Remember high school? Remember how most everyone seemed kind of normal? There was the one guy or girl who was especially quiet, maybe one weirdo, and 2 or 3 beautiful/athletic overachievers, and the rest of us who felt like losers, but were really average joes?
What happens to people?
How do they change from being average kids in class with fair to bad haircuts to ...I guess the nice word would be...characters in badly fitting polo shirts with the bottom of their guts' showing (men and women)? Where do the nervous ticks of compulsive winking, ear-tugging, head shaking (side to side) come from? When do people start to think that going up to strangers and asking them to feel their feet is a good idea?
What happens to people? What are they thinking? Lives can be real train-wrecks, sure. But these people aren't in the hospital--I see them commuting to work.
This may sound like outrage. Or rhetorical. Or funny. But this is a real existential question for me: What insanity lies within these people to make them so disturbing on the outside?
About Me
- Suki
- When I was a teen, in the '80's, I thought it was better to burn out than fade away. That may be true, but the possibilities seen at that age are so...limiting. Somehow my life has gotten fuller, with added dimensions that I could never have imagined then. Instead of burning out or fading away, I will grow like a tree or crystallize and start refracting the world around me.
Actually, I hold that it is the insanity on the outside, the physical degeneration, that causes the seeming insanity on the inside.
ReplyDeleteI never thought of it that way. If you run that logic through, the very beautiful and the very ugly would be equally insane, because the very beautiful are so used to getting their own way, and the very ugly are used to outright rejection on every level.
ReplyDeleteHmmm. Not sure I follow that, or maybe I didn't explain what I mean well enough.
ReplyDeleteYou asked, "What happens to people?" How do they become these people with all these strange compunctions and seeming mental afflictions? And I think that it's their physical deterioration (the beer guts, etc.), that grinding on of mundane life, that helps unhinge them. At least partly. So my answer is more mundane that you seem to understand it: They are physically unhealthy, as evinced by all these tics and baggage, and that makes them mentally unhealthy.
Anyways, yeah, I wonder this same thing.
Well, I guess that what I was thinking was that a person's appearance would effect his/her attitude, generally. But I see what you are saying now.
ReplyDeleteI'm feeling bad for some of these people now (not the ones that come up to me and talk about my feet). They probably suffer from psycho-social stressors like poverty, grief, tragedies, and it fucks them up both physically and mentally. I knew a girl who's mom died and she gained about 50 lbs. in about month.