a different kind of looking

[click image]

I'm very tired of children walking around in grown up skin bags. They're so exhausting. You give it to them straight and it ends up like you'd shot it through a crystal. The light hooks a left or a right and they're as blind as if you'd never turned on your beam. I want to scream, "This means you!" I do. I do. But kiddies keep blathering their invective and their excuses and their blubbering over the mean élite... printing it on t-shirts, squirting it on blogs, carrying placards, stickering their bumpers... wearing their colors....

They can't hear. They can't see. They're all walking around as though this sentience gig they've got going for them is actuality and not just the contents of their own benighted heads entertaining them... as reality plays out, completely invisibly, in plain sight.

We all want to ascribe to Americans this ugly failing, bitch about the uniquely American nature of such spoiled incoherence, but, well, on the tubes now, we know that just isn't so.

We also know that this problem doesn't inhere just the bubbas out there, just the uneducated, the great unwashed. Nossirreebob, it don't. There are PhDs from everywhere quite as childish and lightless as, say, yer basic census worker lyncher... while I do grant statistically less likely to lynch. That's okay, though, because their stupidity is at least as deadly... just less apparent... and especially to them. Truth be told, smart people are harder to wake up because their minds are too well defended against sense breaking on their intellectual shores.

People are too used to calling their idiocy "honesty" and wouldn't know the kind of honesty it takes to wake up, to grow up, to stop all this nitwit doing and perform, if it walked up, a surprise polar bear, swiped their jaws off their faces, left them scrambling across their own icebergs to get them back on their bloody-dim pusses. It's that appalling. You aren't interacting with anyone if you only read what you already think, only hear what harks up what you've already made of thin air, only see what your conditioning says is real. Nope. You're locked in a space suit you call skin, and you should be praying for that polar bear.

We've got a global case of I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I going here on the tubes and out in the walking around world, too. Yes we do. It makes my spine feel like a hot poker and all my muscles limp. My head feels like it's gonna fall off its titanium plate. I'm giving you the hairy eyeball, tonight, children.

Maybe in the morning I can do better.