Speech Pathology

I don't have the weird combination of narcissism and gullibility that allows me to indulge in the idea that any choices I make or things I say can "cause" any particular outcome. I don't want to give the wrong impression, there definitely are situations where things I do cause things. I understand the basics of, like, Newtonian physics and weight of consequences in the social contract theory of justice. Yes, most of worldview can be traced intellectually to ideas that were fully cooked by like 1690.

What I mean is I have never watched a football game with a specific pair of underwear on or whatever because I was afflicted by a specific sort of compulsive self-centeredness that makes it possible to believe my support undergarments are determining incompletions or penalty calls and not just keeping my scrotum from sticking to my leg.* I'm also self-aware enough to know that the teams I'm supporting are losing not because I choose to support them, that my attention does not in any way constitute a "curse." It's just the nature of sports fandom that only one team wins every year. The joy of following a sport is that roughly 31/32 of us get to feel cursed every single season. Voluntarily! And, often, expensively!

So for the bigger questions that transcend even sports--even sports!--it would make sense that I would dismiss any suggestion that I have the ability to manifest results with the power of thought, action or desire. The idea that someone can make it rain (the whole-ass atmosphere!) just by getting their car washed is just the kind of workplace dad joke that keeps Tim Allen shows on the air.**

I was thinking more along the lines of how, for example, I have freely used the term "post-covid" in all sorts of conversational situations (professional, casual, romantic, medical, even sexual once I'm sorry to say, and sorry to one person in particular) and now it looks like we're going right back to where we thought was behind us six weeks ago in mid-June. I don't want to misrepresent or accidentally judge my fellow humans: if you believe in the power of impactful thought or whatever you want to call this wishmaking Yoda shit, that's fine, you do you. I don't/can't/couldn't be bothered to blame you for any of this either. And it's not because I have a special or superior level of cognition or maturity or discernment that makes me better than anyone else. It's just that all of us literally know exactly whose fault this is. It is definitely human caused, and no, not because someone purposely let it out of a bio lab in China. I mean all the fucking dummies and sociopaths who have chosen contagion vulnerability, injury and death over an existent, easily available, completely free preventative AND cure in one (or, more often, two) shot(s).

It's just another example of how none of us are actually unlucky. When I'm sitting in my cubicle at work, fogging up my glasses from under my mask, I'll know it's not because I wasn't judicious enough with my word usage, it's that I was born into a society burdened with a portion of the voluntarily gullible. I partially take it back, though: if that's not a curse, I'm not sure what is.

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*Keep it from sticking more. For those unburdened by ballsack, no underwear has been invented that can prevent this entirely.

**For a while anyway. Fuck off forever, Last Man Standing