Lotus Box

Thor: My new motto is "People are stupid." Even the people who aren't stupid are working dilligently to become stupid. I just spent 1.25 hours in a dentist chair listening to the prate of an airheaded mother of 4 children (who are all in their 20's, and I know, now, what each one of them does for a living and whether they graduated with honors.) But more than her children, she went on and on about her "spiritual journey". She just got back from India where she "studied" some sort of mumbo-jumbo on getting in touch with her inner person. Good God, lady, if you can't handle an adult religion, just say so. We all understand. I'm lying there with all this crap in my mouth, helpless to make all the sarcastic remarks that pop unbidden (OK, they were bidden) into my head. The brunt of her assault was that all these drug addicts were just extra-spiritual people who are seeking to return to the bliss of their former existance in the spiritual plane and mistake the euphoria of drugs for that bliss. Saints preserve us. She even said that the purpose of heroin was to prove to us that the spiritual plane existed. That a user is getting a true glimpse of the spiritual bliss that (gag) lives inside us all.

Anyone who's survived 4 teenagers should have experienced enough pain that such fluffy nonsense should register as a joke. I'm thinking that she must have been smarter in the past, and all this "studying" has really amounted to nothing but Stupid Lessons. Before she started poking my gums with that sharp...uh...poky thing, she asked me if I wanted gas or a valium. I declined. That was a mistake. I said "Mffss ssssth sssp, mm dhssng dd ssddn da sslng". Which translated is "Please shut up, I'm trying to study the ceiling." There was Musak playing in the room, and I had said something about it. She explained, at length, that it wasn't Musak, but some sort of ancient Indian chants done in a modern style. The fact that it sounds just like Musak and induces the same ennui as Musak seemed to have escaped her.

A greater mystery is how such a fruit basket cropped up in Texas.

Tyr: Heh, y'all should have seen the look on his face when he came out of the dentist's office. Imagine Mufasa discovering that Scar gave him a poodle cut while he was sleeping.

But I think people are stupider now because they have bad music pounded into their heads 24 hours a day. Every store, every restaurant, every bar, even my gym, has blaring music on all the time. Americans, and especially Texans, are loud people. No two Americans can sit at a table at lunch and have a quiet conversation, but must, instead, blow and guffaw so that even the kitchen help know what their problems are. Or they would know, if everyone else wasn't also yelling their heads off. As they drown each other out, they keep getting louder and louder. Then, since there's so much noise, someone will go ask to have the music turned up, which makes everyone shout even louder.

There's not a pub in all of Austin where you can go and chat with someone over a pint. At 3:00, some bad band is warming up their equipment and doing sound checks. People can't think anymore, or don't want to, and to help in that area, they keep their empty heads full of bad music. I guess they assume that if the music is loud enough, no one else will hear the stupid things they say.

At the gym this morning, the little pimple farmer who hands out towels and controls the music system had some non-music on with the volume turned up as high at it would go. The "singer" was going on about how his "slick black meat" was going to....um...subdue this female. At 6 a.m., everybody in the campus gym is faculty and staff. I'm pretty sure no one is under 40. Yet, if they're not blasting us with ghetto-hate-gang-banger crap, then we're getting shallow bubble-gum techno teeny-bopper crap. Or maybe some other crap. I love music, but I also like to entertain thoughts occasionally. At the gym, they have the music so loud that I, a Ph.D. in math, have trouble keeping count of my reps.

In summary: If one's head is painfully empty, there's a better solution.

Thor and Tyr