Oblique

A few weeks ago I had the chance to catch up with an old friend online.  It had been more than a decade since we'd talked last, so I was interested in seeing where life had taken him, and hear about how he was doing.  At some point in this conversation, after I talked about Sophia for a minute, my friend had mentioned that my "aspirations always seemed so..." and I suggested some adjectives at that point.  He seemed to suggest that I had been casually riding along in the electronic airport sidewalk of Americana.  This troubled me.  Has my life been a series of meaningless, blase, events in which I apathetically participated?  Was I a grayish-blue Dawn of the Dead zombie, my feet erratically shuffling me on in non-euclidian circles around the meaningless mall of middle class dreams?  I didn't like this idea, so I filed it away.

This last weekend, I found myself in the midst of the blue-gray horde.  My computer's charging cable had come under canine attack, so I had to go to the Apple store to pick up a new one.  I wandered the mall like a mars rover, trying to navigate my way to the correct logo, and I felt disgusted.  I was in the epicenter of the electronic, sugary, caffeinated, chromed, fake tits, santa-claus-taking-pictures, sterilized, sanitized, sexitized heart of consumerism.  I hated myself a little, and I hated the people around me.  I hated that I was hating, and then I realized that..

People are beautiful.

Young, old, skinny, fat, they're all beautiful.  Every human being you see is a flawed gem, not quite matching the pristine standards we place on them.  When we see this swarm of humanity, we see the flaws and the cracks in people, or at least imagine them.  We don't see their shining attributes.  For all we know these people could be heroes, serving in unseen ways, invisibly existing as a piece of fabric in the rumpled cloth of a humanised humanity.

I think one of the easiest things in the world to do is to view ourselves as superior, in some oblique way, to the masses of people around us.  And I think this is the very worst of ourselves.