I suppose that if I try hard enough, I might be able to link infection, feelings and routines into a semblance of order that suggests they’re somehow related. It’s much more likely though, that the title items have nothing at all in common, and that those three things are just my current obsession. Maybe obsession isn’t the right word. I think that once I achieved a certain duration on the planet that I dispensed with the notion of obsession of any kind. I’m not sure what the exact survival length was of the ability to find the world fascinating.. Maybe in my mid to late thirties, but regardless of the precise moment I’ve definitively lost my ability to be infatuated with this world. After some thought, I’ve decided it’s a combination of heaps of examples I’ve witnessed where the good guy didn’t come out on top, the truth didn’t win out and justice didn’t prevail.
Reality is just shock therapy in disguise, and enough doses of it has a tendency to take the edge off of any fairy tale endings you may have been clinging to.
Getting older helps the process along as well, because aging ensures that you’ve been around long enough to be subjected to a few ugly truths. Plus you’ve probably witnessed enough incidents of mortality in action that it’s a certainty you’ve pondered your own expiry date.
So, routines.
Routines and I are not very fond of one another. I’ve never found them comforting and I lack the necessary discipline to force myself to ritually perform the same tasks day in and day out. I suppose I should clarify that I have conformed to some required routines like showing up for work at the same time each day, but I managed to mix up my optional work time so it wasn’t boringly redundant.
So, I’m not a creature of habit and therefore would be difficult to kidnap or assassinate. Not that being kidnapped is likely to happen to me but it’s mildly comforting to know I’d be a bit of a challenge.
My wife on the other hand, loves routines. She walks ten kilometers each day and she goes to bed and wakes up at the same time each and every day. She would be easy to kidnap. I’ve tried to point out to her that she should alter her route so some sketchy guy in a panel van doesn’t abduct her, but she ignores me.
Routines are by their very nature, tedious and mundane, and in my wife’s case maybe even dangerous, and so I avoid them like the plague, which is a decent segue into my next title topic.
Infectious diseases and feelings.
I’m not talking about the flu. Although the corona virus is on my mind, we have yet to see people dropping in the streets, or a wagon being horse drawn up my street as a John Cleese facsimile chants bring out your dead. So, the kung flu is kind of in the back ground. The disease that’s front and center is a mental disease and it’s aggressively communicable. I don’t know exactly what to call this infection. Like the Christian Satan, it goes by many names so I’ll have to resort to listing the symptoms of the illness.
The first symptom in the infected is the inability to recognize facts and data and so they create and live in an alternate reality. Because they require a reality that aligns with their feelings.
The second symptom is a Tourette’s like affliction where you blurt out nonsense, unsubstantiated accusations, insults and barely disguised venom at the people who suggest you have all the signs of the first symptom. Because they have different feelings than you.
The third symptom is that you become fully delusional and start to believe that the first two symptoms are normal. Because your feelings have caused you to lose the ability to reason.
Feelings.
They’re like a virus, and they can infect a room or they can infect an entire nation.
I start to get uneasy as soon as I’m in a space where there’s an abundance of feelings. Regardless of whether that room is a Trump rally, a funeral or a protest march, it’s only a matter of time until something stupid, regrettable or embarrassing happens.
Embarrassing is the mildest of the afflictions that come with this mental malady. The worst case scenario is a horde of the delusional running amok while ruled by their feelings, and completely disassociated from any contact with their frontal lobe.
It’s like a perpetual Black Friday where a mass of people have become infected and have devolved to their basic instincts. They’ve abandoned even primary reasoning in favor of the desire to hit someone with a rock.
It’s like a stampede. Not a Calgary stampede but a stupid stampede. It’s like a Mecca or lynch mob.
It’s irrational, and very much the lowest common denominator we can demonstrate.
But it’s universal, because even the dumbest of the dumb possess the capability to unthinkingly wield a rock.
Because………feelings.