miserable suckers

An interesting thing about people is that we are guarded.  We walk around with imaginary walls to keep out whatever might come our way.  This means that our lives are full of chit chat and how ya doin'.  Small talk isn't a completely evil thing, but I think that there is at least a little evil in it.

The strange thing is that most of us like other people.  Walking around with our walls and chit chat, we are a bunch of lonely suckers.  This is irony, right?  We've only got a a half dozen decades here and we're spending most of it worried about what other people think of us while they're thinking about what we think of them.

The tragic thing is that we all know this.  We all know that the other guy thinks the same things as us, wants the same interaction and depth as us, feels the same hurts as us.  We know it all.  If we look close enough we'll see it in the other's eyes when we fluff on about shallow things.  We know all this, and yet we let this ironic story unfold again and again.  We hit blips of wholeness, trust, and community, but most of the time we trudge through the day with a burden of miserable loneliness on our back.  This burden is a like a sack of rocks.  A bag of useless coal.