Monday, April 18, 2005

Bob is your Uncle

I am a credulous person.

In another time, another place I might be called gullible or impressionable.

Weak-minded.

There are, however, a few things in this world for which I distrust categorically.
Ministers. Insurance salesmen. Books or movies based on true stories. White martial artists. Guys when they talk about fights they’ve had, or girls when they talk about how many people they've slept with.

You get the idea.

One thing I mistrust above all others, a real personal peccadillo, a key idiosyncrasy is this: opinions.

I don’t trust them. Not just other people’s, not a few, not those that dissent from my own but categorically. Up and down, left and right.

I don’t trust the easy ones: Nazi’s are bad; socialized medicine is good. Rape, cigarettes, red meat bad; stem cell research, abortion, and free market capitalism good…wait, bad…wait…which brings me to the hard ones.

I don’t like hard ones either.

I don’t trust anyone or anything that’s ever come to a conclusion or made a decision more important than what to order, burger or salad. It should be obvious at this point I’m contradicting myself.

In the Hagakure a manual for the mental training of young samurai it was suggested that all decisions be made in the time it takes for one to breathe seven times. Confucius when told by a disciple that he always thought things through three times told him gently “Twice is enough.”

I am a contrarian by nature. I’ve begun to think I’ve a real genius for it. I hate to argue but I do it all the time. Mostly internally. I love dissenting views, the underdog, unless everyone else does too. I like to agree but I don’t like it when people get too smug. I don’t like it when people are too sure of themselves and find it ridiculous when they are too insecure.

I loathe taking a position. There are few things as morally repugnant to me than taking a firm stand on anything. Still I find that there are times when the human thing to do would be to have a preference for one thing over another. This I determine by convenience. Almost every restaurant has a burger, thus burgers become my favorite food. Stealing is wrong because it’s not worth the concern.

I don’t have morals, I have customs.

Already, at this point in the paper I’m running out of steam and wondering how I’m going to extricate myself from the grossly explicit position preceding this paragraph. My plan is simple; make a bold statement and expound rapidly. You’re trapped into a forward progression and won’t remember the beginning by the time I’ve reached the end.

Unless this is the end.

We get the word jazz from the Acadian French word that originally meant “to chat.” “Do you want to chat?” was how hookers in New Orleans would politely ask a potential john to determine his intentions. The word jaser came to be a euphemism for the sex act itself. The music commonly played in these houses of ill-repute came also to be called jaser and finally just jazz. So really “jazz” music means “fuck” music.

4 Comments:

Blogger Jonathan said...

Have you thought about submitting this to (insert lame journal here)? How about (insert lame journal here)? My friend knows this guy who likes to read, and he says that men like you are like elk in the highlands.

8:39 am  
Blogger Jonathan said...

P.S. I fucking love jazz. Is that redundant?

8:39 am  
Blogger Jonathan said...

Are you ever going to post again?

6:34 pm  
Blogger J*me said...

Hey Hans came across your blog recently saw you at Star Wars movie too you were sitting in front of me and your hairdo was getting in the way of my fiance's view LOL But it's all good see ya around!

5:03 pm  

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