As much as I love this country, I think I may realized one of it's many faults tonight and it makes me sad. The discovery first began while reading someone's blog about their ADHD nephew and the ensuing prose about unfit parents. Then, earlier tonight I was playing poker with some pagans I recently met. Two of them took a smoke break, leaving me with one I shall refer to as Cobb. Not his real name of course, I didn't receive permission to publish the intimates of our brief discussion, so the least I can do is not put is name on anything I say.
Cobb had mentioned earlier in the game the reasoning behind him smoking weed. He said it slows his mind down to a speed that is productive. He said "my brain just moves to fast and I can't focus". He thought this a fault of his and something that needed to be fixed. I think the fault lies in the hands of our society as a whole.
So during the smoke break, while the two of us were alone, I, being intrigued earlier, probed a little further. He told me that he started smoking in high school mainly out of boredom. He hated school because it was too slow and the only way to stay focused was to smoke weed. He explained that after a smoke he had the focus to read what he needed to. He explained that his main distraction was all the questions he had. Always questions swarming around in his head, one always leading to another. One answer always leading to yet more questions. Yet he needed to push those interests aside to make room for school work. I asked why he didn't just ask the questions. He responded that he came from "small town Texas", and all those questions would have gotten him in trouble. Never found out the specifics of the questions so I can't say one way or the other.
So then I asked what is it that you think about. He said "mainly life, and people. I love to watch people and think about why they do what they do. Sitting and watching people is my favorite. I watch people and laugh all day long." My first thought was "wow that's what I think about". We then agreed that we made ourselves laugh much more than another people ever have. I realized our brains were very similar.
So changing once again I asked "so how do you do in college? Do you think you'd do better without smoking weed now that your not at your slow high school?" He said he didn't think so, but there was no way to be sure because he hadn't really tried it. By this time I made some conclusive assumptions. The guy was pretty intelligent. Besides for making good grades he showed a great capacity to think things through in a logical sense. He also showed a capacity to take one lesson or idea and use it to learn about other things.
Then I thought about all the really smart people I knew. Smart in as many ways as I could think of. Mainly some kind mental prowess that gave them an upper hand in some area of life. Most of them did drugs and complained of things moving too slow and being bored with education. Despite all the intelligentsia that came to mind I thought "maybe they all have wrong". I think this society is moving too fast.
Cobb complained of having no time to follow his own thoughts. Even on topics brought up at school, they were always giving the surface info and then moving on. There is no time for people with the capacity to think on a greater number of levels than the average person to really explore those depths. Everything about the majority of our culture is about quick flashing attractions that don't give you enough time to think things through. What are video games and most television program but quick bursts of color, sound, and movement laced with tiny bits of information someone is hoping will entertain in order to get a buck. The idea of more has impressed itself on our society with greater weight than the idea of better. Most companies succeed on service speed or things that allow us more time in the day to do more things. Consider this, I can't say hi to most people on campus because they're plugged into an i-pod. It's not good enough just to walk somewhere. It's more productive to listen to music and walk somewhere. Cell phones are the same way. Cell phones combined with i-pods. No lie the other day I received from me deceased grandfather an TV-Radio-CD-MP3 player with a compass, thermometer, and flashlight all in one.
I think our society is moving too fast for the slow, methodical, birth of ingenuity. Before we had all these entertaining distractions America led the way in innovation. Now we're viewed as the lazy rich slobs of the world, and so we are. Regurgitating Mummies hypnotised by flashing lights are clever commercial ditties are the target market for every interest: education, entertainment, art, business.
STARBUCKS!!! Somehow I know starbucks is involved here but its to light and I've been typing too long to put in the effort.
I do a trend though. How many of our greatest artists have led depressing suicidal lives? Why do so many of our greatest minds end up in the drink or narcotics? To slow things down, to rest. I didn't get to speak at all about the Lord in this but there is definitely a lot there. There's much of my thought left out in this, but then again I'm not heavily trained in retaining my thoughts for any long length of time. If I don't regurgitate them soon enough they start to fade. OH NO!!! THEY GOT ME!!! They got me. they got...
ps-i'm not meaning to identify myself as a genius
5 comments:
Hey there Felix - found your blog via steinbeckandshinerbock and I like it VERY much. Thanks for sharing.
the pleasure was all mine. i dig the muskrat fuzz. peace out and happy new year.
Hey Felix - There are times when my mind runs too fast for me to catch up to and there are times when I have peace and can think clearly. The hard part about our society to me isn't so much that it causes us to have too much on our minds at once. However, I guess my irritation relates. My thing about the million adds, fast food, and the conveniences that I never thought I needed until I stepped into Sharper Image or Brookstone is that it is all one big distraction to me. There is life out there but having to dig through so much useless crap to get to life is a struggle and this society paints all this crap to look like cheesecake (one of my favorite deserts)! So instead of pushing the cheesecakes aside, I eat them. Then I eat more cheesecake after that! Sooner or later I am fat on cheesecake-tasting crap! I just want to get to the point in my life where I am caught up in so much life that the crap/cheesecake distractions no longer are distractions but instead take on their real form, CRAP!!!
I feel you rugbar. While I don't struggle with cheese cake, much of the crap that I deel with looks like some sort of delicious chocolate/coffee/peanutbutter delicacy that has the same wonderful filling sensation as a dark beer. Hard to resist whether cheese cake or the other thing. This whole dialogue reminds me of Solomon's plight in Ecclesiastes. Love you man.
The real distraction in life, to me, is not what exacts makes life like riding a carousel with horse blinders on. What that means is some people use things like an ipod to escape the some times deafining inane noises of life. I myself am constantly plugged into music, as you know, primarily because half of the time i'm disgusted or annoyed by the sounds around me. Drugs, in a sense, become a conduit to that, which sadly i had to figure out the hard way. The interesting thing that most people don't think about drugs is how does being high most of one's time affect them when being sober? What i mean by that is that when i was constantly high back in my day, when i was sober, I felt different. I saw things different. i percieved life, love, hate, pain different because i was so used to being high that being sober was in a weird way, being high to me. Those of us that feel that things move to slow are sometimes victims to fact that we are moving too slow ourselves and we call it the world. So we take drugs to speed that up? No. We took drugs to cope with the fact that we're calling the kettle black.
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