Negative99

I was at a funeral two days ago. I was reminded of the idiots who protest at the funerals of fallen American soldiers that I blogged about recently. It hit me at one point… during the the solemnity and grief of the moment, as family members around me were crying and consoling each other… how utterly and indescribably wrong it is to heckle grieving family members at a funeral. No, really… whatever you are imagining in you mind, you can easily triple it if you are really there. There’s nothing to stop me from mechanically agitating (to use engineering terms) those funeral protesters, should I ever encounter one, until I’ve successfully caused a chemical shift in their neural activity.

Speaking of… and not to be too trite of a follow up… that is just one of many situations that we, as mere humans, really don’t understand the magnitude of until we are actually present to experience it. I was just talking about this today with someone. There are certain circumstances that people tell us about… that we read about in newspapers or see on the news… that we can try and imagine, but our imaginations fall terribly short of the emotional and physical effects that real-world situations cast on us. For instance, While I was stationed at Fort Drum I was told about a place just off post, called the Golden Unicorn (I know… sounds like a gay bar), that served HUGE pancakes. Well, until you get served two pancakes that are each the size of early laptop computers you really cannot comprehend what 2500 calories of fried beer batter looks like…. you just can’t. I tried to google for a Golden Unicorn website but the best I could get were hits for 10th Mountain soldiers making breakfast plans on their MySpace pages.

Speaking of MySpace… what a parade of human debris that can be. Now, don’t get on me about devaluing human beings… I know that I’m not any more valuable than anyone else… but I can’t help but notice that what started out as a website for indie music bands to have a so-called homepage has now become a haven for teenage (and pre-teen) debauchery where little girls will post pictures of themselves in underwear to get the attention of pimpled-faced, testosterone-charged punks. Both aforementioned groups can’t seem to construct complete sentences with proper spelling and grammar (thank you IM) any more than your eldest relative can explain the impact of Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript And XMLhttpRequest) on modern web development. And really… have you seen the pictures on there? Forget the dirty stuff… what goes through someone’s mind when they post the same shot of themselves five times and give each shot a totally different caption? It’s like deja-Zoolander all over again.

I think I need a hug.