Posthuman Blues

I ran into a pretty dark-haired girl on the way to the coffeeshop and we ended up talking for quite a while. Unfortunately, a bitter, incoherent old man sitting on the outdoor table next to us persistently interrupted with loud meditations on religion and his personal medical history while flashing his pink-painted fingernails. Encounters like this are inevitable in an urban environment, but I was extremely bothered by it. I happen to strike up a spontaneous conversation with a girl and some delinquent just happens to make the scene in order to make our encounter as awkward as possible. What are the odds?

To make the day even more unpleasant, the Kansas City Chiefs are playing tonight. Evidently they're on a winning streak. This means that a disturbing percentage of adult males are strutting around decked out in fire-cone-red Chiefs attire. Not T-shirts -- actual jerseys, like they're on the damned team. The last I checked Halloween was on the 31st.

I could really do without these imbeciles and their decorated vehicles. The other night I walked by some forgettable truck with a prominent sticker on the back window: "Official Vehicle of the Kansas City Chiefs." Oh, really? Strange, seeming how members of the actual Chiefs franchise are probably driving Porsches and Jaguars that they can afford because our society's collective self-esteem is so low that its members regularly cough up hundreds of dollars for season tickets and stadium parking and overpriced beer. All so they can "root" for a bunch of mentally deficient strangers in make-believe gladiator outfits who wouldn't bother speaking to their self-proclaimed "fans" unless it involved a photo-op.

I hope the Chiefs fucking lose. Badly. Better yet, I hope the Midwest is plunged in a blackout that forces hoards of befuddled suburbanites in Chiefs sticker-emblazoned SUVs to find something to do with their time other than staring dimly at televised corporate iconography and trying their hardest to transplant their egos to some fictional "team" that they've been trained to entrust with their emotional lives.

But, of course, if these poor sods didn't exist, the machine would fail to function. People might be less inclined to purchase needlessly elaborate cellphones and long-distance packages because corporate sponsors wouldn't bother wasting advertising money on the "big game." People might start kindling sparks of unsuspected creativity instead of leading their usual precarious media-addled existence. Then maybe I could find a job that's actually rewarding instead of slaving in a harshly lit prefab cubicle so I can afford to buy an occasional book.

"Right," you're thinking. "Like Mr. Posthuman here doesn't have a TV." I don't. I can't stand the sight of them. I'd be overjoyed if all the televisions in the United States spontaneously exploded, taking their ostensible owners with them in big orgasmic blossoms of flame and broken glass.

It's very fashionable right now to worry about Iraq. And we should worry. But we're looking down the stainless steel barrel of a cultural apocalypse every bit as life-destroying as a rocket-propelled grenade. Idiots in little-boy costumes parade our streets like shock troops for some malign invasion while, up the street, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art fires eight employees because of budget cuts.

Sports nuts bitch and moan about spending a patently ludicrous $6 on a cup of watered beer at Arrowhead Stadium, yet someone's still coughing up the cash for it. And Kansas Citians continue to kvetch about the price-gouged parking that's heaped on top of the price of tickets. To me, the solution to this problem is absurdly simple: stop going. Stop "supporting the team." Not just until the price of beer goes down, but for good. Burn sports arenas to the ground. Even better, use them as ready-made landfills for the televisions you won't be needing anymore.