Truesday: Reaching Apathy

I consider that mental interference to be a form of apathy. My knee-jerk reaction is to just not care. I drift off. Surround myself with more familiar issues. Issues with more easily comprehended consequences. Should I learn to break bricks with my face? What would I look like if I were Korean? Call a cab? Body rock or stripper squat?

And that’s the variety of shit I turn to when faced with what I believe is my own apathy. Well, what I’m defining as apathy here in this little blurb of word vomit, anyhow.

But something tells me there’s more to it than that. In a very real way, I whole-heartedly want my apathy to be so much more than just a product of witless surrender. But is it? Is there some hidden substance in there somewhere? Or am I just apologizing for being such an intellectually lazy twat rocket?

Ehhhhh, yeah. Perhaps I'm ill equipped to answer questions about my own motivations, but there's no harm in trying.

Example for to illustrate: When I was in college and without reliable transportation, I ate whatever food was closest to wherever I would be sleeping. I ate all sorts of awful leftovers from people’s fridges. Brown bananas. Wax-wrappered whatevers. Coffee grounds. Taco Bell. And this careless method of feeding myself led to countless nights of violent indigestion and air pollution. And while I never really solved the whole not-caring-much-about-food-quality thing, it eventually led me to be much more choosey about what variety of toilet paper I am willing to endure. To this day, I take the selection of paper products which will be touching my ass very seriously. Quilted. Double-ply. Medicinal if available.

So am I apathetic about my food source, or am I passionate about my toilet tissue? Do these two cancel each other out? Can an apathetic attitude toward finding a healthy food source simply mean that I was unwilling to dedicate effort toward a lost cause, while my newfound passion for Charmin Ultra was a joy birthed from aforementioned apathy?

My wobbling point: can a current apathy lead to something more substantial, and real, later on down the line? Something I simply haven’t fumbled across just yet?

Why this is currently bothering me:

There’s some of that voting going on today. It’s pretty popular nowadays. All on the myspace and whatnot. Colbert. Ruining most of my cnn reading. Even dead people are doing it. Sometimes they’re rumored to be so excited, these dead people do it more than once! Craziness!

My Voting Summary:

From what I’ve managed to gather over the years, elections are a set of almost pre-determined events, by which a handful of marginally attractive people lay virtual claim to future positions of imagined authority while the incumbent figure of imagined authority mounts a defense to maintain their stead. The proven/preferred method for both offense and defense is to heap more misinformation per dollar upon your opponent than they manage to heap upon you. While the outcome will still magically appear random, all candidates will definitely leave the competition with smudge-mark accusations of racialistic, Nazi misogyny and very likely, something involving any combination of the following words: immoral – naked baby heads – non-consensual sex – condone – back in the 70s – Strom Thurmond.

Once the election is over, none of these accusations will be truly investigated, because none of it actually matters. But the Thanksgiving dinner table will no doubt be awkwardly quiet for all candidates, regardless of voters’ punch-cards.

“Say, John, could you pass the corn? And did you really rape one of Strom Thurmond’s House Bills back in the 70s? Heard it on the cnn.”

The history behind the creation of these popular vote-in figureheads is either long lost, or far too convoluted to bother deciphering in these chaotic modern times. For any particular election, no one (including all comers/goers) is really sure what the position is really about: improper vs. proper function of, or what is expected to come of it. As if winning the position is all that’s actually required to fulfill the damned thing. In fact, it is extremely rare to be able to quantitatively or qualitatively say whether a retiring agent has done an exceptionally brilliant or criminally abysmal job at performing the duties of these positions. No scorecard. No listed requirements with which one may eventually have marked against their actual output. ‘Tis a fascinating world of vague finger-pointing, pandering, backroom alliance forging, and muck-raking. Well, that's what Hollywood has me believing, anyhow.

But, these spots are relatively few, potentially lucrative for friends/family/cellmates, and rarely available for public auction. They’re a scarce commodity in the economics of political resources. So everyone involved fights like hell over every aesthetically important aspect of the thing. Everyone except for roughly 60 - 80% of the population which apparently found better entertainment elsewhere and will likely never vote.

And the real tragedy of it all, the hottest burning fuel for my blazing quasi-apathy, is that the smear campaigns just end up stealing any possible legitimacy behind whoever loses the least and ends up manning the position. No matter who wins, they've been dragged through the mud for months and sometimes it's hard to tell whether they were up for election or criminal indictment. But there they are, "serving" the public good.

The hell what?

Really, the best comparison I can think of would be to have the Miss America competition adjusted so that these women, one of which will be the shining and undeniable proof of American physical beauty, be pitted against each other in razorblade/hatchet/acid fights which will inevitably leave everyone unrecognizably disfigured. Last one standing/breathing gets the tiara.

Then put the crippled beast of a winner on stage with a silk sash that has to literally spell out that she’s the most beautiful amongst us, because there’s no way in the fiery reaches of Hades that we’d come to that conclusion otherwise. Then have her try and peddle cosmetics and hair products. See how that flies with the sponsors/consumers.

Would I be apathetic if I didn’t buy whatever dream cream she’d be schlepping around on late night TV, from her bed in intensive care? With her one working arm and melted complexion? Is my apathy legitimate because it's simply my recognition that the whole thing is barfing on itself? That it might not be producing the variety of results it pretends to?

If it’s anyone’s fault that I don’t give a shit, is it necessarily mine? It has to be partially mine. Sure. But could it be that apathy is more than just a cop-out? Maybe it’s a well-meaning coping mechanism?

Better yet, a reasonable precursor to an upheaval in commonly-held yet flawed logic? Worse yet, revolt of some sort?

See you at the voting booths. I’d bring toilet paper if I were you. The soft kind. I'm just sayin'.