The Walking Dead

So, Severely-Fucked-in-the-Head-Girl invited me to a dinner party she was having. If there is one thing I hate about DC life, it is all the goddamn dinner parties. Human beings in their twenties and thirties have this weird insecurity about adulthood. Recently IKEA has tapped into this with that whole wine glass commercial and the “living an adult life” bullshit. Swedish mother-fuckers. Look, I know I am an adult. My hair-line is receding, my black socks outnumber my white socks two to one and I own mutual funds. Whatever-the-case, the consumption of brie, wine and mini-quiches still goes on in order to fill this void in other people’s lives.

Though I find SFitHG to be thoroughly entertaining and quite interesting, parties leave little opportunity for one to socialize with the host since they are busy, well, hosting. Instead I was left chatting with various people who work at SAIC, State Civil and State Foreign Service.

I used to believe that in order to be an interesting person, one had to have interesting things going on in one’s life. I have been proven wrong on both fronts of this theory. On the one hand, I have a legion of friends who have nothing interesting going on in their lives who are incredibly stimulating intellectually. I know first hand how boring Shoffy, Bulworth and Rogue Progressive’s jobs are and yet I could chat with them endlessly about the finer point of things that don’t even have finer points. The same goes for Snazzler, a real life Jewish carpenter. I mean, he builds stuff, and yet he still has an entertaining insight on life. Boring lives perhaps, but interesting people none-the-less. (Perhaps all of them have secrets lives I don’t know about)

The other hand of this argument punched me in the face last night. Country experts, world travelers and terrorism gurus with zero personality. Mortgages, decorating homes, commute times and the virtues of I-Pods dominated the evening. This conversation actually happened:

Me: I can’t believe I’ve entered this phase of my life. A world where everyone talks about mortgages. What have we become?

Man: Yeah, well, the reason everyone talks about it is because the market is crazy right now. Just last year, my wife and I were looking for a town home in the Tyson’s area and they were priced at $375,000. We looked again this year that they are $450,000….

I thought he was fucking with me, but no, he actually tried to engage me in a conversation about something I had just finished calling excruciatingly boring. What was he thinking?

And perhaps that is the real problem- thinking. People can travel the world and not contemplate their surrounds, the world or themselves (you can lead a horse to water…). On the other hand, even a man trapped in a wheelchair with movement of only his pinky can have insight about the universe that surpasses us all. Thinking is the key and once people stop doing that, they are nothing more than zombies…who may need their brains blown out by a shotgun before they bite you.