I so do not apologize ahead of time if anyone is offended by my unquenchable desire for shit to make sense. You see, I come from a time when people said what they meant and meant what they said. At least, that’s the way my grandma used to always tell us to communicate.
Let your yes be a yes and your no be a no, she’d say—other than that, she just had to assume you were lying. But in this day, the year given us of 2011, making sense and encountering people who have that same unquenchable desire for shit to make sense is a dwindling endeavor. What I’ve come to find is that for many folks shit doesn’t have to make sense and that’s just fine by them. The irony is that the less sense it makes, the more supportive they become of senseless shit.
Ever since I can remember, I’ve had this feeling of floating above the abyss called Earth and simply observing. Like I’m here, eating, breathing, sleeping and occupying space like everybody else but not really a full participant in the “action.” How oxymoronic! I often wonder why it is so many family members, friends and associates can’t see what I see. And why is it that even when they catch a glimpse, it’s reminiscent of the old “clap on, clap off” commercial—like that, the glimpse is gone and they’re plunged right back into the comforts of darkness.
And then I think, maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m the one missing the light. Maybe I’m the one living in darkness. Maybe I’m the one not making sense. But then it comes back to the unquenchable desire I know I have. I can’t help wondering when it all began to occur—that brilliantly imposed system that influenced people, as a whole, to stop making sense and, more significantly, to stop caring if something made sense.
Did it happen in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s . . . ? Or, perhaps, it’s been occurring all along throughout the ages. A gradual, subliminal, cyclic process. Stealth, you might say. Perhaps, it was predicted that we’d get to this point. Adding another “perhaps”—perhaps, mankind always comes to this fork in the road and decides to take the road well traveled.
However it is that we’ve ended up here, where people I once thought were so intelligent now leave me with serious doubts as to their ability to employ logic, is a mystery to me. A disturbing mystery. To any thinking person, it should be up for inspection on how we got to the point where almost any kind of wool—even in the form of plastic rice—can be pulled over the eyes of the people and not but a handful will flinch or think to remove the piece of wool so they can see.
It could be that it has worked in my favor that I’m allergic to wool. Unbeknownst to me, I’ve probably been saved a lot of falls on my face and ass, since wool cannot be placed over my eyes without me fighting to remove it, so I can not only see but frickin’ breathe. Maybe we’d all be better off if we were allergic, too. Then not only could the wool not be pulled over our eyes, but we’d be ever cautious of the wolf who comes to us in sheep’s clothing. Yeah, more wool.
Damn me and my unquenchable desire to make things make sense, which includes the ending to this commentary.
*Note: The China rice story, if it’s true, is food for a whole nother sit-down discussion, because I can’t for the life of me, figure out how someone can be convinced that plastic rice tastes, feels and cooks the same as real rice. I just can’t. But that’s not what I’m here discussing, or maybe it is, since it’s another one of those senseless things that just don’t make sense no matter how you boil it, but seemed to make enough sense that somebody somewhere purchased this rice and attempted to eat it.
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