Saturday, March 12, 2005

Heroes--Appendices--Miniaturization--Sake

A few days ago I got to drink with an old high school teacher of mine. Me and my friend bought the first round, and he bought us the second. We got caught up on some of the more significant happenings around our school of formation, so to speak. It turns out that the student council president decided to switch genders, which seto ff some mild controversy which was quickly extinguished. (Anyone who knows my old high school should know that it is a leftie factory, bless its soul.) Our conversation meandered from politics to death to euthanasia to old bitter stories, to newer and more insane ones. I realized somewhere in the midst of this that if I lived half the life ths man lived, I would be pleased with myself. I guess the high school years were lacking in male role models.

If we fast-forward that memory by afew hours, skip past the driving and the coffee shop, we come to me and a friend trying to walk off the alcohol in broad daylight. I remember saying something about Moloch, whose eyes were the thousand blind windows of the building across the street, and whose ivory towers stretched into the distance like endless Jehovahs. That was some mad rambling for a while as the lady with the stroller stared at me rather strangely. I might have gone on a harangue about the appendix, the organ that cannot disappear because the risks borne by a body having a small appendix are too great to make sense in any evolutionary scheme, or that might have been dasy before. This friend and I always tease out some boisterous ranting, usually featuring many leitmotif deities which apparently serve as shorthand for concepts we've expressed before and wish to gloss over for dramatic effect: the Blind Eye of Odin, Shiva, the Appendix, Moloch, minimalist composer Philip Glass, Dear Leader, and numerous other bit players in the sprawling drama that nobody else seems to want to understand.

Somewhat tired, we decided to stop in every sushi bar on the way to our ultimate destination and order appetizers and sake. That was a lot of sake, which helped fuel more ranting on the sidewalks which inevitably led to a series of other bars and stories and new faces and cleverness and twirling. Everything started twirling and then stopped and then started, depending on my disposition. The evening ended, unfortunately, on a bitterly acrimonious political debate wherein I committed myself to a position of profound pessimism, mistrust and, yes, cynicism. I wanted to be proven wrong. The most positive thing I can say about that is cynicism did not decisively win the day. But now it has me thinking and full of doubt and searching for doors to exit this room where the tar runs down the walls and the dust itself seems to scream in agony. That was my inebriated self speaking. This resulted in a series of psot attempts with depressing quotes. A series that will not end until someone or something snaps me out of my intellectual funk. This should not be confused with a social funk, though the two tend to reinforce each other.

Consider: "even if God did exist, it would make no difference."

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