The Pod Mentality (12/10/08 Wednesday)

It was Chris. He told Julie. He'd been reading the blog and thought I was a threat to Julie. He heard all the gossip, too, but apparently didn't feel it was a threat to me. He came to me yesterday because "it" was bothering him. He told me I couldn't write whatever I wanted--this from a future librarian! Chris, whom I never judged for his adultery, judging me for expressing myself! telling me Stacey and Hinckley were doing me a disservice as friends. Fine service you did me, Chris. Fine, stupid, unsophisticated readership I've got--read just enough to judge me, not enough to understand me. "He's good," someone said about me (to someone else) about my writring. "He should write."

Hypocritical voyeurs, all of you. Cultural leeches. Do you require someone else's blood coursing through you to give you life? Fat enough now? "Wouldn't you want to know if someone were writing about you?" (subjunctive mine) I've been asked repeatedly. Only out of curiousity and vanity; and I certainly would not be alarmed if it were someone I knew writing it. What do you think I am? Of course I'm obsessive. So are you, pretending the things you arrange are putting your life in order. All the presidents' heads are facing the same way in the cash register, so life is perfect. The books on the shelf are all exquisitely aligned, so so are the stars. Your house is immaculate, so your parents love you. I'm not pretending: My obsession is my emotional development, my growth as a human being. I don't fill that hole with books, TV, internet, drink, food, classes, pets. I fill it with earnest thought about what is important, the essence of the meaning of my life. I come to truths I don't want to see and struggle to accept them. I fail, time and again, but I don't deny the truths, painful as they are; no amount of cultural cotton candy is going to obscure them. What are the truths you avoid, that you don't even look for, that you refuse to recognize when they come to you unbidden? What the hell do you know about yourself that places you on The Mount? Just another of the daily lies you live by.

I am the subject, Julie was the object. (Note the verb tenses. It will be the last time I deign to explain myself to the lower rung of "intelligence.") This is about me; Julie was the catalyst. If you knew how to read you'd not only know that but you'd know I was moving away from that agent.

Tell me what it's like to live only vicariously, to despise your own life so much you have to seek out or make other lives more pathetic in order to feel some worth, to have no concept of worth beyond what is offered for you purchase. No, wait--I already know, and I've long since grown out of it. Not that it's paid (speaking of worth); the idiot's irrational, immature and inconsiderate behavior always trumps the intelligent, rational, and mature--simply overwhelms it as a mob, tramples it, ensures the endurance of its own race. It's just like sleep, I hear. I wouldn't know; I keep my eyes open.