Hell really is other people. Sartre had it right, man.
Think about all the problems you have in your life. Go ahead…I’ll wait…
Okay, you thought about them and now think about how many of those problems are caused by having to contend with the idiocy of other people. I’d guess it was in the 70-80% range. Maybe higher if you’re a social person.
I’m thinking about this today because I had a run in with the neighbors. Actually, it was the neighbor’s mother and father, and actually, the daughter/neighbor doesn’t live next to the apartment building where I live. She bought it to scam money from rich people by opening a spa a few months ago but never quite got around to doing anything other than putting up an ugly cinder block wall that blocks most of the light coming into my windows, and actually after all that, they put the building up for sale a few weeks ago never having occupied it.
So how on earth, you must be pondering, could I have a run in with the parents of the neighbor who never opened a spa?
I use a portion of their driveway to park on the dirt outside my Tucson apartment. Months ago they ordered me to never park there and I talked to my landlord who talked to them and I never heard about it again. Today, I came home after a 30 mile bike ride and the mother had parked directly behind my truck so that I couldn’t get out.
It would seem the parking had really been sticking in her craw for the past 8 months and she was going to take action now that her daughter was selling the building. It was her last chance!
As I was leaving to do some errands, the husband started yelling at me and then the mother started yelling at me, and suddenly, despite my best intentions to get through my life without causing much harm, to try to maintain some sort of self control, I’m having a long argument with screaming old people who look like reformed hippies about parking and real estate sales.
Now, had they simply asked and said something like, “We’re selling the building and just want it to look nice.” I probably wouldn’t have cared about parking on the street 5 feet further away from my door. Instead they were yelling at me effectively saying over and over “IT’S MY LAND! GET OFF MY LAND!”
[note: there's a reason ranchers in Montana and Idaho hate the rich assholes who buy giant estates they don't work and then put up barriers to land use that people have been doing for generations.]
It should be noted that people in the apartment I live in had been parking and using that bit of their land, which is actually city land if you factor in the zoning and permit restrictions Tucson has (I know this because my landlord knows this), for over 20 years. The guy who owned the building before him used to wave hello and chat. That accountant didn’t care.
So they care and they’re screaming at me about how the brown dirt in front of their building has tire tracks on it.
Despite all my work and all my best intentions to transcend the idiocy of the world and overcome my own internal state I found myself arguing about 6 inches of brown dirt, city laws, and then finding myself launching into a diatribe about miserable worthless people using precious air that could better invigorate a scientist, an artist or a gardener, rather than sucking up everything avariciously like a cancer that won’t stop.
I found myself pissed off with nothing I could really do about it.
The mother stomping her foot like a petulant 14 year old girl who didn’t get what she wants (think of Veruca in Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory “I WANT IT NOW!”). The father at least 5 inches shorter than I, and I’m only 5′8″ yelling upward into my face about brown dirt and tire tracks pointing diagonally instead of straight ahead into their brown dirt field of a parking lot. And then, for some inexplicable reason showing my his paint covered fingers. What was that about?
It was an utterly ridiculous sitcom-like situation.
I described that crap just to get to this point, people suck. There is no denying it. No matter how much you might want to believe that there is good in everyone, as all the Sufi books I’ve been reading and other sundry religious texts I’ve read in the past demand, when you get down to the real world, almost everyone is a worthless piece of shit who sucks up precious resources that could serve better purpose anywhere else.
Bill Hicks once opined, “People suck and I can prove it. I can prove it on an Etch-a Sketch.”
This include me much of the time. I keep finding myself in situations where avaricious people demand and demand some more to feed their insatiable gullets. So there’s definitely something wrong with me. And there’s definitely something wrong with me that I don’t much ask anything of anyone. I don’t want to bother people, it’s a psychological condition that’s gotten me nowhere.
But that aside, you can’t deny that almost everyone is draining. It’s crazy that society works at all. It’s amazing there aren’t more murders. It’s amazing there aren’t bodies littering the streets considering how crazy everyone is.
Why is it impossible to reason with anyone? Why is it impossible to discuss, accommodate, hope for a happy outcome when dealing with people? Why is it that we absolutely need lawyers to save us from the ministrations of others?
It seems like life shouldn’t be this difficult but then it’s the assholes who demand, who just simply take everything they want that win the day.
And no one of note ever says to those people, “Calm the fuck down! Your life is stupid and pointless so get over yourself! Sit down and have some fucking dip!” They don’t do it because it would be pointless, nothing would change. Easier just to play the same game and try to rape them first.
So weird and I’m still so pissed off about having my happy bicycling buzz ruined.
What’s more interesting though is how useless arguing is. This comment forum on Fark
http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=1756670
demonstrates that aplenty. There is nothing funnier than a group of people arguing politics.
It’s almost as funny as me struggling to let go, to remain placid and calm in a turbulent sea tossing all around me and failing miserably like I did earlier this week when an errant word in an email from the moved-on-one, mentioned way too often in piece of crap of detritus from my mind, sent me into a tizzy where I lost my calm mind. It was replaced by the aggrieved lawyer that I become when I try to make a point, a point that can be made, can’t be argued because no one is ever wrong, everyone is always good and righteous all all moments in their existence. Thus, arguing is pointless and hilarious and tragic and just plain stupid.
But I find myself falling into that trap all too often which, by my own definition. would make me one of the demons of hell I’m railing against above. Fuck me and my self-consciousness!
The Sufi books I’ve been reading talk of rhythm of life. Of your life kind of flowing when you are in step with the rhythm of life around you and instead I find myself feeling like Ronald Reagan trying to clap to a gospel choir when he was president…always off the beat.
This is especially annoying now that I’m conscious of all of this while it’s happening and I just don’t seem to be able to take a breath, step back and stop…yet. One day maybe. Until that time I shall roll around in my own crapulence of misdirected anger energy and wonder why I never befriended mobsters when I live in a mafia dominated neighborhood in New York City so that I could have a guy’s legs broken for a small fee or maybe trade in computer support.
Computer support guy to the mob would have been kind of cool now that I think about it. I wonder if you’d get a t-shirt for you hard work? I bet getting equipment wouldn’t be nearly as tough as it was when I was running the computer department at an ad agency.
I could just say something like, “Tony, we could use a new server.” And Tony would “talk to a guy” who’d bring along a new server pronto. Or maybe if a printer wasn’t working I’d just take out my mafia issued gun and shoot the piece of shit. Then we’d “acquire” a new one without having to make a business case, breaking down the cost of repair versus the cost of owner ship over the expected lifetime based on the warrenty and support services. Without having to beg for three weeks while the rest of the office complains to you to complain more about the lack of a printer.
Being computer support guy to the mafia sure would have made today easier. I’d have just called Tony and Tony would clean up the problem by the end of the day. No more little reformed hippies yelling at me. No more childish old women stamping their foot because they didn’t get their own way. It would all have just been cleaned up and then I could have gone to a guy’s house and explained encryption.
Lost opportunites, that’s what my failure to be social in my New York City neighborhood was. Anyone out ther reading this, you should befriend mobsters because you never know when they’ll come in handy.
I’m going to regret that until the day I die. Which will probably be from stress soon if this meditative enlightenment thing I’ve been trying to achieve for the past few months doesn’t kick in.
Let’s say Sarte was half right. All those people of Hell are also our Heaven. Not necessarily the same ones, mind you. But sometimes. Like that poor little man bossed around by that big, bad wife. He was looking to you to understand that even as he was hating his own dear wife for acting that way toward poor innocent you he was mindful that if he didn’t participate in her rage he would never get any again as long as he lives, because you see,(while you can’t see) that she is also his heaven. Like your beloved “moved on one”, who doesn’t seem to have fully done that if she’s still emailing you,as you see, or not, you are also HER hell, and formerly heaven, as she is yours. That’s why he asked if you were married. You’d know. And it probably wasn’t about the damn dirt anyway. Really. Life flows,yes. It also ebbs. People suck,yes. And blow…Mostly I think humans are OK. It just takes some understanding and enlightenment to realise you are one of Them and if you weren’t doing all this internal demolition there would just be so much old and in the way shit to build upon. You’d be just a fat health care worker. Except for being skinny. Maybe you’re fat inside. OK, now the medication is kicking in and I’m just being silly. Maybe you should try silly for a while. When your sides quit hurting from so much laughter, you’ll be OK. And you let them ruin your buzz. tsk…tsk…tsk. But you gotta love a guy who does this to himself. Now you have a clue what it’s like to be a woman. You think you’re stuck, but you’re leaps and bounds above most mere men.
You said “I’d guess it was in the 70-80% range. Maybe higher if you’re a social person.” I think it’s higher if you’re not a social person, given that one of the reasons you may not be so social is precisely because people cause so many problems. So although the sheer number may be lower, the percentage may be higher.
I suppose that is only if your non-social life is relatively stress-free, which it doesn’t necessarily have to be. So I may not have a point.
LJ makes some good cogent points.
Although it was said,
>he was hating his own dear wife for acting that way toward poor innocent you he
>was mindful that if he didn’t participate in her rage he would never get any again
>as long as he lives, because you see,(while you can’t see) that she is also his
>heaven.
Maybe that is true. Although what I suspect is that he just got stuck and doesn’t want to deal with the change. Thirty or so years is a long time and people don’t really know what that moment means. Love and passion is too clouding to make sane decisions.
We were talking about this at work today. A co-worker has a brother-in-law who is constantly being mislead pushed by his wife. That guy’s joke, that’s not so much a joke, is that’s he “going to go out for cigarettes” and just never come back.
He’ll move on eventually and everyone knows that. Or he’ll go insane from not having the courage to accept the necessary change that was not faced.
Most people just don’t like change. I’m not a big fan and that’s why the broken relationship was so hard on me when it finally became obvious.
And LJ also said:
>Now you have a clue what it’s like to be a woman. You think you’re
>stuck, but you’re leaps and bounds above most mere men.
Maybe that’s some women just like some men ponder the internal state more than the average monk. But most women don’t, just like most men don’t think about themselves. This, I believe, is propaganda feminist culture has tossed out into the world, and since most people never contemplate their lives, it stuck. It was a kind of power game to convince men they were inferior when, it turns out, everyone was inferior.
In fact, I might go so far as to claim that men are MUCH more likely to ponder their internal state because I’ve met a whole lot more men who’ve done that than I’ve ever met women who’d ever begin to admit that they might be wrong about anything at all much less really question their internal processes.
Men are the nature built scout ants of the world and their job is to explore everything.
Now, it could be that I’ve just had a lot of bad luck. I will admit that it could just be a simple statistical anomaly. Maybe I’m as crazy as everyone else. But I still think a good evolutionary psychology case could be made.
Thanks for the comment though. Silliness is preferred and that’s what I spent all day doing today, improvising a series of songs about coworkers turning one’s name into a techno-dance track.
Yep. Silliness is better than actual life thoughts. They cause too much craziness making one want to go get some cigarettes.
Scott- the good Lord put petty, vapid folks on this Earth for our entertainment, and it would be a minor transgression to let opportunities such as this pass you by. Granted, as I am reading this entry late, any retributive action on your part now might be esprit de’ lescalier, but perhaps an exercise for next time.
First, a carefully articulated letter of apology ie”Dear neighbor- I am sorry about intruding upon the pristine sanctity of your patch of dirt, as well as the precious time you had to take out of your life to yell at me for doing what was always acceptable before. In the future, i will avoid soiling your dirt with my tires. -Scott”
Park on the street as agreed. Then incessantly cut across their lot with your mountain bike when going to and fro, and treat yourself to a couple of unnecessary skids.
Never underestimate the personal satisfaction that can be gained from belittling the ignorant or engaging in surrepticious, passive-aggressive retribution.
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