course. Here we are, a month to the Most Important Election Ever!!!, and the vast majority of Americans are either a) indifferent/bored of the whole spectacle, or b) seriously contemplating, if not dead set on, voting Republican. And if you fit into neither of those camps, you're probably glued to a computer screen twenty-four hours a day, shitting your pants every other minute in, alternately, excitement/mortification. So where does that leave me? I freely admit- and think this is a sign of health- that I can't wait for the damned circus to roll out of town, but that's mostly because I've come to, despite my rather smug disdain for politics in general, be one of those sad bastards who sits around online all day, shitting my pants- 99% of the time in mortification, which is a small comfort. I just can't take anymore of this fucking stupidity. I mean, I attended college in Santa Barbara, and thought that the depths of human stupidity were exhausted in my mind, that they could no longer dizzy me, surprise me, stimulate my gag reflex. I was wrong. I remember reading, around the time of the last election, about a new syndrome going round. Something about "outrage exhaust," where one is so constantly bombarded by atrocities and stupidities that the reaction to these becomes dulled and your righteous anger can't be bothered to manifest itself anymore. That's a line that has been unequivically crossed.
The list does not end there, naturally. There's still the perennial favorite, of course, that endless source of vexation that is so pervasive, so damned inescapable, that I wonder if it isn't a torment from hell itself. I'm talking about rap music, of course. Not the Platonic ideal of rap music, true, but exarcerbated by it's ubiquity: commercial rap music. "Music" featuring Akon, or Lil' John- "music" that is essentially NONSENSE WORDS REPEATED TO AN ANYEURISM-INDUCING SYNTHESIZED RHYTHM. My god people. I mean, I know that the vast majority of you are simpletons, well-meaning but essentially tapeworms, the complacent packaging for ambitious genetic material, but holy crap, do you realize what you're doing?! You are bopping along to or repeating (frequently, too loudly) NONSENSE on the order of fucking BABY TALK (if babies were mysogynistic, ignorant pigs) produced by liquor-addled morons with hard-ons who are becoming filthy stinking rich on the basis of your willfull ignorance and bad taste. You are handing them money- and respect, and power- without them having to earn it by hard work or manifesting appreciable talent, and what they're providing you with in return is, not to mince words, the DEATH of your goddamned SOUL.
Man it felt good to write that down. Is it ridiculous to flip out equally over politics and shitty rap music? Yes! Are politics and rap music two fundamentally absurd notions? YES. And if I have to hear, "lolly lolly lolly, let me see you pop that body (?)" all the way through one more time, someone is going to die the sort of gruesome death that will guarantee my name in lights for a long time to come.
Something else that has recently crawled under my skin and begun to feed, loudly, on the proteins that make up my muscles, etc., is the mind-boggling fact that not one, not two, but three people with whom I was/am friends with are now engaged to be married. One of them, one of the two was-friends, will be married next month. Not only is this girl completely insane and immature and homely, but she might well be the last person in the world whom I'd thought would get married- EVER. Oh, and, she's 23. And while I am aware of the fact that childhood does end at some point and people get on with adulthood in the more tangible sense of the word before anything else, I am also aware that we no longer live in the year 1953, and that women who are unmarried past 25 are no longer fed to the bears as a matter of social policy. I mean, wow. I'm worried that either it reflects poorly on me that I think marriage at 23 is- what's the word again?- ABSURD, or that the world is an even more hopelessly ridiculous place than previously assumed. The other couple consists of two 23 year olds, and the last couple jointly turned 25 this year. And none of the aforementioned reactions to all this absurdity begins to accurately depict the confusion surrounding this last engagement specifically, since the groom and I are sort of in love with each other, and the bride is this terribly pedestrian creature who enjoys the less-than pedestrian musical offerings of Jessica Simpson (and all the terrible things implied thereby).
A list of other (less offensive?) absurdities:
- that not once, but twice, a bird has landed on my head as I walked down the street
- the existence of fat-free ranch/cheese/butter, and other such FAT-BASED commestibles
- that once you are educated to some extent, you see the society that educated you for the joke that it truly is?
- that truly subversive things are co-opted into the mainstream, albeit unwittingly, alongside cosmic trash
- that someday, politics and rap music will go into the void right next to shakespeare, miles davis, the haggia sophia, and the species homo sapiens
Say what?? Ah, life.
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