The older I grow the more I realize how terribly difficult it is for people to understand each other. – Ludwig Wittgenstein
The old man would be a hermit if he hadn’t married a female who would be a hermit if she hadn’t married him.
He was a zen existentialist and she was a former Sunday school superintendent. Southern Baptist. But it worked.
I am white and I have a penis. Only stands to reason I am better than everybody else.
Everybody else that is except more powerful white people with penises. And most every female. A couple of special dogs.
I am white and I have a penis and therefore I am better than everybody else.
The old man could honestly say he had never thought that once in his life. Sounds kinda silly. Sounds real stupid when you say it out loud.
The old man grew up in a green hamlet along a blue lake.
The first dark- skinned people to join the formerly all-white community were the Italians.
Wasn’t long before we were introduced to pizza. Just one benefit of immigration.
He’d had this dream where he was the last old white man left.
All the other creepy white motherfuckers had been hunted down and killed. Publicly. On Pay TV.
In the dream, the old man was still lean and so he was able to hide behind the poultry blood tank every time they came looking for him.
Too stinky to locate.
When they finally caught him, he didn’t know how, he woke up in a dark cell like Negan in The Walking Dead.
Latte-colored lesbians paraded by. He liked lesbians but they didn’t always like him. He wondered which time this was.
I am white and I have a penis and therefore I am better than everybody else.
So, what you’re telling me, it’s all about power and greed and skin color and gender and they are coming to get us and we’d better cheat because otherwise we can’t compete.
There’s this theory if you say shit often enough repeatedly over and over, it becomes true in the mind of The Great Unwashed.
And so I ponder, why doesn’t that shit sound crazier and crazier every time you hear it?
Because nobody says it out loud. Not actually.
Would it make a difference and why should it.
Sartre said, “Hell is other people.” That was the only existentialist thought the old man could quote.
But they are not to be feared.
I am the last old white man because I was not afraid.
Same reason I don’t like to leave the house.
The contradiction? That’s the zen part.