Consummatum est
In which I rage drunkenly out and get positively nuts with the formatting.
Friday, 2004-12-17 | Classic Gin, Journal, Social Studies, Strong Drink
Civilization fails again!
I had hoped that I might enjoy a moment of unmitigated pleasure upon finishing finals. My hopes were dashed:
There is a thing called 'transparency.' This noun, 'transparency,' is synonymous with cognizability, comprehensibility, conspicuousness, decipherability, definition, directness and distinctness. The purpose of transparency is that everything that defines a given action should be presented in such a fashion that each definitive thing is easily understood by others.
Those of you who read my asides frequently know that I believe ardently in transparency: anything that I happen upon is yours. The one thing I believe in utterly and completely is solidarity and I will go to any lengths necessary to uphold and enforce it. Towards enforcing this end, I render whatever I learn unto you; is it incredible that I might expect the same from you?
I try not to take what I perceive as violations of this transparency personally--I really do. When someone decides that they've got a secret that simply MUST be keep from me, I do my best not to interpret this as a personal insult. Despite the fact that my door, so to speak, is always open and that the only fucking thing I have ever cared about is the idea that my intentions should be known and undersood, I do my motherfucking best not to be offended when some asshole decides that his secrets are his own and that I, his colleague (and sometime concubinate) don't deserve to know what is tormenting him. But there some times when it becomes clear that the conduct of certain persons demands immediate salutary redress. Towards that end, I render the following corrective.
Understand that I attempt utter transparency. I recollect the first days that I met my current colleagues and I recall spilling guts; I made my agenda clear and repeated myself as necessary in order that I might be understood in my entirety--anyone willing to listen was awarded with my best effort to make him understand.
Now, in my wrath, I recall a certain night on a certain part of the coast where I acted with total transparency--I spilled guts with anyone who would listen, expecting that anyone who might listen would come to be my friend. It seems like a good idea even now--to reveal everything and keep no secrets seems necessary. How else might people live amongst one another in peace?
As if my overtures weren't enough, I even went so far as to make my personal history known to those with whom I gave thanks for my very life; the Thanksgiving holiday of this year found me sharing my innermost with certain parties in order that they might understand that mine was an agenda of total transparency--I was, in effect, saying that my personal history and attendant emotional dolor were public domain.
For those keeping score, that's TWICE that I attempted to inspire what we have been calling transparency.
Nevertheless, certain parties decided that theirs was a pain unlike any other and that my attempts to live alongside them were an insult; towards that end they decided that since they were truly alone in this world (and thus different from EVERY OTHER FUCKING BREATHING PERSON) and that their private pain must remain private lest... lest... (well, this sort of privacy doesn't actually make a motherfucking lick of sense and therefore no subjunctive can ever express it)
So, what have we discussed and what have we learned?
Like Melissa once said, people are inveterate in their selfishness--they believe that their personal agony is unlike anything else that anyone else has ever experienced. Towards this end, they engage in the vile, bestial practice of keeping secrets from the people with whom they cohabitate--perhaps driven to do this by some vestigial feral or reptile genes within them--and thus preserve what they falsely identify as their humanity.
These perverse and despicable proto-human Cro-Magnons lurk among us and they embarrass us. They do it because they are nothing more than a lizard brain, a hypothalamus, incapable of sense.
We humans, unaware of their hidden agendas because they have decided that we are not worthy of being appraised of them, are ourselves eventually made to be understood as callous brutes because we transgress against their hidden agendas.
Civilization fails again--we humans do our best to be honest and forthright and these half-wit, sub-human nothings reduce our hard-won civility to embarrassment in a moment with their private lamentations.
They are selfish, callow, ego centrists who are easily identified by their repugnant narcissism, self-importance and self-interest. They prey upon those of us who attempt to be honest, un-offending and sincere; wallowing in their sickening self-pity and refusing sympathetic ears in order that they might wallow more completely, these troglodytes insert themselves into public situations in order to pervert and subvert them; they make of each civil encounter a shameless pageant of lugubrations.
Damn them. Damn them for forcing the hands of their betters.
Do you imagine for a second that I keep secrets from you? Do you imagine for a second that there is any experience of mine that you are not welcome to? Do you imagine, even for a moment, that I might keep some experience of mine from you in order to enjoy the agony of it more fully?
You disgust me.
Despite my good example, my practiced transparency, you disgust me and make of yourself that which I can only detest and abjure: cherish your abandonment as you have cherished your self-pity, you nothing.