Monday 9/14/20
I think the world would crack in two with shock if people were to learn that "easygoing" and "easy going" are two separate things. My (nonexistent) kingdom for a smart, sane, fit woman who knows the difference. One almost has to laugh at how low the bar is. Can a person, for instance, manage two grammatically correct sentences? Or how about just not saying, "I'm looking for someone to compliment my life." The bar is not low, I have learned. There is no bar. Any trace of the bar has been destroyed.
I could not sell The Golden Girls op-ed. There are so few people who will even write back. So, that's bad. More work, time, and energy, a great piece goes unseen, and no money, of course. A complete waste.
Lovely jackhammer going outside. Seems fitting. Wonderful for the headache I already have.
I look up to see that there is outrage because a sociopath chasing a cop with a knife--like something out of a horror film--was shot. What the hell are you supposed to do if someone chases you with a giant knife? Outrun him? What if you can't? We're at a point where you are supposed to let yourself be murdered for the (also nonexistent) "cause." You're a villain if you're not up for getting stabbed in your throat. "Eh, just take a throat-gashing and blade through the heart for the team." Like if that's your kid fleeing, you want your kid to be stabbed? Just die? Everything in this country is backwards. We are so sick. Hope you love the internet. Hope you love your Twitter and your likes. Hope you love your depression and your alcoholism and your narcissism and your anti-meritocracy and your gender and race politics and your pandering and your obsessive need for attention and your clicks and your indolence and your real prejudice against anyone smarter because this is where it has taken us as a society.
Two cops sitting in a car, and someone, caught up in the fervor, the cause again, decides to shoot them. I don't follow this that hard. I see it when I see it. I'm not invested in insanity. I keep my distance from it. I tend to what I have going on, which is more than enough, and which is going worse by the hour it seems, and my mental health, and my physical health, my growth, as best as I can. I could slide off a cliff damn easily right now--I'm terrified of that, frankly--and never get out again. I know that right now. I am barely hanging on, if I'm hanging on. This is a dangerous time for me. I'm not good at some of it right now. I struggle to face things--the fear and anxiety is still crippling since that initial breakdown--but I do what is my best at the moment. I'm disappointed in myself that it's not better--and even disgusted with myself--but I don't need to get up to my hips in this insanity, because it will poison you. More people with the "you shoot to disarm" nonsense. Life isn't a Clint Eastwood film set in San Francisco in the 1970s. "So I decided to wing him in the fleshy part of the calf." Nothing works like that. You'd think someone coming at you with a huge knife was a leisurely round of skeet shooting and you're the king of the sharpshooters, no pressure, no jeopardy, no risk. People absolutely melt down when you say, "perhaps you could do this a little tiny bit better," or "maybe you could be the smallest amount more professional in your job," and yet they'd be unfazed by someone pursuing them with a six-inch knife and do some mere calf-clipping? Really? When you say such things to many people, they see that as an all-out attack, and they will never get over it. They'd gladly kill you if they could for saying as much. But someone who tries to kill them with the blade, and they'd be like, nah, this is cool, you're oppressed, I will take this slicing for the team, allowing that I do not wing you efficaciously?
Imagine if Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, were all alive? Thoreau? Imagine what they'd think? Save for works of true art--and I increasingly think that true art is all that matters, really, what the human race was best for at its best--maybe we reached our height as a people when we crawled out of the water, or the mud, or whatever it was, shed the gills, and tried to start making something. I think we are so lowly. I think we are below the animals now. Animals have a nobility. They don't devolve. They do what they do to the best of an ability to do so. I don't see how you say the same of humans. I don't see how you say it at all. Animals are not base. Animals are nature. Humans are against nature. They are fundamentally unnatural now. We are walking unnatural order. Almost all of us represent as much. And those few who do not, pay a price.
