“So where’re all these opinions, O professional opiner?”
Yeah, so as anyone could tell you, I have a one track mind. Okay, that’s not even remotely true. I have at least a 50 track mind, but when one of my trains of thought finally makes it to the station connected to my fingers, it dumps as many passengers as it can before giving another train a chance. Perhaps we will finally be rid of the train bent on introductions, though I make no promises as to which train is next in the queue.
Speaking of trains, I passed quite a train of cars this morning on my way to work. Seems there is something big on campus today or this weekend, though what exactly I can hardly guess. And the fire field is absolutely alive this morning in preparation for the coming training courses. Every piece of heavy equipment is moving around, chewing up the earth to what ends I can only imagine.
But in the satellite office I share with two of my coworkers, both of whom are on vacation today, there is nothing to do. This is somewhat better than the rest of the week where we invented new and marginally exciting things to do so that, from the outside, we at least had something to show for our time spent here. But in fact, there were no flowers, no honey, no baby bees, just a whole lot of buzzing around in the hive.
I try to convince myself that boredom is occasionally a good thing. A time to relax and digest the past days, weeks, and months, a chance to organize your thoughts and feelings of late into the catalog of personal experience. But that’s not what happens in my head. Instead, it seems that the little man in charge of the switchyard of my brain decides if I get to take a break, so does he. The chaos in my head then becomes near deafening.
The steam engines carrying great ideas are overrun by the cargo trains of bad ones. The only engineer at all with a wisp of logic is knocked from his tracks by the crazy guys on the hand trolleys. The switchyard becomes the very embodiment of insanity.
But there is a man running around the ensuing chaos switching the gates by hand. And I gotta tell you, the guy is good at what he does.
Of course it doesn’t really matter how good he is. Sooner or later the guy who thinks he’s in charge of the switchyard wakes up from his nap and really starts to foul things up. And I guess, in a similar sense, he’s really good at what he does, assuming he’s intending to screw everything up. Sooner or later, I really need to fire that guy. Sooner or later, I won’t have to.
I wonder sometimes if any of the wiring in my head is sound. I don’t particularly think there are a whole lot of people out there in the world who compare their heads to a switchyard on the brink of destruction, and it’s quite likely the ones who do live in padded rooms.
But my room is filled with sharp things, not that it much matters what is in my room, I could injure myself and everyone around me in a padded room with my hands tied behind my back. Every once in a while, the train that stops next to my mouth dumps out passengers intent on hurting everyone and everything they can. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the tongue can lick the pen.
I sat down to write about elitism and prejudism, but I never quite made it. Periodically the guy manually switching the gates turns the train of self-awareness off whatever track it was on, and instead runs it right under the spotlight of truth. I could write all day long about elitism and prejudism, but at the end of the day I am faced with a simple truth I can either accept or deny, but I can’t make go away.
I am the least. Whatever organization had deemed me unacceptable for membership couldn’t be more right. Whoever calls me friend and brother based on some worth of my own is a fool, though still wiser than me.
So is your prejudice of me valid, is your elitism justified? Only if you find me unfit, and send me away.
This my friends is what makes that guy running around switching gates by hand so amazing. He’s not doing it because I am the wisest or the smartest or the coolest or the funniest or the any-other-est you can think of. He’s doing it because he built the switchyard. He knows how I’m supposed to work, and he knows that when he is running the gates, great things happen.
So yeah, I’m pretty crazy. And I doubt any of the stuff I say ever even makes sense. And I can’t really think any less of someone who thinks we shouldn’t hang out because of my skin, or my religion, or my gender, or my car. If I were you, I’d take any excuse to avoid being around me I could think of too.
But there’s this guy… He’s the one who built me, and he built you too, and if he thinks my switchyard is worth saving, if he thinks I’m worth having in his family, I’m pretty sure the same offer is on the table for you.
So prejudice and elitism, fine by me. Discriminate and segregate to your hearts content. Just know that the only true equal opportunity employer has a job offer waiting for you. Yeah, the work is hard and the hours are long, but you won’t find a better retirement plan.
Posted with : The Way, Bare with Me