"The rest of us, not chosen for enlightenment, left on the outside of Earth, at the mercy of a Gravity we have only begun to learn how to detect and measure, must go on blundering inside our front-brain faith in Kute Korrespondences, hoping that for each psi-synthetic taken from Earth's soul there is a molecule, secular, more or less ordinary and named, over here - kicking endlessly among the plastic trivia, finding in each Deeper Significance and trying to string them all together like terms of a power series hoping to zero in on the tremendous and secret Function whose name, like the permuted names of God, cannot be spoken... plastic saxophone reed sounds of unnatural timbre, shampoo bottle ego-image, Cracker Jack prize one-shot amusement, home appliance casing fairing for winds of cognition, baby bottles tranquilization, meat packages disguise of slaughter, dry-cleaning bags infant strangulation, garden hoses feeding endlessly the desert... but to bring them together, in their slick persistence and our preterition... to make sense out of, to find the meanest sharp sliver of truth in so much replication, so much waste..." — Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
Lately, I think I’m suffering from early stage Michele Bachmann – having difficulty distinguishing the neurological sparks of exploding tiny cerebral embolisms from coded messages from god.
A mild-mannered gardener by day, at night I dress up like a colorblind ladybug and fight crime, or - depending on the TV Guide and the police scanner - I watch 70s sitcom reruns on basic cable. I also meticulously alter my daily routines so that I don’t fall into patterns that my enemies might study in order to defeat me. I never shower at the same time twice, say, or eat a liverwurst sandwich for lunch two days in a row.
And speaking of sandwiches, I’m as American as a grilled cheese sandwich made out of Wonder Bred (sic) and those suspiciously orange slices individually wrapped in plastic (but with the plastic removed before grilling). If we simply toast our bread and then slap some cheese in the middle, the terrorists have already won and destroyed our American lifestyle options. Next stop: Sharia law that denies women access to healthcare and stones the gays.
But back to my mental status. Lately, I’ve been saying “bollocks” instead of bullshit when the evening news is on the tv. As we all know, bullshit (or as they say on the other side of the pond, bollocks) describes the content of what you say when you don’t know or care whether what you say is true or not. To lie assumes you know what the real truth is. To bullshit is to not care one way or the other. Most of the talking heads on evening news seem increasingly to have dispensed with mere lies and drifted into pure bullshit.
I conclude from my increasing dependence on bloody British expressions of displeasure, that one of three things has happened. One, god is trying to tell me something. B) I’m listening to too much BBC America. Third, of course, I’m batshit crazy after all.If it’s god, then I conclude he’s is telling me to expand my cursing horizons and embrace a more international lexicon of profanity; to mix up my speech patterns the same way I mix up my daily routine to foil evil villains.
If it’s not god, then the Beeb could be sending me subliminal auditory messages that somehow American censors don’t get and thus don’t bleep. The Beeb is agreeing that the evening television news is rubbish. See? There I go again.
And if I’m simply crazy, well then, at least I have the imagination to enjoy it by making cool Brit profanity my own and not boring myself by shouting the same old cute bullshit back at my television, while continuing to sift through the waste for the meanest sharp sliver of truth.