A funny thing happened to me at a bar. I was in the men's bathroom taking a piss when two girls stumbled through the door. The first fell flat on her face on the bathroom floor, and the second fell directly on top of the first. The bouncers were already right there, because both were incoherently drunk, and as one bouncer helped one of the girls up I finished up at the urinal and helped the other one up. I thought it was funny and walked out of the bathroom smiling and a little startled.
As soon as I emerged from the bathroom and the two drunk girls were taken away, another girl got in my face and said 'It's your fault.' I gave her a puzzled look, and she said 'no, I'm just joking.' I smiled and kept walking. When I was past her she continued, '...because you opened the door!'
The fact of the matter is that the girls didn't fall because I opened the door. I was still holding my Charles Dickens at the urinal when these two drunk girls fell into the *men's* bathroom because they couldn't figure out which was the women's bathroom and they were too drunk to properly walk and open doors. But this other one who was apparently 'just joking' about it all being my fault was truly under the false impression that I caused that scene. As I walked away with polite smiles I admit that this meaningless misconception of hers still irked me a little.
I'm certainly of the 'don't sweat the small stuff' mentality--on the record--but sometimes the small stuff seems pretty well connected to the big stuff. After I left this bar and was waiting for the train, another group of drunk people stumbled by me, complaining belligerently about the crowd in the subway station. They must have been partly after my heart, as I regularly complain about large groups of phone-ogling, slow-moving, inconsiderate people. But then this super-ironic, super-unattractive hipster among hipsters started a full-on rant. It began with how all the people on the platform should just jump in front of the next train and kill themselves, and ended with 'this is why they bombed Boston.'
She was truly a horrible person, and it took so much resolve to refrain from laying into her. She was the perfect prototype of all the 'little things' that are wrong with the world: a gross overbalance of entitlement above empathy, an insipid excuse for ironic comportment, a thorough inability to understand the force and merits of true irony or satire. These days (I must be getting old) this kind of intellectually broke and witless 'irony' prevails, in which you simply hold up obvious extremes ('innocent stranger, kill yourself!'; 'minor inconvenience = major tragedy') and think this is either funny or biting. It is neither. It is stupid and overdone and reflective of the laziness, vacuousness, and unearned arrogance of the average fuckface whose meager efforts afford her an ironic night out in the city...with trains!
The disdain this behavior generates in me makes me wonder sometimes whether I (you) should just become powerful, as opposed to doing things with my time that I believe in, and that I think make this world better than worse. Then I (you) could better stand up to this tyranny of bad irony, like so many powerful people do.
This is certainly how dictators begin to justify their actions. Fortunately, dictatorship is not an ambition of mine. Had I embraced the 'small stuff matters' mentality, I would (should) have told her off then an there, and this post tonight would never have happened.
