People – your problems are boring.
All the while we expect the whole world to conspire, to get us the things we care and long.
So hopefully we think its a drama movie with nice ending – oh no, we so dearly hope it ends well, with all the money, fame, action and loved ones still along.
We its heroes. Everyone else – just a side-kick. Unimportant. Ungrateful.
So much evil, of course none of it among us! Our problems – rocket sciences, everyone else’s just a crib.
Jobs of dubious importance, conscious and well aware of it. Yet the human farce of social ranks, authority, parenting.
How sadly wasted are efforts!
How cruelly we refuse to understand!
How hugged to our lives are we, to our egos!
How often we take life for granted!
Ahhh…how sumptuously delighting is vengeance, and how stone cold hard – a sorry? how juicily spurring to point else’s mistakes and how ravaging a criticism?
sleeping-pooping-eating-going-working-eating-cribbing-coming-eating-sleeping.
You are just a cog. A regular mechanical cog, turning the unknown wheel, knowing not – where it goes.
Repetitive mundane banal bland cheese pizza’s – that’s what we are. Gulp it brother, Gulp it! use that coke…gulp it!
Tick Tock
Tick Tock
Tick Tock, all your life. waiting.
People! – YOUR problems are boring
People! You amaze me! You are the most interesting ones, to me, on the face of the earth! People!
Somewhere back in the jungle I had shucked off all ambition of that sort. I had been shot at too many times and had lost interest in supermarkets and exurban subdivisions and tonight is the PTA supper don’t forget dear you promised.
Oh, I wasn’t about to hole up in a monastery. I still wanted–
What did I want?
I wanted a Roc’s egg. I wanted a harem loaded with lovely odalisques less than the dust beneath my chariot wheels, the rust that never stained my sword. I wanted raw red gold in nuggets the size of your fist and feed that lousy claim jumper to the huskies! I wanted to get up feeling brisk and go out and break some lances, Then pick a likely wench for my droit du seigneur–I wanted to stand up to the Baron and dare him to touch my wench! I wanted to hear the purple water chuckling against the skin of the Nancy Lee in the cool of the morning watch and not another sound, nor any movement save the slow tilling of the wings of the albatross that had been pacing us the last thousand miles.
I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I wanted Storisende and Poictesme, and Holmes shaking me awake to tell me, “The game’s afoot!” I wanted to float down the Mississippi on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and the Lost Dauphin.
I wanted Prester John, and Excalibur held by a moon-white arm out of a silent lake. I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and eat the lotus in a land that seemed always afternoon. I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be what they had promised me it was going to be–instead of the tawdry, lousy, fouled-up mess it is.
[Glory Road, Heinlein]
woah! That way, each of us wanted something. Some fought, some got. Together, we made the tawdry, lousy, fouled-up mess- the world.
Right. This is the idea of this book, and in general, Heinlein.
(Actually, Heinlein goes a step further, and says that the world is not “tawdry, lousy and fouled-up”. Check his passionate defense of the current-world in a speech his wife read when accepting NASA’s Distinguished Public Service Medal, 1998. [http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/athens/heinlein-i-believe.html])
1988
my counter to this post is thus:
http://callmechintu.wordpress.com/2010/08/19/spirit/
i know… me countering myself, this is the new theme of this blog…