The Cork Squeaks

Did I ever belong to this world? And by world I mean the culture, the milieu in which I entered into being, assuming its attitudes, hefting its principles around, drinking its Kool-Aid, learning its language, signing its forms and documents, wearing its clothes, gurgling its propaganda, worrying over its wars, suspending its doubts, navigating its contradictions, adopting its admonitions, adapting to its climate. How much of this, of these qualities, these characteristics, are me, comprise the amalgam that presents itself to the world as a coherent personality? The core of me is what, cork? Or more like a web of portent? There are huge segments of my incarnation that feel alien to the whims of the current zeitgeist. Here’s one: I despise video games. Video games grow morons. That’s their entire purpose: make killing fun and pollute the intellect with scores. Here’s another: war. This is a world that loves war. But most rupturing and russet and menacing and migraine is its ongoing obsessions with money and its antagonisms toward the psyche. That poor pale angel leaning against a wall of the brain. What to do what to do what to do. What to do in a world that lets people sleep on cardboard for the sin of poverty. Talk like this in conversation and you’ll soon be labeled an old codger. Grumpy old man. People love disarming unpleasantries this way. Let’s get back to small talk. Fun rides cute puppies and gossip. Got any gossip. The only gossip I know is the gossip of gullies in the grumble of gray. I prefer the grammar of the inconsequential, the indentations of the lowly in the locutions of the longhorn. Like it or not it’s a political world I don’t like it but it’s true and unavoidable as all true things are inexorable predetermined foreordained inescapable. Until they’re not. Until the world that baked these axiomatic raisins into the dough of its rising disappears like crumbs on a kitchen table. And before the dishrag is dry another social paradigm has miscarried justice to the point of palsy and condemned the unwilling into the hands of the all-too-willing. I repeat: I do not feel at home in this world. I arrived by traveling through time. One fine afternoon it was 1965 and the Rolling Stones had just released December’s Children and the next afternoon it’s almost a quarter of a way into the new century which prefers video games to rock and roll and walk with heads lowered staring fixedly at mobile devices and couldn’t tell you the difference between a ladybug and an episcopalian lapidarian. We knew the robots were coming. We just didn’t think it would be us. Which is a singularity. And a hilarity. The nexus trembles when someone fusses with its hem. And when things fall out of heaven they hit the ground like snow.