At the outdoor market this morning, I found myself caught behind two pretty-damn old women, for whom it was clearly a challenge to walk back out onto the unmarked, multi-lane folk free-for-all (a mixture of meander-ers and people with a pressing purpose). Normally I'd've just passed them by and been on my miserable way, knowing that they were gonna need more time and space than the rest; I'd've been there forever otherwise.
But today I noticed something different. Just as I had taken a Ginobili step to the left, I could see that the woman on the left was looking resignedly over her shoulder, frustrated that she didn't have a chance. So I paused, giving them just enough time to get out in front of me. We then proceeded to walk at a painfully slow pace until I heard someone behind me bitch and moan (demonstrably, mind you). He whined something about why they "couldn't just take a seat somewhere".
Maybe it was that I was already frustrated by the circumstances as they were, but this really irritated me. I whipped around while simultaneously producing my butterfly knife with a counter-spin and held the handle to him in confidence, "Why don't you just fucking kill 'em?"
The look on his face was priceless. An actor could not have managed a more complex reaction in ninety takes. "Are you crazy?" he exhaled.
"Great!" I cried. "Millions upon millions of murderers rot in prison and all the assholes are roaming around loose!"
Back when I still drove an auto-mobile, I used to marvel at the sheer trust we drivers displayed in our routine game of anti-chicken. A mere inches and a center-line separate the ongoing from the oncoming, yet so seldom does one give the wheel a last-minute yank, ending at least one life as it knows itself.
Still, that such a demise has made acquaintance with a young man on a state road in South Carolina is unremarkable. That the road on which he was travelling had been named after his father might be seen as ironic. That the reason the road was named after his father was because his father died three years ago when "his vehicle hit a roadside bomb" in Afghanistan is typically patriotically pathetic. That the namesake's offspring, an eighteen year old, "was going to graduate in a few months, and had talked about joining the military just like his father" makes his death deliciously un-ironic, mercifully timely, and wholly appropriate.
I can no more muster sympathy for third-party victims of the hierarchy's bondage scheme than I can for myself, who by merely choosing to be happy, could shed this misanthropic melancholy. So in not choosing to be happy, I sure as fuck am not gonna feel sorry for myself.
Is it too much to expect the clueless subjects of the state to simply stop being clueless? Well if ignorance be bliss, then happiness is not that easy to come by either.
But today I noticed something different. Just as I had taken a Ginobili step to the left, I could see that the woman on the left was looking resignedly over her shoulder, frustrated that she didn't have a chance. So I paused, giving them just enough time to get out in front of me. We then proceeded to walk at a painfully slow pace until I heard someone behind me bitch and moan (demonstrably, mind you). He whined something about why they "couldn't just take a seat somewhere".
Maybe it was that I was already frustrated by the circumstances as they were, but this really irritated me. I whipped around while simultaneously producing my butterfly knife with a counter-spin and held the handle to him in confidence, "Why don't you just fucking kill 'em?"
The look on his face was priceless. An actor could not have managed a more complex reaction in ninety takes. "Are you crazy?" he exhaled.
"Great!" I cried. "Millions upon millions of murderers rot in prison and all the assholes are roaming around loose!"
______________
Back when I still drove an auto-mobile, I used to marvel at the sheer trust we drivers displayed in our routine game of anti-chicken. A mere inches and a center-line separate the ongoing from the oncoming, yet so seldom does one give the wheel a last-minute yank, ending at least one life as it knows itself.
Still, that such a demise has made acquaintance with a young man on a state road in South Carolina is unremarkable. That the road on which he was travelling had been named after his father might be seen as ironic. That the reason the road was named after his father was because his father died three years ago when "his vehicle hit a roadside bomb" in Afghanistan is typically patriotically pathetic. That the namesake's offspring, an eighteen year old, "was going to graduate in a few months, and had talked about joining the military just like his father" makes his death deliciously un-ironic, mercifully timely, and wholly appropriate.
I can no more muster sympathy for third-party victims of the hierarchy's bondage scheme than I can for myself, who by merely choosing to be happy, could shed this misanthropic melancholy. So in not choosing to be happy, I sure as fuck am not gonna feel sorry for myself.
Is it too much to expect the clueless subjects of the state to simply stop being clueless? Well if ignorance be bliss, then happiness is not that easy to come by either.
