October 11th, 2005
Drop kick me Jesus through the goal posts of life
End over end neither left nor to right
Straight through the heart of them righteous uprights
Drop kick me Jesus through the goal posts of life.- Paul Craft, in his seminal work, "Drop Kick Me Jesus through the Goal Posts of Life"
* * *
Have you ever stopped to wonder why a quarrel with another person—a true quarrel, and not just some stupid semantic disagreement—gets its hooks into you and the other person? I mean this: You can disagree with Person X over there about some detail, trivial or even large. But there are some times when you feel the fundamental grind on your soul that having to even abide another person makes. It's like a subatomic reaction that is catalysed by your proximity (intellectually speaking).
In those times, each party is so convinced—nay, obsessed—with the idea that each is not just right, but completely righteous.
I need to define some things here:
In the true tradition of human behaviour and human thought everywhere, except among the people living in the evolutionary cul-de-sac known as, "I'm okay, you're okay" 1 Good Guys are those people who Think Like We Do.
Bad Guys are people who are not Good Guys.
People who are not part of My Tribe are almost definitely Bad Guys until they've done something to prove otherwise. If I'm bunny-headed, I may waive the requirement of "proof otherwise", but that almost always leads to trouble ... so probably not.
So, remembering who the Bad Guys are:
I plumb forgot that the Bad Guys in this world just plain don't think of themselves that way. They're just "misunderstood" ... or they are at a complete loss to understand why everybody hates them. Loathesome little creatures of this world are convinced they are the gentle angels of goodness and light, while the bulk of the rest of us slobs and wretches wander the Earth misguided and/or stupid.
Oh, and the Bad Guys have an overinflated sense of self worth, don't you know.
You see, this is really scalding my Ovaltine these days because of a couple of things that recently ocurred:
One of those over-informative, everybody-is-my-buddy salesmen trying to make me buy a $275 pair of Armani glasses frames (can you imagine me wearing anything Armani???) broke out of his well-polished shit-sucking shell in complete frustration at my unwillingness to just unthinkingly believe him about every point. He got a bit snippy for a moment and snarled, "You're a hard man!" (then he got himself back under control, which is too bad because he was just starting to show some character).
I received a free handwriting analysis that said: "Mr. Nobody [a pseudonym, of course] is sarcastic ... he pokes people harder than he gets poked. These sarcastic remarks can be very funny. They can also be harsh, bitter, and caustic at the same time."
Yeowch! Kinda skewered by that one, I was. But I take solace in the fact that "harsh, bitter, and caustic" are very subjective and non-quantifiable terms. They might as well be as re-worded as, "Mr. Nobody has gotta be someone's idea of a Bad Guy, the bastard."
So there are plenty of people out there in my rather limited world who look at me and think, "Brian is a Bad Guy." And I suppose, this wandering rant notwithstanding, I am much the same. But when I am convinced of my purity of intention (my sister Carolyn once attacked me with the sarcastic label of looking down "dispensing wisdom from my pillars of moral rectitude") and I come across those people in opposition to my very way of life and style of being, but who are also sure of their right-thinking and proper stance on the world ... well, that's when the subatomic particles between me and them begin to get excited and damage the flesh.
It's when people who are absolutely certain of their righteousness in the world and who also happen to be opposed to each other meet that we get the real ugliness and danger in this world. I really truly wish Roger Hodgson had been right in his song "Child of Vision" from Supertramp's 1979 album, Breakfast in America when he sang:
We have no reason to fight
'Cause we both know that we're right[sigh] Except, of course, that we just use our differences to fight even more ...
1 And to continue: "So what's your problem?"
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