Good Morning Baby

Woke up early Sunday morning as N kissed me goodbye and headed out the door. I tried to roll over and fall back asleep but no luck... I was up. So I wandered out to the livingroom in my midmorning midhangover haze and flipped on the boob tube. Dateline. I felt a gentle nudging to keep flipping, because for some strange reason I seem prone to absorbing the feeling of a thing. When I watched 'Beyond Borders' I immediately sat down afterwards and devised a six phase plan to move us to India and open up an orphanage. Something about this program had me intrigued so I watched. Big Mistake. Before long the mood shifted. The negative, angry, intensity of a young man who'd murdered five people he claimed made racist comments about him on a train. The mood hung heavy on my shoulders, infecting my perception. I began to detach myself from everything around me. Observe the world in third person. Just then a commercial for a new show similar to 'cops' came on. Vice something or other. Which featured a young wash out hill billy throwing around a prostitute we'll call "justice." I tilted my head to the side in utter fascination. as if this were the first time i'd ever seen anything like this. Let me get this straight humans....you perpetrate crimes against eachother, then hire other people to enforce your own mercurial sense of morality on them. and film it. and then other people, the same people who are so terrified of having these crimes perpetrated on them, watch it?

human subject considers question and replies...

no no, not me. I find that sort of thing atrocious. I watch Law and Order.

so let me get this straight...Some of you humans are offended by the voyeristic implications of a film like 'COPS' so you pay other people, to PRETEND they are perpetrating those same crimes on other people, film it and watch that instead?

you people are fucked up.

i flip off the tube and decide to go for a hike to clear my head but my mind is plagued by thoughts of this mornings broadcast. murder, rape, violence. and on lesser scales, lying, cruelty, dishonesty. what the hell is wrong with us?

sometimes i feel myself slip on the hard cold edge. hang a toe over. begin to believe that this world is full of cruelty, full of hate, full of liars and tigers and bears. but then i get down to the waters edge, beyond the bluffs of broken hill road. i watch the water slap itself against the face of the cliffs, small children splashing euphorically in the afternoon swell, i see an old man and an old woman sitting on a bench pointing to a ship with its jib up, tilted to the west, breaking up the surface of the sea and i realize that this world is not full of evil. its full of people who don't know what to believe. people who allow others to define their perception instead of creating their own. Sometimes, I am one of those people.

So i guess the point here is...if you find yourself in that grey space....don't watch dateline.

it fucks with your head.