Dry humor, or wet seriousness, for the end of the old year -- #2

I picked up, at my wife’s request, some breakfast hot bar items for Gramps (her mother) at Whole Foods Market this morning. The cashier asked – because they’re young hippies who have to – how my day is going. My humor is usually gauchely subdued, dry and disconcerting. I replied, “Stern. I woke up stern.” And I felt it and looked it, and also suspected this was not a felicitous, familiar term in the young flower-power lexicon.

The world, and the universe, are here, are stable even eternal, yet here we human beings are splashing and screaming and creating dramas like emperors in a sandbox, twits in a tornado. Our lives are so complicated, with so many problems and subtleties and footnotes and deep meanings, on a cosmic plane that is blind to all. Adding piss to poop, we send out a Collective Conscious, join hands and become a vast club that has “traditions,” shared beliefs and causes. We intently watch the rest of the world as if we are all One. Let’s teach line dancing to the Syrian refugees and tie a purple ribbon ’round an ol’ oak tree.

I’ve wondered – Is there any more dignified and appropriate way for human beings to live? Conformance with the Music of the Spheres, for example? An inner sense of movement that says “explore the mysteries” that would make us all go outward through the galaxies, downward into the earth and physics, inward to the psyche? Rather than, say, having four-thousand religions, voting for the cartoon Narcissist, having six trillion singing competitions, caring what Anthony Bourdain eats?

Here is my solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: All of you become agnostics then support your goddamned families. That would do it. Grow up, you fucking bunnies. “Stop it!” as Bob Newhart would say.*

I recently wondered what it would be like to have Absolute Zero defense mechanisms, self-medications, tension-piss-awayers. That is, no masturbatory forces like drinking, prestige seeking, fantasizing, writing poetry, blogging, chewing fingernails, wanting riches, etc. Almost all of us would be just pain and emptiness, looking blankly outward, with no goals, no personal North. This is what happens to children. Maybe, though, it would be our best medicine: that cold, finally still place, to see who we are.

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* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow0lr63y4Mw