“Your mouth is open. Sound is coming from it. This is never good.”
I never claim to be an anarchist.
I think I generally come across as harmless. I rarely swear or raise my voice, and when I do speak my opinions probably sound like the mildly left-of-center ramblings of an over-educated pseudo-intellectual who lacks the certainty of some who has, I don’t know, gotten stabbed or whatever it is pushes pseudo-intellectuals over the edge into revolutionary circles.
I think my thoughts, when I talk about them, lack whatever sharpened edge it is makes me sound dangerous in the way that encourages people to get all tingly and tell their friends, “this guy. You have got to listen to this guy.”
So I think I come across as harmless. Or, at least, mostly harmless, if only because I also think I make it clear that I like nerdy things. Many nerds, I have noticed, love an opportunity to make Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy references. So I may, by general opinion, be harmless, or mostly harmless on days when I find myself in certain company.
I admit, I experience a certain frustration from apparently being off-written as harmless. I mean, I may be. I may be one of the more harmless people you will ever meet. I don’t know, really.
I think about it, because I like thinking about the roots of things.
Take language, for example. There must have been a time when the human race communicated strictly with grunting and punching. That and suggestive wind-breaking would have been the extent of what our ancestors could do in order to communicate higher ideas to each other — ideas like saving some food for tomorrow, and other rudiments of civilization like that. Which means that, if you think about it, we had a one in three chance of evolving as a species whose primary form of communication is getting into a fight. A grammatically charged one, where a left hook could have a myriad of complex interpretations, and a swift kick to the bollocks might, depending on angle and velocity, mean anything from “let’s go for drinks” to “love your top. Where did you get it?”
It could have happened, you know. We could have been a punching-based species, where martial artists are scholars, and your brawling man down in the pub is reckoned one of the most honest local poets. MMA would move us to tears by its breadth of expression, and we would feel our hearts break every time we watched the perversion of language which was professional wrestling.
And if anyone spoke in public, we would shy away from their impropriety.
It almost happened. We missed that world by inches — inches. And veered off into this weird splinter universe where our basic state is pretending not to be confused.
I don’t know about you, but I think verbal communication causes most misunderstandings.
I mean, if we never talked, we would never have the little daily misunderstandings that cause us so much grief. The harassed young woman getting our order wrong at the Taco Bell would never give us the wrong food if we had never spoken our order just a little funny in the first place.
I think we’ve all been there: been having a bad day, and all we really want is thirty-seven mixed variety faux Mexican entrees. And, since we have been having such a bad day, we are meditating on the pressures that grind society into the practice in simpering dishonesty it takes to get through the day that society has become. And so, in our charity, we choose to improve the world in our small way by writing down our whole order in detail on a piece of paper, then begin to recite the thing to the little box listening to us. We ask for six tacos, and three tostadas, even though we don’t know how to spell toastata. Four Crunchwrap Supremes. Three burritos supreme. Seven bean burritos. Nine Nachos Bell Grande. And four gorditas, even though they make no sense.
The spelling here is a little sketchy. I do not speak fast food.
And at the end, after we have ordered our confectionery disaster, just to save time and make it all convenient for everyone concerned, we say, “And leave the onions off everything.”
And, for some reason, the harassed young woman does not seem to appreciate our consideration and grows a little testy.
It’s episodes like that where wars find their roots. For all we know, that harassed young woman only needed one last smarmy customer to nudge her past the edge of reason and into the brink from whence world-straddling dictators emerge.
Or, you know, maybe it was me that needed to be nudged by some short-tempered young person failing to do a simple job fulfilling my little whims, no matter how obnoxious my whims are. Because the foul-mouthed, arrogant, unfeeling customer is always right, and I want my onionless nachos.
The whole point is that we don’t know. We don’t know what goes on in anyone else’s head, and we never will know because we have to talk to people. Which, in my experience, has always been the first step to misunderstanding anyone. The moment I open my mouth and begin to allow noise to escape, I have started curtailing my ability to understand anything. Not sure if it’s a universal problem. But I do frequently see people who I have talked to, and given detailed instructions about how they can make themselves into better people — or, at least, better as far as I’m concerned — and then watched as they, quite calmly and methodically, didn’t do what I suggested. They’ll always say something about “free will” or some fool thing like that, which just sounds like trouble to me.
So clearly there’s some miscommunication going on there.
Which I think suggests only one course of action.
Everybody needs to stop talking. All the communication errors in the world go back to the same place: the fact that we try to communicate at all. If we stopped doing that — if we stopped talking over each other and trying to tell each other what to do and where to get off — we would have a lot fewer misfires. I feel pretty certain of that.
So, you know, just…stop talking. Ever. Never talk again. Then we can all embrace the grab-bag of life and just, kind of, accept things.
I can see no way this could go wrong.
Plus, then, I will have a lot more time to listen to things. You ever listened to things? Like, really listened? Like, with your ears? Not just the tinny sounds from gifs on Facebook, but listened to, you know, things? You know, listened. To all that annoying stuff you spend all your time calling annoying and distracting, so you drown it out. You know that stuff? It’s called…sound. I just started listening the other day. It is a strange way to spend some time.
It’s my new hobby, listening.
So I don’t know if I am, really, anything other than harmless. I think I am harmless, probably. Because instead of doing something dangerous, like questioning the very assumptions by which we live our lives, I spend my time trying to answer harmless questions. I don’t ask questions like, “How could that guy be a judge? That guy on the news. You know who I mean.” There are plenty of other, more hazardous writers who can do that — significant writers — worldy writers.
I try to answer harmless questions, like, “You know those rare times when your mouth is closed and no noise is coming out of it — I know, sounds weird. Is your brain on when that’s happening?”
And that will never change the world.
Yes. Mostly harmless.
