You know, Thoreau is who made me interested in the examined life, or the intellectual life, or the thought worker life, or whatever it is I do here. He’s known for “On Walden Pond”, but he also wrote an essay called “Civil Disobedience” which , if memory serves, had to do with the Mexican-American War.
Me, I’ve reached that point. I’m always out exploring, and checked out a place I had not been to in a while. They used to have a bar you could sit at and talk to people. The last time I was there I had a long conversation with the owner of a trucking company about working with gangsters in New Jersey. Good times. But he creeped me the fuck out. I inferred things I wish I had not. But it was still interesting.
Tonight, they took my temperature as I walked in (masked, of course). The gal with the colored hair asked me how I was. I told her “I’m living in the fucking Twilight Zone.”
The bartender was nice enough. I tipped him $10 on a $30 tab. That’s not great, but not terrible. He said he had been doing fine.
But walking out I was like “I’m done with this fucking mask”. I had been watching one of the managers walk by me for a while. You can tell fearful people by their body language, and he was definitely fearful.
I was walking literally about 30 steps from my table to the front door and he told me “you need to wear a mask”. I told him “oh, I’ll be putting it on in just a second”. He said “you have to wear it between the table and the door”. I got to the door, turned around, patted him on the shoulder, and told him “don’t worry, I won’t come back. And go fuck yourself.” Verbatim quote.
If you are saying to yourself “hey, this guy is an asshole”, yes, yes, sometimes I am. The world needs assholes. It needs them a hell of a lot more than it needs more fucking sheep. I AM an asshole, sometimes. I have never felt any need to deny it. I am also fiercely loyal, principled, and thoughtful. If I might channel my inner Kant, would I will that all the people in the world be like me? Yes, yes, I would. Dear God it would become complicated, but ideas would flow like rivers, and sooner or later all of us would become congruent, and really, really interesting, creative and good things would start to happen.
I’m done with this bullshit. Unless it is absolutely necessary for work, I am asthmatic from this moment forward, and anyone asking me to wear a mask is risking me hyperventilating and even passing out. I might have even passed out last week. I’m not sure yet.
I think of the Taoists. I don’t remember if it was Lao Tse or Chuang Tse, or both, but one or both commented that if you have too many rules, you make liars of everyone.
Well, I am going to become a liar. I have natural talent for it, but in general I prefer the truth. But idiots and cowards do not deserve the truth. Fuck all of them.
Let’s all devoutly pray that this period where so many Americans were tested and found wanting passes soon, and we can go back to pretending that a good chunk of us are not ignorant, cowardly, conformist douchebags.