Pertinent petulance

“You cannot understand the weak,” said her lover. “He is not conscious of having done wrong, he did all he did to survive. That is the supreme argument with the weak. They think all mankind should do them homage because they survive. Can you understand that?”

My, how relevant this seems to some of the conversations I’ve had recently.

I find people fascinating, perhaps the most interesting things ever to be created or to have crawled and evolved out of steaming messes. If I have a hobby then people are it – really, how can you not watch? How can you not be fascinated by the foibles and habits of individuals? How can people’s visions of themselves fail to excite interest?

Ah but that last one is the killer. Don’t we all take ourselves too seriously and those who protest contrary even more than the rest? My target, aside from my precious wee self, is a particular group who rage rage rage about their own survival and expect credit for it. There is little honour in living through – or is there? Isn’t it what you make of yourself, your situation, your great trails and tribulations that counts? It’s what we choose to become, Harry. What is it to have been born? Not much, happens rather a lot, happens to rather a lot – one might say all – of us. Some things you just get over. None of us can help our families or our upbringing or the thousand abuses inadvertently or deliberately acted upon us. We can but mould ourselves with what we discover we are – and eventually, we ought to discover who and what we are. Then, though, those who don’t – what becomes of them? Oh I know what becomes of them. They tell us, she says – defying the gods of irony, of themselves. All the time. They have no other real topic of conversation. If they succeed in anything then they rest upon their pitiful laurels and expect the world to trot up to them and fall prone. When it doesn’t – oh! cry conspiracy! The dragged up cannot succeed. The heavy hands of the wealthy and fortunate hold them down – tall poppies everywhere. Always they have to prove themselves in tiny petty ways to those who intimidate them most: I’m smart, aren’t I smart, don’t you think I’m smart? aren’t I pretty, look at me I’m pretty, oh a boy, flirt, smile, seduce, run, I’m sexy they all think so, so pretty and sexy, so smart, why aren’t you looking at me? tell me I’m pretty, tell me I’m smart, I don’t have to prove myself to you, I worked so hard to be here, I overcame such obstacles the like of which you’ll never see or understand, oh how they criticised me for being smart/pretty/sexy but I am, you know, I am, I have been so abused, so unloved, everyone should love me for I am wonderful, aren’t I wonderful, tell me I’m wonderful - and so on and on. They always have to compete. They always have to share. The minutiae of their every experience revealed, shared, anguished over with the expectation of your approbation. Anything you say, any trauma you suffer, they trump you – for they have had it so much worse. Always. And they will go to great lengths to tell it to you. And the more you intimidate them the more they have to tell you. The more they have to tell you of your privilege as compared to theirs. On and on – and finally, one day, it occurs to you that they have suffered no distress but that of their own making. What they’ve chosen to focus their lives on is not betterment nor is it real living – they’ve chosen to focus on the petty and mundane, to turn molehills into mountainous feats, to almost half succeed in being totally miserable. Misery because that’s what they want, because it’s what they think their ordeals should create, because that is how they survive, because they don’t know how to live.

‘Oh I’ve got your number, taken notes, I know the way your minds work. I have studied. And your minds are just the same as mine except that you are clever swines:- You never let your mask slip, you never admit to it, you’re never hurried. Oh no no no. And every night I hone my plan – how I will get my satisfaction, how I will blow your paradise away. ‘Cos I spy.’

lol