| The Journal of Provincial Thought |
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Admonishment # 1013. Stop Offending My Modesty.
You were not born with a right to distress me with active impositions, but with the obligation to keep your distance physically, psychologically and spiritually, extending only the basic formalities of social interaction pending growth of a relationship between us. Your freedom of speech ends where my hearing range begins. Your freedom to publicly expose controversial body elements only ever existed in the cavity of depravity left behind by the abdication of conscience. If you choose to ignore these rules, that will be no problem for me if nobody else is around. However, it offends my modesty to be observed tolerating these impositions without protest, insouciantly, perhaps even with a certain conspiratorial smirk at times. Stop it.
Admonishment # 406. On Thinking You're Just HOW Hip?
It’s permissible to see yourself as a surfer of the forward trends as you go about your life, understanding that mannerisms and styles are not arrivals at some profound and supreme condition eclipsing all prior cool on earth. (Especially if it isn’t you who has devised the mannerism or style.) Don’t stand upon the present moment, the perceived pinnacle of the timeflow, looking down dismissively upon history: “Those guys were off the hook for their day.” Your day is in the process of being overzoomed as well, my friend. IF your kick is so fly that some bad cat two centuries hence can still hear about it, it’ll appear to him quaint, dusty, naïve, harmlessly retarded. Ten years from now you’ll think it yourself. In a while the bad cat will come tumbling into your bin too. Modernity began with ancient Latin talk of modo, “in the manner of the now.” People have been modern ever since. What makes you especially modern?
Admonishment #844. On Making Up Rorschach Answers.
A certain man, believing himself insane but determined to deceive the doctor, made up what he thought to be healthy answers to the Rorschach ink-blot inquisition, instead of relating how the blobs made him feel or what he actually saw in them, which (he later acknowledged without elaboration) “was some pretty messed-up s**t.” The doctor observed that the man’s characterizations, floating the frequent parenthetic “ink deposited perhaps randomly, perhaps by design,” were meticulously literal descriptions of the shapes on the page. This in itself spoke volumes, particularly since he was repeatedly asked not to do that. But it was all the other things the man talked about, and everything in the way he did it, that really helped the doctor get a handle on this guy and mark him for additional lucrative appointments. So if you’re in a similar boat, maybe you want to express a few general human reactions about what you see, very lightly, and otherwise keep a sock in the pie hole. And don’t shriek and grin like an orangutan.
—Fondlegod has opined.
| jptArchive Issue 6 |
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