Wednesday 4/24/24
I am not sure what I am more taken aback by: How into themselves most people are or how uninteresting most people are, but I do know that it is the case of both being true simultaneously that is depressingly far more depressing than either.
The condom is still going strong on the City Hall steps. Michelle Wu's Boston. That's wonderful. Maybe we can get some more city employees to stand on the stairs scratching their asses (do slugs have asses?) and do nothing while getting paid for it. The other day I saw one such employee make a pretense at sweeping up a paper plate. He had his brush and that container on a stick into which the debris goes. Well, in theory. He brought his brush--very slowly, mind you--over the top of this paper plate three times, four times, five times, but the plate would not go into his container. It refused to budge. So you know what he did? He walked away. "Eh, fuck it. I'll just leave it there." As for the condom, I now envision it as a cross between a survivor and a conman, like a character entreating, "Go ahead and use me! See how hardy and strong I am? I'll keep your seed from getting where you don't want it to go!" Cut, then, to an unwanted pregnancy, and that child later growing up to be a city employee on those very stairs who isn't going to sweep up a damn thing.
When I ride the T, I am usually the only person who is not staring at their phone. I look up and think, "I could make half the train disappear right now and no one would notice." I am reading or else just looking around--being in the world, which is some radical concept now. It does not matter if people are together. They will still be on their phones. What else are they going to do? Have a conversation with the person they're with? About what? How often are people present in the here and now? When are they? For a teeth cleaning at the dentist? Is that one of the only times?
I have little intercourse with anyone for a number of reasons, and while I do not wish this to be how things are and hope it changes in time--which would require my situation to change--there is also the very real reason that not only do people have nothing intelligent to say, they have nothing to say at all.
On occasion I will speak to someone and they can only express themselves one or two words at a time, and I can tell that that is a challenge for them. It took a stressful, sweaty yeoman's effort for them to produce that single word. They can hardly think of anything to say. What they can think of they decide against, because people are now too cowardly to be themselves at all, or to say anything genuine. Then, they turn to that phone to see how many new likes they have, because that's easier, that's all they have, that's how they're now conditioned, that's what they've become, that's the comfort level, that has risen up in importance because they've made it so that not only is nothing else there, they also can't handle seeking anything else, and so in following they have nothing else.
In the dating world, people will blame the dating world itself as the issue, like it's this villainous abstract concept, but the truth is, they are the very real and concrete and not-abstract-at-all problem and they are why that world is what it is. It's just one sub-category of a larger world that has the same problem for the same reasons.
It is impossible for me not to have disdain for a coward. That doesn't mean I'll communicate or reveal this disdain. But I will have it and it's non-negotiable disdain. A writing off of someone at the base level of who they are. I may talk to the coward if need be, I may act with kindness towards the coward because I am fundamentally kind and that is important to me, but the disdain will be primary. I will conduct myself how I conduct myself because that is its own value system for me and what I answer to as a standard.
When people are obsessed with not having things go wrong, and think in terms of what measures they should take to not have thing go wrong, what things they should not say so that things don't go wrong, they end up making things go as wrong as they possibly could when the other person is an intelligent person of character. Thus, they drive any such person away, and have only people like themselves in their lives, which does them no good, feeds their depression, underscores their true aloneness, makes them starved for attention, leads to narcissistic, social media-ized behavior, and probably contributes to a self-medication problem.
