Rant

I don’t know what’s wrong with people these days. I think maybe it’s that people aren’t supposed to know what they’re missing. Two hundred years ago you worked on your farm. If you were lucky you could buy into some fallacy that there were people in a city you’d never see who were smarter than you and doing things that you could never understand but that were in your interests. Your father did the same thing and if your son was lucky so would he. Now every man woman and child on this planet has to compare himself to astronauts and billionaires. And everyone feels like they need to have this experience, like there’s something missing. So they watch independent films but the independent films are shot in HD so they have to have their three thousand dollar television with eight channel digital surround sound and fourteen cooking shows on at the same time. Then two weeks out of the year they take their vacation and hope that they can afford to fly off to some other continent and watch nature through the windows of their air conditioned condo. What’s the most common desktop picture in the world? It’s some pretty beach scene. People spend their entire lives under fluorescent lights so that for a few minutes a day they can look at some professional photographer’s idea of what they want. No one wants to admit that they aren’t thinking for themselves; no one wants to move to the beach. They feel in stereotypes: teenage depression, middle-aged ennui. They feel like something’s missing, and they never stop to consider that it might be themselves.

Laugh. Cry. Punch someone in the face. Punch yourself in the face. Play in the dirt.

Just live.