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Don't worry, I'm not...
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The good life is about two-and-a-half things:
1. looking at everybody's shit and calling them on every one of the hundred toxic elements in their choices.
2. embracing them anyway, forgiving them anyway, loving them anyway.
21/2. Doing the same for yourself.
You, dear reader, are fucking toxic: every one of you; hateful, gross, a miasma of self-righteous hypocrisies, an impediment to people's well-being, the world is a worse place for you being a part of it.
So am I.
And you, dear same reader, are amazing: every one of you; the cause of love for some and love's very source for others. The world is better for you being a part of it: more enlightened,more fulfilled, more loving, more meaningful.
Fuck you, and thank you for everything you do.
Humans are mysterious creatures, irredeemably flawed yet worthy of redemption precisely because they persist in spite of flaws to try harder, be better, put off their failures without even perceiving their successes. Every success is as temporary as every failure. Every success leads to failure and every failure leads to success. Humans are all the moreso worth embracing because they fail so often. If humans succeeded to be better all the time, they wouldn't be worth anything. It's the effort to change, the perpetual struggle to change, that makes humans worth forgiving.
It's not a secret that I view the various social scenes as toxic that I've been bound to for eleven years. I could try to deny it at this point but who'd I be fooling? I've said it so often that I'm amazed anybody still talks to me. So many people I know reek of sanctimony and are all the uglier because they think that their worst side is their best. The world is slowly dying because so many alleged progressives pressure each other to conform to widely held cultural norms that grow ever more extreme for lack of intellectual diversity. Anybody who dissents at even a whisper is suspect of low character. Even if they're an angel in their personal conduct they can only be considered a 'friend with an *.'
And yet how am I any different?
The paradox is that simply by my insistence on having pointed it out for so many years, I'm the most sanctimonious, self-righteous, arrogant prig/prick of them all. If I'm at all a part of this (now ageing) segment of a city that is about a hundredth as 'weird' as they think they are, then who in this enclave could possibly define self-righteousness better than me?
And it goes just as much for my extremely pickled culture of origin. To be perfectly honest, it's a fucking toxic place that had I a different skill set I'd have left decades ago and burned the bridge. It might have been a terrible mistake, but I could have at least seen for myself if anywhere was any different and made a more enlightened decision about what's true in the big world.
The many J___ who populate my town of origin are the shallowest, most uncurious, most spoiled and wasteful people in the history of my people. They took the greatest opportunity in the history of the J_____ people and flushed it down their formica toilets to live lives of material selfishness and egotistical self-advancement, and in the process may have damned new generations of J___ to living a life as dangerous as those lived by all of their ancestors. Any adult or child who does not fit their Mandelbrot shaped cookie-cutter is a second-class citizen of the town, a J__ among J__s.
And yet, whom among them is more spoiled, wasteful, egotistical and arrogant than I?
(I'm going to omit this paragraph, the hurt is frankly too deep...)
It's easy to get along when you feel no resentment or hostility, but no soul is gained from that. We earn our souls, and we earn them by struggling through our resentments to see the best in people we resent. What we resent, even what we object to, are just small parts in the totality of each person. The world is full of the temptations to judge and condemn, and yet none of us knows the full extent of the hurt and horror that warps people into what offends us about them.
Now, I realize, nobody wants to hang around the guy who says 'you're a fucking ass' all the time, and yet you don't know me either. You may think, dear reader, you know me as well as you know anybody in your everyday life.
You don't know shit.
Fortunately.
You don't know what made me what I am any more than I know what made you. It's possible that I don't even know what made me any better too. If I can be this smug about other people's holier than thou tendencies, doesn't that make me the least self-aware of all?
So yes, I'm tempted overwhelmingly to take back the apology and go on pointing that silver finger at the world. I won't do it, but I'm tempted.
The point is that you or me, we don't really know each other, many of us have to in some way forgive each other for what we find objectionable, and learn to live together as some sort of community with people whose good intentions we doubt.
I'm game if you are. Some of you will be, some of you won't. For those who are, thank you, and I'll try to keep my finger pointed at those who stay away.
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