Doug Henning, that is.
Fuck you, Doug, and all your empty headed talk about “the power of IMAGINATION!” and how we could “be anything we wanted to be” because if we only wanted it badly enough, our biggest dreams would come true.
Yeah, Jiminy Cricket can go fuck himself with a can of DDT too.
And it’s not just you, Doug. I loathe your entire generation of vacuous pinheads regurgitating your formulaic “pro-social” pablum about how great cooperation and friendship are and how we shouldn’t exclude people just because they’re different.
Fat lot of good that shit did me when I was a friendless weirdo child who never even got the chance to cooperate with anyone because I was different.
I mean, my fellow students must have had that shit repeated to them over and over again every Saturday morning too, yet somehow they still didn’t get the fucking memo.
Like a lot of inclusive and empathic ethics, it’s not something you actually do, it’s something that makes you feel good when you hear it.
Actually being nice to people sucks.
They got the memo about cooperation, though. They all cooperated beautifully when the entire student body of Parkside Elementary was chasing me around the playground with harmful intent.
All that crap about the power of friendship really hurt me back then. It was like the normal people were mocking me and grinding my face into the dirt about how wonderful being normal like them (and not “gross” like me) was and how I would never know the simple social pleasure of having a peer group because I was broken and disgusting and wrong and didn’t even deserve to go anywhere where others could see me.
But that would never have occurred to you, would it, Doug? Your evacuated cranium would never have conceived of there being a downside to jerking people off by telling them how great something most of them already had was.
But it wasn’t just the children’s entertainment of my formative years that I hate. I hate that whole generation of hippie dippie Boomer teachers who didn’t want to be seen as an “authority figure” and therefore let my fellow students run wild like Lord of the Flies.
God, do I hate that book.
My whole childhood was marred by the unintended consequences of all those Boomer teachers preferring to try to be our “friend” instead of having to actually live up to their responsibilities and take charge of the classroom.
As a result, I, like many other Gen X kids, grew up in a world without authority figures. And that made us, or me at least, very nervous and uncertain because we lived in a kind of anarchy where you had nobody to turn to when you were scared or weirded out or just plain don’t know what the hell is going on.
Human beings experience enormous stress without leadership. Whether the limp wimps of the world like it or not, we need hierarchy.
That doesn’t mean anything fascist. It just means there needs to be someone who understands the big picture that people can turn to when they don’t know what to do.
Without that, everyone gets stressed out by all the uncertainty. Nobody even knows if they are doing what they are supposed to be doing and if so, if they are doing it right. Discipline falls apart (if it ever existed) and people do mindless, aimless things like cattle in a feedlot. Everyone is miserable, including the teachers.
But hey, better that than forcing a Boomer to actually take responsibility for the things they actually have responsibility for, right?
No wonder they made such lousy parents.
More after the break.
Not that I’m bitter
Oh wait, yes I am. I’m bitter as hell about the way my life turned out.
But I am trying to get over it because it’s not helpful. I know that my harsh, bitter, angry, scornful internal narrative is hurting me in the long run because it gets in the way of my moving on with my life by causing me to dwell on my past.
Or more correctly, dwell IN my past.
And that’s no good. If I want to move on into the future I have got to make peace with my past somehow, and that won’t be easy.
And it can’t be done by fiat. It has to be earned by working through all of the emotions involved until some degree of resolution is achieved.
Not “closure” because nothing is ever truly completely closed. But it can be sufficiently resolved so that the wound is closed and you can use that part of you again.
Right now, all that bitterness and rage over where I am today and how I got there as well as the massive amount of grief and torment I feel about all those years of my life in which all I did was playing fucking video games plus all the self-loathing that comes with being a 51 year old loser who’s never even had a job adds up to a massive amount of stuff for me to process and there is no quick and easy way to do it.
I can’t possible swallow that mass of indigestible dreck all at once. So all I can do is eat it one mouthful at a time and hope that some day, somehow, I will have eaten enough to make a difference in my life.
And that means giving myself permission to be mad about stuff that might even, in the final analysis, be my fault.
One of the biggest and most soul-wrenching questions that I face over and over again because I can’t seem to resolve it is : how much am I to blame for being who I am today? Could I have done differently? Or was I destined to tread water for 30 years before I could even begin to get my shit together?
The thing is, both answers to that question are bad. It’s bad to imagine I was helpless to do any better and it’s bad to imagine that I totally could have ergo this is all my fault.
Maybe it IS my fault. But if it is, I can’t handle that at all. Accepting that would crush me. I might never recover.
But the question then becomes, if I stay like this, is it STILL my fault? Or can I make it better for myself?
I’ve been proceeding on the assumption that I can. And in tiny ways, I have.
But part of me yearns to reach out for more. So far, my negative demons have been keeping me from doing so.
But some day I will finally reach outside myself and meet the world.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.