Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Aftermath

That word has been in the news quite a bit. Aftermath. I'm thinking it is a catchphrase in the knee-jerk double speak manipulation of reality that Fox News and other marketeers of disinformation use to keep people thinking less critically and more inside a box that vomits capitalism. They want us to think that at 7am we start our day. at noon we eat. at 5 pm we go home. when tragedy strikes there is a pattern of preparation, ignorance, death, grief and renewal...and aftermath. This is the subtle manipulation of a culture by the big thinkers behind the curtain. We are not a philosophical nation but we like to pretend we are when the rest of the world is watching. Aftermath is a five cent word being used by balloon chested news anchors with big hairspray manes of Sub continent nun hair extensions and false white teeth caps. Those are who we look to for guidance like blind people checking a cemetery for speed dating. If you aren't repulsed then you are numb like Novocaine.


I'm not grieving because I'm emotionally immature. I'm selfish and childish. That's because I grew up in a household where I was the youngest child at 11 years old and the oldest child was 43 and he was my dad. But that worked to my advantage because I had no role model on how to assimilate a dirty sock onto my crooked foot. Other essentials like cooking and acquiring gainful employment were unfortunately overlooked in my descent to the bottom of the social dung heap but no childhood is perfect. har har har.

A word on young Oggy's misanthropic sources: I did not dream of bringing a bushmaster child-killing rifle to school and murdering all my tormentors. No, but I did fantasize about how wrong that would be if I did dream of it. And the terrible wrongness of it attracted me...Fortunately for the PHS class of '89 the only weapons in the house were a broken Atari 2600 Duck Hunt controller and my brother's bad breath.
I can't put words in the mouth of spree killers but when you are a teenager or mentally a teenager then you can think strange things and I remember that the idea of doing the worst thing possible started to make sense. It was what I called an anti-fantasy. Another anti-fantasy was marrying the most inappropriate woman possible. A fat bitch, for instance. An abusive, fat bitch who smoked cigarettes. My buddy Brad and I had long conversations about the implications this involved and we agreed that only if we did it would we know for sure. The thought of that, the anti-fantasy, was so humorous that I accidentally made this daydream come partially true in my later years...and it was as bad as I thought it would be. It was absolutely horrible. Like getting punched in the stomach because you admit you got food poisoning. It wasn't that I wanted to be in a dysfunctional relationship...but the idea that to intentionally seek out a horrible situation that was also intimate...was so wrong that I couldn't resist.There's always someone who shoots the civilians in those cop video games...just because they can. Who knows, maybe those people eventually become cops.

I guess some people have a voice of reason that tells them to play it safe and accept that if it looks like a bitch and sounds like a bitch then it's a bitch. I also have that voice of reason but I have another louder voice that says, "But what if..." and there lies some troubled times for Oggy. It's all my fault. My parents can sleep easy. I'm completely to blame. It's not a badly wired brain that put me in these compromised situations but it's a brain that wants to see the possibilities become a reality and not just the commercially acceptable possibilities. You never know for certain what it means to live in a tree in the forest for months with several feral dogs and a bipolar girlfriend. You can suspect, you can speculate, but you never know. Well, I Know. You will probably predict the overall awfulness of the experience but you will never get the juicy details right. And maybe I was just looking for the queer details that you can only experience if you turn over the rock that says "DO NOT TURN ME OVER." Some people turn to drugs; I served bowls of soup to people who turned to drugs. Now I'm not sure there's a big difference. Maybe these spree killers are curious to an extreme. The problem isn't that video games encourage real life killing; the problem is that video games offer an incomplete experience. The killers were dissatisfied with virtual killing sprees. They lacked authentic emotional passion so they sought out the real thing...and until video games can wire directly to the brain with real consequences then socially inept lunatics will always wonder what it really feels like.

Does this help you, dear reader, come to terms with life? My back is killing me so I can't write much more. I'm also freezing because the air handler project was foiled by idiots at Grainger who sold me a 120v-24v transformer when I specifically asked for a 240v-24v transformer. THERE'S ONLY AN 82 YEAR OLD MAN DEPENDING ON THIS HEAT! Caveat Emptor and freeze my balls off for another night.

No comments:

Creative Commons License
Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.