Life Sentences #12

The following operates on the theory that nobody can bullshit a bullshitter. If you don’t understand that theory, you are at grave risk. Seek assistance somewhere. Not that you’ll find any.

Preamble to Sentence of the Day:

I remember hearing the possibility of Universal Bullshit prophesied many years ago, at Slim’s Saddle Bar in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, drunk at nine-thirty in the morning with my co-workers from the overnight shift. We would buy shots of Schnapps and shoot them together and light cigarettes and collect ourselves and somebody would inevitably say, after a long thoughtful exhale, “Yeah, it’s all bullshit.” We would nod and laugh in the manner of fuckin-A right but nobody there at Slim’s believed it was all bullshit, only that most of it was.

These days? Bullshit is literally passing through our bodies in wireless-signal waves twenty-four hours a day and apparently, even though the bullshit’s inside our bodies, we still want to access this bullshit on every electronic device available whenever we’re conscious, which is how fucking much of the time?

Like the man once told me: Mag, you ask too many goddam questions and don’t have too many goddam answers.

This is how I’m watching March Madness: I’ve got the laptop set up in front of the TV and next to my laptop I’ve got my cell phone. While the game’s on, I’m working on a secret document and checking my email and checking my Facebook and following the Sportsguy’s live chat on ESPN.com and texting my buddy The Champ and my buddy Chef Guido and my daughter and a number of other people all at once, and holy Jesus if I haven’t had A.D.D. all my life, circumstances have conspired to make me test positive for that shit now. There’s just so much bullshit going on at once!

I guess I should take the old-guy approach and be a standard-bearer of the past and say, “Friends, this multitasking behavior will signal the death of the novel and of art and of music and of film. Please learn to concentrate.” But you know what? Fuck that. Our mental environment is a bit scattered, is all. We just have to find a way to get everything we need to get done within this context. In cyclocross racing, when the conditions are horrible and everybody’s bitching about the conditions, the strongest racers still come to the front. Why should the rest of life be any different?

Sentence of the day:

Mag loves the constant bullshit and the lack of focus that comes from it.

Analysis:

Mag (subject) loves (ditransitive verb, meaning it carries two objects) the constant bullshit (direct object with imbedded adjective) and the lack of focus (second direct object built from a noun phrase) that comes from it (restrictive verb phrase with pronoun referring back to the first direct object).

Further analysis:

That's really all bullshit, folks.