Day 251: Insignificant

My friend Mike is round to watch The Wire. "Wire boys, oi oi oi!" That's what we chant at each other. And we say, "Good Wiring," afterwards, or, "All Wired up now", or something.

We're not intrinsically cool, Mike and I. But we're happy, so whatever.

We're not happy. Of course we're not happy. Don't be silly.

Today, Mike is not happy because of his headphones.

He comes round wearing these headphones. I've not seen them before. "Nice headphones," I say, meaning it.

Mike says: "They make my head look enormous, don't they? I mean, my head is already enormous. And then you add these awful things on top. It's ridiculous. I'm very self conscious about it all." He is smiling, but he also means it, also.

So I make jokes about his massive head for a while. But you know what? I didn't think Mike had a massive head, or that his headphones were massive. Of course, if Mike wanted to present me with this narrative, then sure, I'd run with it, because humans like ready-made narratives, and this one involved someone being the butt of a joke, and that someone not being me. That's always a plus.

But if I'd seen Mike in the street, and not known him, here's what I would have thought: "That man is wearing headphones." And then I would have gone back to thinking about myself, and all the incredibly important things happening to me, like whether my head looked stupid or over- or under-sized in any way.

Or perhaps, paying the absolute maximum amount of attention possible to another human being, directing all my awareness outside of myself, I might have thought: "Does that man have better headphones than me?"

And I would have studied the man, and the headphones. And if the answer that I arrived at was, Yes, the man did have better headphones than me, then I would have felt miserable for a while, and pondered how unfair it was that I had cheap tiny crappy headphones while everyone else in the world, in the entire goddamned world, had giant powerful beautiful headphones.

If, on the other hand, I concluded that, No, my headphones were best, then I would have immediately dismissed the man from my thoughts, and gone back to the integral work of worrying about whatever it was I was I was worrying about. The weird shape of my head, probably.

What I'm saying is that we ALL think we have stupid heads. We ALL think our accoutrements, technological, sartorial, show us up to be impostors and unfathomably pathetic losers. We ALL worry that, walking around in the spotlight, at the centre of the universe, everyone is watching us and sees all our faults and blemishes, that all those bit part actors on the sidelines are staring in at us and pointing and laughing.

But to everyone else WE are the bit part actors. WE are the ones who might point and laugh. To them, it is they who are the centre of the universe. We are as entirely meaningless to them as all those faceless nobodies in the street are to us.

And they are, aren't they? Nobodies. God, how they shuffle and lurch towards us, down the high street, wearing their puffer jackets, their tie-dyed ponchos, their luminous wellington boots, their pin-striped suits. Ceaseless throngs of them. Shoving, sweating, burping. In Armani. In charity shop throws. In torn bin bags.

Whatever. We don't care. We don't give a shit. Get out of our way. We've got important business to attend to, we're incredibly stressed here, distracted, off in the glorious unique temple of our skulls, at the precise, we're certain, centre of the universe, so vital, so necessary, worrying about the things that truly matter, such as our flabby knees, our oddly hanging scarves, everything we own, wear, possess, are.

It doesn't matter, does it? It doesn't matter whether Mike has a big head (and he does, objectively; it is gargantuan). It doesn't matter whether your jeans are tight around your hips. Whether your breasts are small, or large, or wonky. Whether your tongue lolls out of the side of your mouth when you laugh, or your feet slant inwards when you walk, or you have a double chin when you are turned to profile in unguarded photographs.

You're simply not as important to others as you think you are. You don't matter to them, to me, at all. You're entirely insignificant.

And I very much hope that brings you comfort.

......

Music: Sixtyniner, by Boards of Canada. Don't /think/ I've listened to this really early stuff before. It's lush. Wide, expansive, intricate, intriguing. Lush, I say. Lush.