I occurs to me, as I listen to my son prepare himself a 2000 calorie dinner, that the idle mind is a playground for the Devil. And so my wife still loves psycho-sexual dramas, bless her heart. She introduced me to 'The Following' and I have watched seven episodes this past week. It's unbelievable but entertaining.
I've noticed that the plot started thickening and moving too slowly as they decided to, watch yourself I'm about to spoil you, focus in on the dynamics of the three-way killers who are holding the child of their cult leader's ex-wife. I mean three way as in boy + boy + girl two of whom are in love with the same boy.
Is there anything we won't swallow?
Perhaps not. Perhaps in our evolutionary state, outstripped by the comfort of la vida loca here in Upper Middle Classville, maybe we are so short of actual dangerous stimulation that we need to focus on something ugly and terrible just so we don't get bored out of our gourds.
But there's another way we deal with ennuis. We get obsessively petty. For example, somehow I managed to spend 175 bucks on Valentines dinner for two at the local upscale hotel. My wife and I do not watch our figures or the calorie counts much. So believe me when I tell you that short rib was short and we had to get our Jack In The Box on, on the way home. When the surf part of Surf & Turf is two shrimp, something's wrong. Aside from it being Valentine's Day with my wife, I was bored to shit, but a bit peeved that I didn't have my good knife with me. I watched the fluffy people watch the ice dancing in Sochi on the big screen, and even though the Asian kid in the white blouse fell down, there wasn't much action to be had. And so I was again double dipped in boredom, but I also envied the man sitting next to me his seersucker jacket and red Gucci shoes.
I searched my mind for another activity. I'm 52, I like drinking new kinds of bourbon and scotch. That's what I know. I didn't even think for a moment about joking about taking her to the shooting range, but my head was completely empty. I have everything I need at my two story, four bedroom, two bathroom home. I don't need to be out and about, and when I am, I'm sheepdoggish, looking for some shit to go down. It never does. We've had 2 murders in 17 years over in this town. Nothing's dangerous but the drunk drivers and the scatterbrain motorcyclists. I just wanted to go home and play Battlefield 4, where I must think quickly move around the video game level and kill or be killed. We went to the local poolhall instead. It was tacky, but still nothing intimidating.
I am not compelled, and that is my luxury. I have everything I need for everyday, so I have begun to prepare for the extraordinary. People about me say some kind of apocalypse is on the horizon but I don't actually believe it. I want to exercise my Second Amendment rights, and yes sometimes I go into dangerous neighborhoods at night, but I don't think the zombies are coming. In fact, I rather like the whole zombie angle of shooting. That's me, the zombie hunter, because only fantasy is noisier than the quiet we have around here.
The Spousal Unit jumps on my case because we have gone three or four months without healthcare. It's all getting sorted out, because we always sort things out. She handed me an envelope with disdain today. I was wearing my contacts and could not immediately tell that it wasn't something from the IRS. But it was a $38 parking ticket. Horrors.
I'm not giving up my stoic demeanor. I remain prepared for the catastrophic failures, like Fernandez wrote about Venezuela and the Economist is writing about Argentina. But the catastrophes, like snow in Atlanta, seem a long ways off. So I fill my mind with dangerous fictions, and so do you.
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