Practicalmadness

It is well-known that there comes a point in the life of anyone (or at least any non-yuppie non-Republican American) at which one looks around at their environment and, still drunk on hope for the future, gets mad. Allow me to posit that there is a further point in the life of said American at which the rage at the status quo becomes the status quo, and therefore passe, and is actually two or three levels of passe, so we're talking boredom across multiple exponential levels here, which is more than most human minds (as well as some cats) would care to deal with.

Allow me to further posit that when you spend the vast majority of your usable waking hours explaining to someone (who isn't listening anyway) why an Americano is better than Folgers, or why they really never want to drink French Vanilla Cappuccinos from that machine in the grocery store ever again, etc., you begin to lose faith in humanity (read: the wisdom of the American people to come in out of the rain, much less order coffee) as it becomes clear that these things which -- I hope we're all in agreement on this -- suck are simply good enough for most people.

And it's so frustrating, speaking as one who thinks they know the difference between good and bad things, to constantly have to explain why something you believe in on a very simple, basic level (be it theory, love, your work or even the joy of drinking an Americano instead of burnt drip coffee from Dunkies) is worth considering.

And when you have to explain your most basic thoughts and feelings to everyone you meet, and at best just see them parroted back to you but filtered through the expectations and prejudices of whoever you're talking to...it just becomes very hard to have an opinion about anything anymore because you'll never be able to convince anyone besides yourself, and may never really be able to talk to anyone besides yourself, and so you can never really matter since you're not the one writing the history books, and you can't just be responsible only to yourself. That's too limiting. But you can't be all things to all people. That's insane.

And it becomes clear that your relevance within the broader context of our media culture -- please, it hasn't been about God, country and/or family for a very, very long time -- is to be decided by people who really only want to see themselves in you. Either that, or they want to see how much you can spend, and so those bohemian artists who starved in garrets and redefined art and literature in the 19th and 20th Centuries would just be starving idiots with Art Institute degrees looking for work at Starbucks this fall, and getting so frustrated when the 2,000th housewife from Wisconsin asks for a French Vanilla Cappuccino.