Whiteclay part 9

"Does size matter?"
"Oh definitely."

I slept on the floor. The next two nights I would end up with the bed somehow and it was hardly any better. I squirmed for five or six hours and than I got up. The Slurricane is more insidious than anything I've drank before. Nightmares, delusions. I can easily understand Robert and his ghosts. He's spent his entire life, waking and half-sleeping, under the influence of this shit. Whether drunk or hungover on Hurricane, the effect is much the same. A humid washcloth for a brain, no real difference between being asleep and being awake, a constant, unresting consciousness that starts to tear very quickly. I was shattered after three days, left to flail and grasp on blind impulse for another three days after that. The people who live the Whiteclay life, the ones who sleep in rotting houses and sleep on disgusting "beds", I have no idea how they keep their shells walking.

I'm not going to say that they're dead inside. That's not only a cliche, it's a no true Scotsman fallacy. Nowhere is it written that real life can't be grinding, humiliating, filth-ridden suicide. Millions have lived and died this way, drunks, soldiers, the average citizen of Malawi, of Pine Ridge, the average citizen of the world.

No, these people are alive like you and me, but they are shells. We in the white middle class, we in the first world, have been taught that we are, if not important, at least important enough to impact our social environments; our towns, our neighborhoods, our workplaces, our circles of friends. We have influence over people and we can and should seek influence over more people.

The shells, those ninety percent of the human race, don't have that. They have surrendered to whatever environment they're in, become it. Never quite surrendering but becoming surrender. But of course they still live. They feel as much humiliation over wearing the same clothes for three months or getting sick from rat shit as us spoiled rich folk would. They simply don't think they can do anything about it, and nothing in their lives has given them any reason to think they should.

Oh but it's all their fault, you know. the world is magically, automatically just. Those Indians, they make more money than you or me you know. It's a welfare ploy. Every man the master of his fate, straight line and a goal. Stay in Gordon Becky. Marry that Christian cowboy and will yourself a baby. Don't waste your pity on what is meant.

She was accosted by said cowboy, somewhere out in the town, when I gave up trying to reach R.E.M and stood up. It was about 8. I needed coffee and the dry absurdest humor of Nebraska news before I could face the day. It would be a very long one.