Bliss Nostalgia

I used to know Kierkegaard. Seriously, I minored in philosophy as an undergrad. I read Fear and Trembling and, like any and all precocious 20-year-olds before or since, walked around for about six months in a wafting, shimmering, self-perpetuating bubble of righteous separation from my fellow man. You know, the yahoos and squares who drank beer and studied "economics" or some other made-up bullshit. They didn't get it like I did. Well, me and my boy Søren anyway, together, locked as one in mind and spirit, all intentional and shit about everything. I don't even remember enough about it now to make a sly and knowing wordplay joke about any of it, but suffice it to say that's the kind of dime-a-several-dozen assface douchenozzle I was in college, and I hadn't even gotten around to pretending to understand Nietzsche yet.

I'm chugging along into my early-mid-forties now and what do I know? Well, when the boys are over, they bring their PlayStation 4 and I'm starting to get adept with some of the characters in Injustice 2, the very colorful punching simulator starring your favorite DC heroes and villains and also Swamp Thing. I know what not to eat in order to manage my overall cholesterol levels on a year-to-year basis. I know enough Spanish to know I couldn't reliably tell someone who'd asked for directions how to turn right vs. go straight.* I can name the members of most of the major houses of Westeros back two or three generations before the start of Game of Thrones. With the occasional exception of that last one, none of those things is inclined to inspire the kind of pride (of the "...goeth before the fall" type) I'd have known as an idiot college student. Or maybe I'm not giving myself credit for simply understanding that the things I do know don't actually qualify me for any kind of advanced status or station versus any of my fellow man. Not even the stupid ones, the blustery, silence-averse ones who are too preoccupied with proclaiming that they miss the obvious truth that they don't know what it is they don't actually know. You know them. They're around. Sometimes one gets elected president.

And that brings me to things I know now that I didn't used to know that I really wish I didn't know. Like as of this week, space in my finite brain is dedicated to knowing what an Anthony Scaramucci is. What type of person is this? The type to a) give himself a nickname and b) use it to refer to himself in the third person. The Mooch never knows what the Mooch is going to say next. But you can bet your ass it's going to be about the Mooch.

This is an abjectly stupid, petty, cruel, incompetent person who has already proven himself to be terribly bad at simple tasks he's attempted to do that aren't even part of the job he actually has anyway. The type to fill in gaps of understanding with statements of invented fact and unearned testicle-swinging bravado of the most easily dismissed type. It's almost like the person at the top of this particular professional pyramid is starting to clone himself into the lower levels middle management.

And there's 2017 for adults everywhere, all summed up: this is shit we have to know. Hey, do you know who the director of communications for the Obama White House was for any time in the four years he was in office? Nope, me neither. The only thing I really had to remember during those days was that a certain segment of the white population hated his guts and... that's about it. The rest of the work of the government just chugged along, very rarely threatening to kill us all or cripple the economy in a protracted fit of spite. We'd just hang out and maybe half-listen to the occasional policy speech and then, when he was really putting himself out there, maybe catch a slideshow of him hanging out with babies.

Everyday now feels like a blue-book test, where the subject refuses to define itself as anything recognizable, the proctor is a seven hungry alligators and the room is on fire. I'm kind of done knowing stuff. And we're only six months in to Year One of this shit.

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*Derecho for both? Or derecha? I'm pretty sure it's neither and this is a cruel joke Mexicans snuck in to Rosetta Stone just to fuck with us gringos.