Happy Babies and Angry Old Men

So yesterday my buscapades continued. As I was only my way to work, I noticed one old man getting kind of annoyed. He was one of those old guys who can't really stand up straight and needs a cane. I think he was upset because another old man was standing too close. I could here that they were talking to each other, but I couldn't make out what they were saying until this little gem from the one with the cane:

"Get away from me! Are you a faggot or something?"

He said it in Spanish, but that sounds even more abrasive.

They continued bickering for few seconds, then both got off at the next stop. The bus idled there for a few moments, and the whole load of commuters rushed to the right side of the bus to watch their continuing and escalating beef. The one with the cane was now wielding it as a weapon.

"Pinche Viejillos!" exclaimed one bus patron with a laugh. It means, roughly, "fucking little old men!" Perhaps I'm a little too sensitive, but it was too early in the morning for hostility and madness and callousness. I needed a book of Bukowski poems and a belt of whiskey, stat.

As the bus pulled away and relegated their rivalry to my memory, I felt a profound disgust for life itself. I can't take you through my thought process, because it was somewhat hazy to me: all I know is that something about these bitter old bastards, full of piss and vinegar, hanging on to their pride and preserving their last ragged breaths like a bag of jewels seemed utterly, utterly pointless.

But that was yesterday.

Today I've been listening to a song called "Intelligentactile 101" by a young lady named Jesca Hoop. A lot. It's nice.

As far as I can tell, the song is sung from the perspective of a fetus in her mother's womb. It mainly discusses her plans after she's born, like sucking her mom's fingers and other important things.

You know something? I love songs about being born. This one in particular is especially jubilant, rocking from side to side and laughing like a toddler with a set of colorful plastic novelty keys.

Dont' get me wrong: I don't want to be a baby again. I'm not pining for my childhood as a reaction to the unpleasant portent the two old men formed. All the same, the themes raised by this song are just really cheerful. I like the idea of just enjoying life, of seeing it through a fresh lens. That, I think, is the key: I've always though that life must inevitably become more complicated. Every moment we live adds a new dimension of context, a new aspect of complication that seems unimportant in the moment it occurs, but eventually breaks our backs with it's sheer weight as more and more of these moments accumulate.

If we didn't change, this would be completely true. But even though reality is a dynamic and ever-changing system, so is a human being. The concept of growing or acquiring greater strength to carry greater weight seems remarkably short-sighted as I think. Did not these mighty A.M. gladiators value their strength, their capable-ness, their identity as manly men without need of others to defend them? That way doesn't seem right to me. No, the answer isn't in addition, it's in subtraction.

Maybe I should explain this cosmology a bit more thoroughly before I engage this concept. Let's start with another old man: Heraclitus. Notable idea:

This world-order [kosmos], the same of all, no god nor man did create, but it ever was and is and will be: everliving fire, kindling in measures and being quenched in measures.

This is essentially the concept of Universal Flux. It means that the universe is always changing. Kant was probably aware of this when he came up with his idea that the "real" universe is pretty much unknowable, because our perceived universe is always several steps behind the shiftless actual fabric of reality.

While all of this is a bit dizzying and maybe a little depressing, it's important to remember that a human being is not just a hunk of matter or a simple animal: we're much more than creatures, much more amazing than even the greatest and most majestic of reality's constructs. We're in and of this universal fabric, but we don't have to act like the rest of it. The sun, for all it's brilliance and power, must follow it's appointed trajectory. It must burn and burn until it has nothing left to burn. Sad.

But us? People? Do we have to keep all the residue and space dust that accrues on our happless, possibly hatless heads? Hell no! We can take showers! We invented shampoo! And this is not limited to detritus from the nether-corners of existence: this concept can also be applied to the ponderous context that collects over our lives. Just as every moment forces a new dimension of context for us to carry, we can perform an act of perceptual judo and be reborn. How? By understanding that the person you were just moments ago is not the person you are now. You've aged a bit, some things that seemed true then probably seem the tiniest bit less true or more true now, and just like a baby's rapidly changing synapses, your mind has made and severed thousands of connections. The point? You're a new person! That other person? Gone. Now there's you, and no one has ever met you before, and though that other guy has eaten all kinds of shit, you have never even had the pleasure of tasting chocolate.

The wonderful thing is that it's not limited to once a year or once a day or just whenever an epiphany decides to wander in: we can do this every minute, every second, every discrete unit of time we have in our whole lives! The only thing we have do is remember.

Maybe this is sounding very Catholic of me: a sort of modified penance to achieve absolution. This has nothing to do, though, with being in the good graces of the Universal powers that be. It has everything to do with the perception you have of yourself. You have to remember that existence is any incredibly complex dynamic system, and as small spinning convection cells in this system, we're in a perpetual state of flux too. If our perception of the whole system is always a few steps behind the system itself, why should our perception of ourselves be any more caught up? We are reformed and recreated every moment, so why not embrace contextual babyhood? It sure beats the alternative.

Man, I can't wait to know what chocolate will taste like to my tomorrow-tongue.

The Wheels on the Bus

My car is broken at the moment, so I had to ride the bus home from work today. It made me remember a few things I already knew:

1) People who ride the bus are by and large decent, but there's always one jerk in the bunch. For the most part they're fine people: quiet, minding their own business, generally absorbed in their own affairs, iPods, newspapers, or conversations with the other people living inside their skulls. Still, there always has to be one person who wants to be the center of attention. Some kid I saw today was tripping old people as they walked by. When one lady said something to him, he lost his cool. It was a rather pathetic spectacle.

2) Bus drivers are generally not the most polite or intelligent people in the world. I think the last time I rode a bus was about a year ago. At that time, I stepped onto a bus that was apparently ending it's run. I was about to ask the bus driver a question when she made a shooing motion with her hand and commanded "Off my bus." As I tried to interject that I only had one simple question, she reiterated her order. I tried to mention that that is not the most polite thing to do for a person in a public service profession, or at least to affirm that I hadn't been rude to her, but if I hadn't stepped off as quickly as I did I might have lost my nose to the slamming bus door. This was at a terminal, so of course, the bus I wanted was hers. She parked the bus for awhile and rolled it to the opposite end of the station. She saw me running to catch it, slowed down, realized I was the guy who had questioned her politeness, and proved me right by slamming the door a second time and peeling out.
Today it was something much more simple. I was sort of lost and confused after getting off at the wrong stop, so I walked up to a bus that wasn't mine and asked the guy a question:

"Does the number 68 stop here?"
My question was answered with another question.
"Do you see a sign that says 68?"
"Well, no, but that's why I'm asking you." I briefly considered adding "because you are a professional coach conductor while I am a barely literate rube who has no right to trouble you with his problems" but decided against it.

The point, I think, is that you should never ask a bus driver questions. Burdening them with your ignorance is a cardinal sin in BusDriverLandia. Do what I did instead: carry your ignorance as you walk home. Let it distract you from the various marginalized people you run into on that walk, and the smell of sewage wafting up from the street. Then go get your car fixed, for fuck's sake.