People are Bad…

You meet a person and they seem good, honest and normal. What do you know? You know nothing. You take it for granted they’re good and kind hearted. Until they begin to reveal themselves.

I had a friend when I was five years old. My mother uprooted us. We left town. This kid. He was sad to see me go. He said, “I’m gonna miss you.” I thought to myself, this is a good kid.

Six decades and a half later. I still remember this kid. I don’t remember his name. What he looks like. Anything we did together. Only that he was a good kid.

Whenever I think of a kind hearted person I think of this kid.

I don’t know any genuinely good people. Why is that? Is there something wrong with me? Well, yes. But not abnormally wrong. Only wrong in the same way as everybody else. Something is wrong with all of us.

We’re all bad.

You get to know a person you end up finding out what’s wrong with them. Not everything. Just the stuff that slips out. Like bits of debris floating up from the murky bottom. I’m talking about people without ulterior motives. Simple people, like myself. People exhibiting the standard flaws.

The Middling Bad.

Complicated people share with the rest of us the standard flaws. Yet middling bad aint good enough for them. They struggle with urges that compel them to take on the world. Getting ahead means more than getting by. They shield their nasty pathetic selves from people they mean to flatter. You can always tell a complicated person. Everybody looks up to them. You think they’re better than the rest of us.

It’s the middling bad looking up to the better bad.

Old Jesus had his work cut out for him, I’ll tell you.

Entombment of Christ by Caravaggio. This artist was definitely one of the Better Bad. He made it in life. He was a great artist. But he was also Truly bad. He murdered a Dude and ran with Thugs. Truly Bad people comprise about 5% of our population.

Think about it. Five people out of a hundred will slice your throat as soon as look at you. Another Twenty five are doing all they can do to get over on you. The rest are just a bunch of pathetic bungling half-ass good for nothing middling bad people like yourself. They’ll nip at your heels like horrible chihuahuas. They are the ones that wear you down in the end. You can’t very well kill them because you’re one of them.

You’re better off heading out of Dodge.

Christmas Time gives me the creeps

I don’t know exactly why this is.

Maybe it’s because around Christmas time people try hardest to be good. Christmas arrives and all the little Nasties–the middling bad along with the better bad and even a few of the truly bad–grab the opportunity to perform acts of kindness. Many of them lunge into kindness like dolts learning to ski. They overcompensate. Suddenly, beggars are a welcome sight on city streets.

For some reason people need a special day to express kindness.

They can’t just be kind all the time and dispense with a special holiday.

If the truth be known, people are repelled by Constant Kindness.

It’s as if kindness–constant kindness–is an unstable form of energy.

Or the act of being good all the time is like overcharging a battery. Too much goodness for too long will cause you to explode.

This is of course utter bullshit. There’s no such thing as too much kindness. There’s only the state of kindness. You’re a Kind person or you’re not. Just as you’re a good person or you’re not. And since all of us are bad we have no way of knowing what it’s like to be truly good. We don’t even desire to be good. I know I don’t. I’d much rather satisfy my petty urges. When I was young my primary urge was lust. Now it’s gluttony. I’ve pretty much gotten over envy and pride. I’m working on wrath and sloth and feel confident I’ll beat them within a year or two. So I’m left with overeating. That’s not so bad. In fact, it’s almost good. Not quite. Becoming good would require a whole new set of instructions and practices, which only holy people manage to achieve. Did I just mention holy people? I’ve left them out of this discussion. Why? Because holy people, truly good people, comprise about .00005 percent of the population. That’s one in 200,000 people.

I’m betting that kid I knew 66 years ago turned out to be a holy person.

The most wonderful time of the year

Really?

There’s nothing I see WONDERFUL about Christmas time. It’s cold. Wet. The wind blows crap everywhere. Disasters occur with frequency. Meanwhile, all the Middling Bad and Better Bad are running around like crazed squirrels buying shit out of some kind of blind insane belief that giving a shiny toy to a kid teaches GOODNESS rather than CONSUMPTION. You got Jesus in the manger but nobody gives a shit. Not really. It’s the buying that matters.

Christmas is all about teaching kids to be consumers. We pretend its about Jesus. This is what I mean by Creepy.

None of this is Wonderful.

I got my own opinion on what’s truly Wonderful.

Stormy Daniels in her prime, for example:

Did I say I got over my lust?

Pretty much….

I’m okay with just plain bad

I’m a middling bad dude. I accept human nature and all its flaws. We’re rolling toward extinction, which is okay, too. I mean if it was good enough for the T Rex why shouldn’t it be good enough for us? We had our shot at making the world a paradise and we came up short. The only difference between us and the T Rex is we know better. The T Rex didn’t know shit. There’s that glimmer we have of the truly good. Of holy men like that kid I knew sixty six years ago. Of putting not only our faith but our resources with them. If only there were more of them around. But there never has been.

We lost the ability to look up to holy men. Now that I think about it, maybe we’re no different from T Rex after all. We don’t know shit, either!

Happy Holidays!