LET'S ALL BE THE SAME

by kader attia


This morning the 3rd meeting about an internet radio station in Sparta. As is the rule of thumb for meetings in Sparta, nothing has happened yet and no indication that anything will happen. The one that got the meetings going announced today she didn't want to do anything toward it, she just wanted to get the meetings going. Brought to mind a time in the early 70s in Charleston. A gal started calling meetings toward setting up a film society so we could see movies. By then, all movie theaters had left Charleston and went to North Charleston. Every meeting she announced she didn't want to run the thing, but as it turned out, she wouldn't let anybody else run it. After 4 meetings nobody went back.



This the third meeting and there it is again. I'm reminded of the I'm-gonna phenomenon. Many years ago I learned that when somebody starts a sentence "I'm gonna," whatever it is that's gonna, it never comes to pass. This is the one who is always telling me what I gotta do, needta do, better do, and quasi-psychically knowing what I'm doing when she's not there, but, alas, is never correct. If she were an Old Testament prophet, she'd have been stoned to death years ago. Today we get another bomb: I have a good idea, but I want you to do it, not me. I think I'm not going back. I know for a certainty nothing will happen next meeting, or the next, or the next. Again, meetings for the sake of meetings, the Sparta pastime. About the equivalent of, Let's go to the mall.



I really do have better things to do than get up early, drive to town, the one calling the meeting a half hour late--somethin come up, sit around and jabber with other people fooled into believing the meetings were about something other than having a meeting. Then drive home. A gallon of gas wasted. The morning wasted. The day ruined by a false start. I'm out. Not going back. I have a life. So far, 3 gallons of gas for nothing but annoyance. I can drive from Sparta to Woodlawn and back Friday nights on 3 gallons of gas. There, it's worth every cent of the expense. Going to these meetings is like buying something that is broken and there's no recourse. I know, I have a bad attitude. I've been told before.



I've been aggravated all day by yet another Sparta false start. Took a 4 hour nap. Woke up after 2 hours and went back to sleep. At least I got some sleep done today. This is somebody I care a very great deal about, which I guess makes it all the more maddening. I have my quota of meetings already fulfilled. Two is enough. The two I go to cannot be replaced by any other, especially by meetings for the sake of meetings. And I've got somebody wanting to debate me on everything I write to make certain I understand he knows that I am not right and likes to go to exaggerated lengths to push it in my face I'm wrong. Well, I don't give a shit. I'm wrong. What's so great about being right? Please don't lecture me on the virtue of being right. Right won't get me to heaven, wrong won't put me in hell. Both are interpretations



I'm writing a subjective account of the world I live in, one man's experience in the world of a given place and time. I tell it as I interpret it. I'm not putting my interpretations up for argument. I'm not laying my interpretations down as fact. They are just my interpretations and that's all I present them as. I think of the daily writings as free-flowing spontaneous prose poems. If you think I'm not addressing what you want me to address, then write your own blog and tell it your way. My interpretations are a minor testament of one way of seeing. There are presently something like 9 billion ways of seeing, and that's just humans. Then you have dogs and cats and horses and pigs, trout and squid, mollusks, bacteria. All live a totally subjective life. It's the nature of life in the physical world. This is why I like to blog surf sometimes, see radically different ways of interpreting. Listening to NPR news interview shows where people call in to tell their solution for something like whether or not using drones is a good thing, I hear every kind of response, all of them subjective. What I think about the matter is one of 9 billion ways of seeing it. I say 9 billion approximately. I don't know the actual number and I'm not going to look it up to pass a test.



Today at Selma's, Joe Allen brought up that he knows people who don't believe anybody walked on the moon. I've seen some pretty convincing evidence that some of the photographs were made in American desert and some in a studio. But that makes me a conspiracy theorist, not a good thing to be in the realm of the politically correct ostrich stance. We are Barbie girls in a Barbie world. They'll be calling me Michael Moore next. Gee, wouldn't that be awful. The only one who carried the torch for sanity through the Bush/Cheney/Rummy/Rice era gets laughed off as a conspiracy theorist. Ralph Nader has been right all the way along and he only gets laughed at. What's so great about being right?



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