Posthuman Blues

I suppose the reason I wanted to go to graduate school was because I assumed I'd be around "smart" people -- a decided improvement on my typical daily situation. But now, upon reflection, I'm wondering just how "smart" these hypothetical fellow students would have been. All the evidence points toward "not very."

True, I'm biased because of attending a truly foul undergraduate school. Maybe I'm being too harsh or too eager to vilify what has become a threatening social milieu. (Because when you're alone -- truly isolated and cast adrift -- reality becomes scary, defined by encounters with indifferent strangers.)

I wonder what consensus reality would look like if it could assume a human persona. I'm guessing a sharp-dressed corporate glad-hander with gleaming teeth, fastidiously coifed hair and a discrete Promise Keepers emblem pinned to his lapel. You look at him and he smiles a gamma-ray smile, eyes glazed and aimless in their sockets. And everyone else smiles in unison, because everything's OK.