Hookey

I played hookey from work today, because quite frankly, my job sucks. The reason was 'inflammation in my gums', which isn't entirely untrue but pretty good, I thought.

So on my fabulous day off, I had a lie in and then played a round at my local golf course which isn't really a proper course but moreso a large pitch and putt with the longest hole topping off at around 170 yards. It is a beautiful, immaculately maintained short course open to residents of my uppity municipality. At midday there are about 5 or 6 people slashing and slicing, retirees and the like. I find it interesting how diverse golf is becoming, aside from prodigies like Tiger Woods and Vijay Singh, its average particpants are largely older white guys who have enough money to fork over excesses of 5-6m annual club memberships and 100 per round. Not to mention the background and connections necessary to get into the club in the first place. Anyhow, it is pretty cool to see different people around and as arrogant as that comment is, I have to say it. I mean hell, I'm 'different' but there were never any real restrictions on my playing golf aside from admission to the major private clubs in my vicinity, something I'm not missing at all as I have plenty of semi-private and public clubs to slash and slice in. My point is, its more accessible and the class divide is less obvious. If you want to play, you can and if you are good enough, you'll get noticed. I wonder where the next Tiger or Vijay will come from.

I also had time to do a bit of browsing online, catching up on reading. In the past few months I've lost interest in the news. The headlines are a joke in themselves. Whatever the story might be, whatever interest I may have had in it is completely washed by the stereotypical, aggressive and simplistic tone of the headline. I mean something like Iraqi Insurgents go on Rampage, Kill 69 is such a stupid thing to print. A basic degree of common sense will force me to tell you that I doubt they are not all Iraqis and, unfortunately for your simplistic mind, my friend, they didn't go on a 'rampage' like drunken elephants. Okay that wasn't on a new source I regularly read, but still, I see that on the backs of newspapers on my train ride home and just swallow the hard knowledge that the reader of that paper believes that when Iraqi's, or anyone who isn't 'us' defends themselves it is actually a rampage.

The other day I read in the BBC about trains in Iran having female-only cars and permitting women in the other cars only if they were accompanied by a male relative. On the same day, from the same webpage I read about female-only traincars in Japan because of rising incidents of groping on the crowded trains. In Japan, this change is lauded as a stride towards women's rights, preventing them from enduring discomfort on their daily commute; while in Iran, it is a restrictive practice further evidencing the dire state of women in Islamic socities.

That isn't my real issue with the media though. Well I suppose part of it is - the popular media is a joke and should be forbidden from reducing complex issues to a simplistic one-sided view. Screw freedom of speech, if you're a moron you don't deserve to speak. My real issue is that this is how things are. Nuclear tests. Darfur. Burundi. Guantanamo. Iraq. Palestine. Famine. Poverty. This isn't how things have to be but instead how they are. What's the point of burying myself in it when it is just going to continue, business as usual. Analysing it, discovering truth under truth isn't going to change the fact that injustice prevails more often than justice. The way that things are isn't going to change, Americans are both too dumb and too powerful to make a change and the rest of the world has its own shit to worry about. We want to drive our cheap plastic Hummers and Ford Explorers because we can, and we refuse to pay the $10 a gallon the rest of the world pays for gas because, well, why should we? So why bother thinking about it and creating my own personal hell by obsessing over the children killed in Rwanda or the families destroyed by the Janjaweed in Sudan?

My disgust comes down to everday people. The ones who think it's okay to interrupt someone else in mid-sentence; that it's okay to push someone aside to be able to carry on down their path; that it's okay to push past someone through a door; that it's okay to blow smoke in someone's face; that it's okay to throw rubbish wherever it may fall. These behaviours stem from a deep malfunction in basic human decency. They extend much farther beyond this but these are everyday symptoms. And then there are the women with two rodent-like dogs in matching Hermes collars, with their $7m handbags strutting around Park Avenue moaning about the pollen in the air. Look at the flowers you cow. Where do these people come from? What in your mind justifies such arrogance? Don't get me wrong, I love handbags and shoes and things, and I'm fortunate enough to be able to afford them but also smart enough to know that I don't need them which, ironically, is the biggest fortune of all. I don't know what it is that is frustrating me, this may be coming from something not right with me. Why don't I love this as much as the people around me do?