All right, this is getting downright silly.
Today, I am not getting around to eating “lunch” until 5 pm.
That’s not nearly as bad as the 7 pm plus of recent vintage, but it is still annoyingly late to be eating my middle and arguably most important meal.
Most important because it’s the one which features my Cavalcade of Medications. That’s the process by which I take like ten different medications with the meal. All the ones I take only once a day.
And I do wonder if taking them all in one sitting puts undue stress on my systems. I suppose I could spread them out over all four meals of the day,
But then I might forget which ones I have taken, and get confused. It would increase the mental overhead costs completely.
And being the easily overwhelmed space cadet that I am, I can’t afford that. I never know how much mental wherewithal I will have at any given moment, but in general I am not well supplied with it, so I must be cautious.
It’s all reality’s fault. Why does it have to be so annoying? I’m so smart when I stay within the realm of the mind.
Oh, how I dream of being a pampered intellectual superstar. With people to deal with reality for me so I am left free to be my brilliant and amazing self with way fewer incidences of also being a complete fucktard.
Anyhow, where was I? Oh right, late for lunch.
Now I know that in the grand scheme of things, eating lunch two hours later than I had intended does not really matter. I get fed either way. It’s no big deal.
But it irritates me. And not just because of some abstract sense of what the “right” time to eat lunch is.
It’s not like I arrived at 3 pm via some long and detailed scientific process to determine the exact ideal time for my midday meal.
In fact, at one point in the distant past I ate at a way more normal time of 1 pm.
But then, like now, I went through a period where I kept missing that time by an increasingly broad margin and so eventually I just gave up and gave in and said, “Well, okay, it’s 3 pm now. Ya happy? ”
I refuse to let it drift to 5 pm, though.
And I know what the problem is. 3 pm rolls around and instead of stopping what I am doing to blog n’ eat like a grownup, I grump about it like a cranky toddler and end up putting it off just to show it that it’s not the boss of me now!
I suppose one solution would be to move my lunchtime back to 1 pm so that by the time my little snit fit is over it’s 3 pm and I am actually on time, sort of.
Nah. That kind of thing never works.
Or I could just get the fuck over it.
Hmmm. 1 pm you say….. intriguing….
More after the break.
Life isn’t fair
Of course it isn’t. There is nothing there to MAKE it fair… except us.
What justice there is in the world – and there’s quite a lot of it – is there because human beings, with their systems and their laws and their morals, have manufactured it.
The world outside our sphere of influence is a cruel and horrible place. The only justice that exists in the oh-so-innocent world of nature and animals is the brutally Darwinian kind, and that’s no justice at all.
It’s survival of the fittest, and you know they’re the fittest because they survived.
Society exists specifically to fight this law of the jungle. By banding together and looking out for one another, we create not just a stronger tribe but stronger individuals as well.
The tribe that supports an injured member of the tribe through a time when they cannot contribute to the tribe prospers because in time they get that individual’s labour back and thus get years more of productivity from someone the law of the jungle would have doomed to starvation or worse.
The tribe that supports the aged and infirm continues to benefits from those people’s knowledge and wisdom and the things they can produce socially.
The tribe that protects the weak from the strong creates a society in which everyone feels safe and can relax their guard and think communally, fostering things like culture, knowledge, and social progress.
Feel free to bring these examples up next time you encounter a social Darwinist.
This human justice is the only reason I can sit here and write and you can sit there and read it instead of constantly patrolling in case a rival wants to kill us and take our stuff.
Thus those, like the aforementioned social Darwinists, who espouse some notion that we are better off if we discard those they consider to be a “drain on the system” or quite simply “not worth saving” are flying in the face of humanity’s proven track record of being strongest and most prosperous as individuals precisely when we support and protect one another the most.
That’s why history is a story of tribes – the Etruscans, the Hittites, the Spanish – far more than it is a story of individuals.
Even the great Napoleon would have been just some Sicilian pipsqueak without a whole nation of Frenchmen at his back.
Our overly individualistic modern society can blind us to just how interdependent we are and how much we owe to our fellow human beings just for being able to stay alive.
And that’s fine when the system takes care of us. We are then free to imagine we are somehow a self-generating miracle of individualistic virtue who have earned absolutely we have ever gotten through our own individual merit.
But when in our hubris we start dismantling the very systems that allow us to feel this way, we become dangerous both to the society we have so tragically failed to understand and to our own spoiled and overprivileged selves.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.