oppressive encounters

If I were to die from some form of over-sensitivity, it would occur at the local YMCA, during a casual conversation with a stranger. I cannot learn to keep my mouth shut. Nor can I learn to follow through on the implications of even the briefest conversation. What I hear has countless implications which overwhelm me. Most of all there seems to be a sort of satisfaction or conviction that the status quo is good, a kind of blindness about the inadequacy of existing institutions--(Possibly based on the conviction which seems to be secular religion locally that anyone who has a job, owns a home, and two or three trucks, has a wife, a dog or two and three children, must be happy---after all, what more could there be?) Thus, if your home is about to be taken away from you---something someone did tell me about---and if there is no legal basis for that attempt, you need a lawyer. But, don't worry: use Legal Aid.

I was fool enough to suggest that such a thing simply shouldn't happen, that it was nothing more than a manifestation of a broader pattern. My words were ignored. So, too, the fact that (as the story was told), this was not the first time those holding the mortgage had attempted to steal the man's home......

My suggestion fell on deaf ears. It was naive of me to expect anything else. And I found myself wondering about the possibility of change. And what of my own personal satisfaction--or rather complete lack of it?

So long as my life is dominated by fractured conversations of this type, or a worse sort of conversation in which there is always an agenda in the background, I shall have no genuine relationship with any other human being. And so we come round, once again, to the simple fact of my deep dissatisfaction with every element of this thing they call my life. If your words fall to the ground prior to reaching the ears of another sentient being, you are talking to yourself. You can begin to believe that you are alone in the world, and that the creatures who have the form of human beings are zombies--or worse, that they never were and never will be truly human.