What could be easier that what’s easy?
Generally speaking, I’m not a fan of people. And while I realize that this has become the go to cliché for edgy hipsters, one should note that I have a wife, a mortgage and a basement full of shattered dreams. I am not hip, have no need to be hip, and will never again seek to be hip. The only hip in my future is an artificial one that I’ll need to help me hobble through my adult diaper years. In other words, I couldn’t give a greasy, peanut-festooned shit what anyone thinks of me, except, of course, for the people who sign my paycheck or occasionally rub up against me in a familiar, tingly way.
I do have a small group of friends, people who make the long pauses between our visits tolerable. These are the kind of friends that can make a torrential downpour during your only day on a tropical island one of the most fun-filled days of your life. But I can barely find time for them. So if you’re not in that group of people, then I simply don’t give a fuck about you. It’s nothing personal. In fact, it’s the exact opposite of personal.
In social situations, this prevailing attitude might make me seem aloof or even surly. (If I were a fish, what kind of fish would I be? A Standoffish. Ba-dum-bum!) But again, me no give a fucky sucky. The problem is that my new job – a good but demanding one, and the reason I have not been here or anywhere else for so many weeks – requires that I be out in front and make nice with a vast array of asshats, shaved monkeys and true believers. Make no mistake, I can fake it. I can fake it like a Julliard-trained whore who works for tips, which I kind of am except for the Julliard part. But doing so leaves me with a sense of self-loathing that must be maintained in a continuously refreshed alcohol solution to keep it from growing out of control and overpowering my will to live.
And then there are employees to manage. Today I went to lunch with one of my new staff members and, I shit you not, she spent 45 uninterrupted minutes telling me about what a great listener she is. Lunch lasted an hour, and I’m pretty sure I blacked-out for the last fifteen minutes. Not once, in an entire hour, did this “great listener” ask me one measly question or allow me the courtesy to utter more than a single sentence at a time. She also likes to refer to herself in the third person, which I thought was kind of funny until I realized she wasn’t being ironic.
I want to harangue this person with the kind of angry detestation and disgust that is typically reserved for genocidal dictators, aging pop stars and octo-moms. Unfortunately I can’t. Somewhere over the years I’ve grown weary of despising the sad and pathetic who roam so freely among us. It’s just too time-consuming and, well, exhausting.
More to the point, the endeavor is as fruitless as Mother Teresa’s rotting corpse’s womb (Shout out to my Catholic homies!). If it were possible to change people, then I might continue. But it isn’t. Despite looming mountains of evidence to the contrary, generally no one thinks that they themselves are stupid, wrong-headed, annoying, or the mental equivalent of ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag. No amount of logic, analysis, or rational debate will change their minds, because to do so would be to shatter their belief system and cause an unprecedented and painful identity crisis that would take years of self-analysis to resolve. Who’s got time for that when there is ten hours of Dancing With The Stars on the DVR? It’s not like it’s going to watch itself.
My opinion is that it’s simply easier for people to create an alternative reality for themselves, one in which believing is the same as knowing, wanting is the same as earning, and intending is the same as resulting. (To see what I mean, tune into “Deal or No Deal?” and watch as contestants employ absurd rationalizations, contrived logic and life lessons to decipher what amounts to nothing more than a random drawing.)
So in mid-life I find myself in a position where I must pretend to like tedious people and care deeply about a tepid cause so that I can make money to buy shit I don’t need. Either I’m a gutless whore, or an assiduous saint who is willing to sacrifice his own personal belief system for the greater good.
Which do you think is easier to believe?