Readers, pay attention. You aren’t as smart as you think you are. We’d all like to believe that we’re all so smart and sophisticated but the bottom line is that we are all just animals who got above themselves.
The proof is fairly clear – we are all much too easily amused to be sophisticated. When you consider the things that people are entertained by, you really have to agree with me on this one.
Take sports, for example. Now, I am a big fan of sports but when you boil them down to the essentials there’s not much to it. Look at NASCAR. This is a sport which consists of watching people drive in circles for hours on end. The same circle. Over and over again. Why is this entertaining to people? People will sit in the stands and cheer wildly every time someone manages to go around the circle as if they had not just done it 200 times before. I believe strongly that such is the level of people’s sophistication in this world that if I went outside and proceeded to back in and out of my driveway 500 times by the 300th time there would be a small crowd of neighbors chugging Budweiser and cheering wildly every time I passed the mailbox.
Perhaps this is deliberate. Perhaps God started looking around the world and said, “Man, there is not a lot to do around this place. I better make people easily amused to keep them out of trouble.” And so we are. It starts with little kids – toy manufacturers spend billions developing sophisticated toys that have artificial intelligence when they know damn well that children are just as easily amused by eating dirt or playing in a toilet. It just gets worse when you grow up. If I don’t feel like working during the day, I can find more ways to be entertained by bending a paper clip into different shapes then if I had an X-Box at my desk. Hell, if I DID have an X-Box at my desk it would probably be about 30 minutes before I was shooting staples at the guy across from me anyway.
And that’s where train yarn comes into this. I was on the train to work the other day reading a book. Everyone was reading – books, newspapers, magazines, cereal boxes, scrolls, whatever. At one stop, an older woman got on the train with a big bag and sat across from me. She got settled and proceeded to pull a big roll of yarn out from her bag. Now, I am not a knitter (I prefer cross-stitch or macaroni art) but apparently you cannot use yarn the way it is sold (in a sort’ve “yarn log” shape) to do your knitting. Apparently, you have to pull that yarn apart and roll it into a ball.
So the woman pulled apart the yarn and began to roll it into a ball. She just sat there rolling yarn and staring vacantly into space as if this was not the least bit amusing. Which it was not. But everyone else that could see this woman (including myself) was fascinated. An impartial observer would have seen all of us trying to concentrate on our reading but every few moments being drawn irresistably to this woman’s yarn. People next to her appeared to be physically restraining themselves from swatting at the yarn like cats. Here we were, engaged in intellectually stimulating pursuits such as reading great works of literature, trying to understand world political events, or doing the crossword puzzle, but our brains apparently were saying, “Do you SEE THIS??!! YARN!! I mean, yarn! Here on the train! Everybody get a load of this!!”
So, the long and the short of it is that if you think you are so smart, try to figure out if you could resist the hynoptic pull of a woman on a train and her yarn. I doubt you can, because like all people you are easily amused. And if you can resist it, then you are a better person than I. Although, if you can resist the yarn but you are still entertained by the Ross and Rachel relationship on “Friends,” then don’t talk to me. You might as well just give up and go play in the toilet.