My unposted blog-spew follows:
I've spent the last several months desperately attempting -- fruitlessly, pointlessly -- to ignore as much of what's going on as possible, to stop riding the wobbling see-saw of hope and despair, to unhitch Fortuna's debilitating wheel from the bent and greaseless axle of my troubled 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, this useless endeavor has been an unmitigated failure -- not to mention being misguided and ludicrously hypocritical as well.
Luckily (or not, I'm not sure which), I've been rudely jolted out of my self-generated torpor through the highly unlikely agency of what appears to be an endless troop of homeless people, purposefully rummaging around in the long row of garbage cans across the street from the grimy brewpub I happen to be sitting in. I seem to be the only quasi-alcoholic here who notices this interesting activity, occurring as it is but a few feet from the front windows of this tackily hip crap hole; from the neatly-dressed executroids in their SUV's, to plainclothes 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 garbage can people they practically have to wade through -- or drive over -- just so's they can get their desperately needed booze 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 trash 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. 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 a group of hard-case trash pickers to dish up an unexpected reality check; to remind me that, all the pseudo-snark and sophisticated cynicism aside, I'm basically no better than the disconnected money-worshiping 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 really about anything. What an eye opener.
Then again, I might actually have published this crap -- I can't remember. Who cares?
