Friday, October 15, 2010

tucked into shadows, my blowfish collapses

Some of the more esoterically minded souls I've had the pleasure of debate and discussion with have suggested to me that the human mind is vast. The mind, the soul each dwelling in their own abstract plane where either can be several times the size of the person's actual physical body. (If so, mine just blowfish-ed up, blew its stack and posted, now I'm shrinking back down to normal size.)

I've always treated these ideas as cute extensions of the god complex most humans must flirt with, giving us the promise of something beyond this life - however mundane or godlike - to make up for the questions this existence forces to the center of your consciousness. Fun to play with like chess pieces, these ideas are, but offer little comfort in the harshest moments of your life.

What makes this post more than just another episode of talk soup, brain babble gone rudderless? An additional experience to throw on the heap; finally finding myself unable to stop posting a clear, lucid thought with my fellow forum-goers. Pointing out something nobody else has said. Standing up for something just before running away to hide from the inevitable fallout for having done so. Sigh.

I've done this little act on several different bands/artists fora and mailing lists over the last 15 years.

•A rant how "poop loggy logg" sucks on a Prince mailing list - motivated by the fact that my dorm was ablaze with shitty synth-centric gangster rap all year long.

•Get in a flame war about Courtney Love on a Tori Amos mailing list.

•Defy the Zappa-ites on a Ween message board.

•Admit you're not utterly obsessive about the Replacements on a Soul Asylum board.

This sort of reflection doesn't come as any surprise. Sometimes there's no fallout because you're genuinely understood. But what do we remember? The understanding or the big flameout trollfest?

I suppose if you can have that many years in a row doing anything, you're bound to notice changes - if not in thyself then in the circumstances surrounding you and the rest of the audience.

The online experience has changed a good deal. How many of the born-with-a-cellphone generation can remember before wireless internet? Having to get up and GO to the computer lab? Dorms without ANY internet? In spite of all these immense advances in convenience, it seems that the vibes rolling off the rabble here online are just as chaotic and selfish as they have ever been.

Didn't William effing Shakespeare serve as the first example of multiplexed-at-once writing? Wasn't he trying to play a grandiose story for his regular theater-going patrons up in their box seats, while at the same exact moment playing goofy clowning jester tactics for the unwashed rabble at ground level?

I learned to wish to be invisible, want to tuck myself into the shadows to escape the shitty attitudes of the disinterested and unintelligent - just to survive high school, and it's no real surprise that the experience left lasting effects.

Dan Savage began an anti-bullying campaign for gay, bi, and gender-confused youth, to let them know in no uncertain terms that "It Gets Better." I sincerely thank the man for saving the kids of today that would've been my friends back in the day. I can't help but wonder if there'll ever be any such words of encouragement for the rest of the crowd that gets the same shite and doesn't even have the obvious to "blame" it on. When you're getting picked on because your classmates are the ones with the defects, the bigotry, the fear-of-different behind their gleeful cruelty.

The only holes I can poke in It getting Better are that people are selfish, rude, boorish dicks everyday in all walks of life, from the Bank to the Butcher Shop. High school is a place where it's sort of implicit that we're still incubating, unfinished works of personhood. Mistakes still feel hugely embarassing there, but it's understood that everybody's gonna have at least one while they're there.

How much whingeing from the Ben Glecks of the world are we gonna have to put up with if nobody in any high school ever learns that their fellows are harsh, cruel, selfish dickheads and that a thick skin is all we ever have to defend ourselves? If nobody ever learns to thicken and toughen up before leaving high school, America is about to be overrun with whiners. (As if She weren't already...)

Did I ever make it from thin-skinned target-for-abuse to thicker-skinned non-whiner?? /lol