Big Mouth Strikes Again

A friend was about to tell me to keep something secret. This friend seemed to be under the impression that I tell people things.

At first, I was offended. Because people have entrusted me with hundreds of secrets that I have never revealed. Never even THOUGHT of revealing. People have confided in me. They really have. On top of that, I have secrets of my own, which, despite occasional ribbons of revelation, I am quite content to keep to myself. I'm quite sure the world is a better place with most of its information classified.

So I tried to go back through time and find the reasons why someone might have this low opinion. The occasions were found.

INCIDENT THE FIRST: During some bizarre sleep over in some cabin, or condo, or something, in Tahoe, apparently a bunch of people crashed together on a sofa bed. The next morning, I reportedly "sold out" an engaged friend to his fiance. Given that there was no alcohol involved, (don't drink; never have) my complete inability to remember any part of the entire affair was a little odd. I had to meditate extensively to recall even vague impressions. But the salient details and concrete facts are simple to recall: 1)The friend in question had nothing to hide or be ashamed of, as nothing happened on the aforementioned sofa bed; 2) I was, at the time, completely unaware of any history between said friend and any other participant in the innocent sleep that occurred; 3) I considered the relationship between the friend and his fiance to be more solid than any I had observed; and 4) A joke about the proceedings under the circumstances must have seemed, I can only suppose (as I don't remember) completely harmless. If I made a mistake, it was being wrong about the solid footing of the relationship, or mistaken in my perception of the "innocence" of the proceedings. In which case, sue me. But clearly there was nothing in the occasion to merit a reputation of being a blabbermouth. There didn't seem to be any secret to keep. I seem to have spent the subsequent years in a constant state of apology for leaking non confidential information about how nobody did anything.

INCIDENT THE SECOND: During the "State Fair" era, wherein we all worked summers building exhibits at the fair, we had the pleasure of working with a skilled carpenter we dubbed "Safety Dave." We liked the guy; and I, for one, admired his dedicated use of eye and ear protection. At some point during one of many commutes, or lunch breaks, I made a reference to Safety Dave. My "friends" literally used the following words: "We're calling him 'Sweaty Dave' now." There was no further explanation. Later that day, I politely called him Sweaty Dave. He was slightly confused and offended. My bungled apology must have included something stupid like: "I thought that's what we were calling you now." It was a faux pas on my part to underestimate the insulting nature of the nickname and misjudge the situation. It was worse to implicate anyone but myself in the fiasco. But it was certainly no breech of confidence. At no point did anyone say: "We're calling him Sweaty Dave, but that's top secret, so only say it behind his back." I seem to have spent the subsequent years fighting the constant accusation that, based on this incident, I cannot be trusted with information.

If anyone can think of anything else, then I'll eat these words. But it seems to me that based on this meager evidence, the reputation is unfounded, and I do have a right to take my place in the human race. People around me will probably find at least one slip for every secret kept. Which is an embarrassing possibility I'm willing to entertain.

Because, come to think of it, that's not my point.

Initially, I wanted to defend whatever illusion of Honor I might have amongst the people who seem to delight in calling me unworthy of trust. But even as I constructed the defense, I came to realized the HUGE advantage of the reputation, (however egregious.) The fact is, when people think you're going blab it all over, they tend keep the sordid, awkward, potentially draining, crap details of their lives to themselves. And when they're keeping such to themselves, they can't possibly expect you to entrust them with anything potentially embarrassing. While it is important for me that people consider me worthy of trust, it is equally important to me that they save the gossip for people who give a crap.

To be clear:
1) If you tell me to keep it a secret, I will. (But be clear about it, as I am often aloof enough to miss the point when you're blabbing to me and you want the blabbing train to stop there.)
2) If you have developed the habit of keeping so-called "secret" information away from me, I'm fine with that. I don't live in a world where a friendship is based on how much you can't talk about. Keep it to yourself. It honestly improves my quality of life when I can go on thinking everyone is open and honest and realizes the value of George Bernard Shaw's axiom . . .

"The only real secrets are the secrets that keep themselves."

No-Man's Land

I'm a man without a country, so to speak. But it didn't start politically. As always, my social/emotional/physical/political state has philosophical roots. Let us re-trace our steps.

By the end of the teenage years, most people have a pretty clear idea of whether they are a "morning person" or a "night owl." It usually has something to do with how late they like to stay up, relative to how early they are comfortable getting up. Most people have a pretty clear preference. Both lifestyles have their advantages. Early risers get to live out Franklin's "early to bed, early to rise" axiom. They get to enjoy the glory of the morning, the clear stillness and palpable hope inherent in the dawn. Early morning mountain bike rides are cool even in the summer, and you have the trail all to yourself. The morning is serenity.
Night birds, on the other hand, get to wrap themselves in the mystery of the night. To revel in the misty truths that are seen unseen. A kiss while the world sleeps has twice the passion. They also get to share precious moments with comedians, who, for some reason are not allowed to make people laugh while the sun shines. (I speak of Craig Ferguson, and, recently, SNL, and hopefully, Conan). I know how rare it is that anything truly good, or noble, happens after sunset, but even Mozart, who owned the sun, wrote a Little Nacht Musik.
Clear advantages on every side--the problem being that they are mutually exclusive. It simply isn't practicable to indulge in both as a matter of course. Yet here I am, a nocturnal morning person. I love (even need) them both, and cannot choose. So I'm doomed. Their combined magic most often adds up to misery.

Then there's shaving. I have no desire to be lumped with the modern scruffy slacker aesthetic. But that's what happens. It doesn't matter how often I want to say to myself: I'm not trying to look like EVERY Hollywood actor or magazine model, from Jack on Lost to whoever appears on the cover of Esquire. I like a smooth face. Yet I also hate shaving. So I play a game of cat and mouse with my whiskers and always end up on the losing side. Shaven/unshaven and liking/hating it.

Likewise with vegetarianism. I've never minded being the top of the food chain. I think meat tastes good and when produced on a small scale it's not immoral to eat other living things morally and sparingly. And yet, after watching and reading some accounts of how meat is produced, I decided that eating it was not a moral option--indeed, that you cannot be christian, or karmically positive, or enlightened, (insert whatever you believe), and also be part of the meat industry in any way. But I don't want to be one of those vegetarians, the judgemental, evangelical, activist vegetarians who think that a religious person should keep their damn mouth shut but a vegetarian should tell the world how to live. I don't really want to discuss it. But time and again, it comes up. People see you not eating it and have to know. And the next thing you know you're telling them about the toxic pools that kill people and poison the water table as fixtures at mass production pig farms all over the country. I guess if you wait for someone to ask, you're not technically trolling for converts. But let's face it, no one--NOT ONE PERSON--has EVER stopped eating meat because a vegetarian told them where their bacon came from. Even so, my approach leaves me unsatisfied. A vegetarian who likes meat, who cannot and must discuss it with people who ask, but don't really want to know.

I could go on, but why? The philosophical underpinnings are obvious at this point. The reader cannot help but perceive why I am trapped in political limbo. As it is with the night and the day, so it is with my position on the political spectrum. No party represents me. And while I hate dipsheists who display posters of the president with a hitler mustache, I also hate the smug ignoramuses who dismiss people who advocate responsible, limited government as "tea baggers." I know for a fact that people who watch Keith Olberman are precisely as mentally impaired as those who can stand the sound of Sean Hannity's voice for long periods. I understand your need to affiliate with a movement or party, but think you're a complete idiot for thinking the democrats or republicans represent anything but fascism and party-line intellectual cop-outs. I can see how you might think FOX news has a bias; I think you must have fecal matter for brains if you think that the other news networks even approach journalistic neutrality. I admire your clarity and dedication; I despise your feckless, loud-mouthed activism. I applaud your skewering of the power structure when Bush was in office; I mock and deride your blind allegiance to the blundering, power hungry, image obsessed Obama regime. I honestly don't give a tinker's damn about the president's race--on the other hand I think it's really cool that we are half a step closer to having a leader who resembles the chief executive in "The Fifth Element" and various other Hollywood classics.

See? I'm a man without a country, looking around for a third America I can call my own. A man, floundering between extremes, hoping a house divided unto itself can somehow stand.

Medical Miracles

We began dismissing people from the Arena of Ideas years ago. It doesn't seem to have made much of a difference. But hope springs eternal. As it turns out, there are medical facilities adjacent to the arena that may be able to help. Please pay attention, as this may be your only hope for continued participation.

If you believe that one major political party governs by hope, and the other by fear, please report to the medical tent, where your ears will be checked. Your left, or possibly your right ear is obviously blocked to the point of not hearing both parties make that ridiculous statement. The party shills who make such statements don't even believe themselves. Then again, it might not be your hearing. If you believe there is more than a cosmetic difference between the current ruling camps, then a parasite may have actually eaten away half of your brain. If the procedure to remove the parasite isn't destructively invasive, you may be allowed back into the arena after the requisite bed rest and antibiotics.

Similar procedures will be necessary for everyone who thinks that the news media they like isn't biased, and that the media they don't like is politically partisan. Sadly, a preponderance of people in this category will never be allowed to re-enter, whereas the medical issue has less to do with hearing or cranial parasites, and more to do with the fact that doctors have yet to perfect a technique for removing the head from the anus. Recent studies have shown very little post-operative brain activity. Some doctors claim we cannot blame the procedure, postulating that there was not measurable activity prior to extraction. Either way, admittance to the arena of ideas is revoked for individuals in this category for the foreseeable future.

Specialists are now claiming they can help people who have been banned from the arena based on their insane, unhistorical belief that radical islamists can be negotiated with, or that victims of terrorism are in any way to blame, or that they will like us more or less depending on who the president is, or who or what he/she does, or worse, that the current president is any less of a mismanaging war monger than the last one. As it turns out, a recently invented scanning technique is able to detect the pink cotton candy that has grown like padding around your heart, migrated north and corrupted the channels of logic and historical analysis in your brain. Copious doses of antibiotic reality are showing results that give the victims of this disorder hope of returning to the debate.

There remain large, idea-deficient demographics who cannot yet be helped by medical science. Those who have been removed from the arena based on their insidious use of the term "FREE universal health care," individuals who think they can blame economic woes on the people they disagree with morally, double standard bearers who think that freedom of expression only applies to the people they like (i.e. people who fret about a hick burning the Koran and never batted an eye when the virgin mary was ensconced in elephant dung) and 100% of the people who stopped "protesting" the war when the current administration began prosecuting it, are drinking such a unique brand of especially poisonous kool-aid that doctors and researchers have nearly given up hope of finding an antidote. These groups must be excluded from the Arena of Ideas until a cure is found, lest their idiocy prove contagious and contaminate the idea pool.

To those of you on the outside looking in, hoping for a medical miracle, please understand that you have our deepest sympathies. We trust, as always, that science will prevail.

O.C.D.

Everyone has it. Just a little. Or so says the literature on the subject. To some degree, everyone obsesses compulsively about something. Even you fall somewhere on the scale, from insisting on a certain brand of raisin bran, to being utterly paralyzed by a perceived need to keep flushing the toilet until the toilet paper roll is spent. Maybe you function normally until confronted with a cheesecake, the deliciousness of which you are deprived by your morbid fear of its "texture." Or perhaps you carry hand sanitizer in your purse. Obsessive Compulsive traits of one kind or another are universal. It unites us as a race.

Hence, rather than be ashamed of myself, I can rejoice in the O.C.D tendencies that may in fact constitute my only common ground with humans being.

Like you, I am unable to concentrate in my house if there is any kind of mess of any kind. Kind of kooky, huh? Like how we grab for the Windex when there's a fingerprint on the fridge? The daily vacuuming? The bleaching of the tub calking? Clean is better than dirty. Clean is better than dirty. And poor as we are, our houses might not be luxurious, per se, but they can at least look and smell decent. It's nice that we have that in common.

And I'm with you on the car foibles as well. It's nice to know I'm not the only one who has almost crashed his car as he tried to pick up a napkin on the floor of the passenger side. Spots on the window. Spots on the window. Don't touch the glass, why do people insist on touching the glass? Is there a possible reason on God's green earth why people need to touch the glass? I think a lot of you may feel an obsessive compulsion to sully a beautifully clean and transparent substance with your bodily oils. Obviously, you have a problem. But nothing we can't handle together. This is about solidarity. Just keep your damn grubby hands off the windows and, hey, no problem!

You're probably going to be relieved to know that you're not the only one who feels a compulsion to tuck people's tags back into their shirts when they are flouted. Flagrantly or negligently isn't the issue. Tags belong on the inside. Perhaps we can commiserate about that time we followed the pretty girl around the store, but didn't dare say, "miss, your tag is sticking out" for fear that she might think we're flirting? It warms my heart to share with you the joy one can only feel when the scissors we carry for this purpose are called into action.

There may be a couple of people out there who don't understand the drinking fountain problem, but they are the few. So let them drink from the tall side and pass blithely on. We'll understand with relish the majority's desire to drink from tall side, then small, then tall again, and then--walk away--no--small again--finish where you started--tall one, followed naturally by small, back again--go now while you can--tall, tall again to break the pattern--go--but wait, the small one--no--walk--forget it if you can--run--run away--ETC. Luckily, they're usually porcelain or stainless steel, which are pretty good about concealing fingerprints and the like. I knew you were thinking that. We're not so different, you and I.

There are so many other little innocent quirks we could bond over, even celebrate. Of course, there are people who don't understand. Filthy, lazy people, who need help. Thankfully, they are in the minority. The research seems to say so. For now. But who cares? Just knowing how many of you there are out there, and how much we have in common, is life affirming. This solidarity goes beyond mere statistics. It binds souls together.

I don't want to overstate it.

Suffice it to say, it makes me feel better about the inevitable day when we can really join hands, and hearts, and rise up against the brazen, brutish heathen hoards polluting the planet and exterminate them once and for all.

That's all.

Let's Pop!

[Having taken time off to care for the Wife, who has been cured by the world class surgeons at Stanford, we can now return--to anything but politics.]

We hereby nominate Kesha, sorry, Ke$ha, for the title of "World's Worst Person."

That's right. She beats out Olberman, Cheney, Hannity, Michael Moore, and that cretinous, anti-semitic old lady in the white house press corps. Given the competition, it wasn't easy, but our girl won us over.

And before handing her the award at the World's Worst Person Awards ceremony [dubbed the "worpies" by the pop culture mags] here's what the vapid celebrity presenter will read from the cue card:

As if making the "S" in her name into a dollar sign wasn't enough, the recipient of this year's award has earned it with every unspeakable line of her inane songs, and the mindless videos that punctuate them. For flaunting her disregard for the most basic elements of hygiene--yes, you can actually smell her boot-feet stank through the internet--for the lyrical conceit that tricked a million 13 year old girls into thinking that waking up in a stranger's tub and substituting whiskey for toothpaste was in ANY way less than ABSOLUTELY VILE--for holding up Mick Jagger as a standard of desirability for the sake of a vacuous attempt at rhyme--and finally, for driving it all home with a catchy tune that poisons the mind for weeks after hearing it--we are proud to present Kesha--sorry, Ke$ha--with the 2010 World's Worst Person Award!

Music will kick up as a disappointed Iranian dictator nudges the head a drunk-out-of-her-mind Ke$ha from his shoulder. Hearing her song, she'll kick into party mode and skank up to the podium. Unaware of what she has just won, she'll shout "AFTER PARTY AT THE NEAREST CLUB!!!!!!! PICK ME UP AROUND BACK!!!!!! Wooohoooo!!!"

We'd apologize to her fans for insulting her, and through her, them. But someday, she'll treasure this award as the only proof of her career. So, rather than apologies we offer our sincerest congratulations.

In Reductio

Someone is going to have to explain this to me. But let me warn you: Oscar Wilde couldn't do it. Karl Marx couldn't do it. My own brilliant brother couldn't do it. So you're up against some tough company before you even start. Which doesn't mean I don't sincerely want you to try.

But Socialism doesn't make sense to me. I get the idea, which is noble in the same way that a perfect world would be delightful. I understand the concept, which is simple on the face of it. What I want to understand is where you get the idea that it works. What I don't get is how you can look past the utopian side of it and see anything but the purest evil.

I read Wilde's "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" before going to Canada (well, Quebec). He had me for a second. Then I saw generations of people whose soul had been sucked dry and spit out by socialism. People for whom life's grand ambition was to turn 18 and be grandfathered into the public dole, which allows them to spend other people's money on beer and cigarettes so they have the time to enoble the world by watching TV. I saw a medical system that was so inept that people put up coffee cans in grocery stores with the message: "Please donate. If I can get to the states, the doctors there can help!" (I even LIVED this scenario with a friend, who went to every doctor in the province for months and suffered. He was totally cured in two weeks upon his return to the states. Stories like this didn't make it into the Michael Moore propaganda, but they happen with regularity.) I asked around. What do you like about it? "It's free" was the only positive. "It isn't free. Other people are being forced to pay for it. Where the hell did you get the idea that this is free?" "Well, I don't pay anything." Neither would I, if all my clinics looked like yours.

I read the communist manifesto. But it was too late: I'd already seen too much of the real history that followed its publication. 70 million dead in China. The killing fields. Stalin out-murdering Hitler. The former Eastern Block's outrageous pollution of the environment. A noble young woman who cannot talk about the horrors of communism in Romania without crying. These are the undeniable fruits of communism, no matter what the intellectual roots claim. If you can look at them and still espouse the idea, then you are either too stupid to participate in the debate, or you know something I don't about why all this is OK.

Recent events in Greece tore down your argument even further--and you haven't even made it yet. The socialist nations are broke and the shiftless masses are angry. Ever lived in public housing, or been to a county clinic? These are the undeniably ugly places to which socialism wants us all to go.

But forget all that. You have to get me with philosophy. Because the bare bones is where the final die is cast. And here they are:

Wanting to help people is good. Wanting people to help each other is noble. Forcing to people to help each other is Satanic. There is little (if any) nobility in a system that takes money from one person at gun point and gives it to another. Especially when the recipient's only job is to spend what you just gave him. There is no such thing as "free universal health care." There is no such thing as something for nothing. There is no system in Nature that rewards zero effort behavior. Hence, at the moment your belief that we should help each other turns into "we should have a system that forces us to help each other," it cease to be noble, or even natural, and makes you a fascist--no different from anyone who seeks to force their views upon their neighbors.

To sum up: It has never worked in practice; it has never led to prosperity; it has never ended poverty. The consolidation of power it requires has lead to millions of people being murdered, tortured, and oppressed in its name. It is philosphically repugnant, a belief system for fascists and tyrants.

I am nevertheless open to your ideas. Mostly because I am uncomfortable with the implications of how widespread socialistic ideas have become--especially if the only explanation is: "people are just that selfish, lazy, and dumb." Which is pretty much what I'm left with at the moment.

If that argument fails to grab you, I also have never understood hundreds of other widespread atrocities, any of which I'd love to "get," if you're willing to help. For instance:

Classic rock, for the most part, eludes me. Anything having to do with the hippy movement is a mystery. How anyone derives any pleasure from Monopoly is beyond me. As well as Hootie and the Blowfish, the Paris Hilton enigma, people who think we didn't land on the moon, people who eat at McDonald's, why smokers don't categorize their vile cigarette butts as litter, parents who let their kids drink 40 ounce energy drinks, and time travel.