I've spent the last few weeks desperately attempting -- fruitlessly, pointlessly -- to ignore as much of what's going on as possible, to stop riding the wobbly see-saw of hope and despair, to unhitch Fortuna's debilitating wheel from the bent and greaseless axle of my consciousness by paying only so much attention as is absolutely necessary. I've tried to move myself even further towards the margins and fringes, not so much to garner perspective but obliviousness, to shut out what little awareness of things I might actually have. A psychic pit-stop, a mental safe-room, an extended breather from the immense psychological burden of giving a shit within a cultural milieu that prizes self-centered indifference above all else ...Needless to say, the more I tried to ignore everything, the more it all drove me into bouts of stationary batshit panic. This useless endeavor has been an unmitigated failure -- not to mention misguided and ludicrously hypocritical as well.
Luckily (or not -- I'm not sure which), I've been rudely jolted out of my self-generated, over-excited torpor through the highly unlikely agency of what appears to be an endless troop of homeless people, purposefully rummaging around the long row of garbage cans across the street from the grimy coffee joint I happen to be sitting in. I seem to be the only caffeine junkie here who notices this interesting activity, occurring just a few feet from the front windows of this tackily hip crap hole. From the neatly-dressed executroids in their SUV's, to plain-clothes cops with guns, to the self-conscious grunge-fucks who ride up on their carefully de-engineered bicycles while smoking "organic" cigarettes (the basic clientele of this place), they're all pretending not to see the trash can people they practically have to wade through -- or drive over -- just so's they can get their desperately needed coffee fix. I watch this low-rent spectacle, and I think: What's worse, that there are so many in the "wealthiest nation on earth" who must forage through the garbage to survive, or that the people responsible for producing the trash in the first place act as if the rubbish-harvesters don't actually exist?
The irony of deriding confirmed consumerist assholes for actively ignoring the blatantly rising tide of poverty, homelessness, and all the other fun features of predatory capitalism, while at the same time complaining about how difficult it is to ignore all the grotesque ugliness myself, is not lost, which is the point of this post. In fact, "irony" is probably not the correct term -- "hypocritical stupidity" better approximates the situation here. Whatever the case, the idea that ignoring something will make it go away, whether that something be dumpster-diving street people or the neo-con appetite for destruction, is patently ridiculous and self-defeating. Leave it to group of hard-case trash pickers to dish up an unexpected reality check, to remind me that -- all the psuedo-snark and sophisticated cynicism aside -- I'm basically no better than the disconnected money-worshipping corporate fuckwad in his Escalade, righteously plowing through the paper-thin fabric of this tattered society with nary a worry or concern, or a thought about anything really. What an eye-opener.
So, for better or worse or otherwise, I'm here for the duration -- that is, until the drab and most foul neo-con era runs its course, or we're all rounded up by Blackwater goons and locked away in some Halliburton-approved dungeon, or some such combination of the two. Or something else entirely. I know full well that this hosehead blog doesn't mean anything, but so what? Trying to ignore the world as it comes apart at the seems probably doesn't mean anything either.
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Simply as an aside: "ignore" is the root of the word "ignorance," is it not? Enough said.
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