This wheel's on fire

Perhaps I have not been as forthcoming as you deserve me to be, my beloved imaginary readers. If you were to count up the sum of my interests from what I've posted here, and created some sort of doppelbedheaded, you might imagine me to be a peacenik, comic book nerd, classic-rock AM Gold head, liberal, francophile, wannabe writer guy. Well, most of it is true, but it doesn't give you the real me. The real me is much more banal and much less intelligent than this already banal and unintelligent blog would lead you to believe.

I've struggled with how much of the "real" Bedheaded I feel comfortable posting on this already insignificant outpost of the intergalactic garbage dump we call the internets. The problem with being a confessional blogger is that one must necessarily have some halfway significant confession to make in the first place. Well, my life's pretty boring, so there's not much. But there are a few things.

First of all, though my recent rash of peacenik pronouncements might make one think otherwise, I at heart am a solitary, distrustful person, and harbor an overwhelming distaste for human nature that compounds itself daily, even hourly. It seems to be all I can do to keep from devolving into a raving lunatic, spitting out bile at any soul unfortunate enough to cross my path.

It seems the more contact I have with people out of my immediate circle of family and friends, the more I become convinced that the world is populated by insane idiots. That's not to say that I think I'm more intelligent than anyone else, but more that a great majority of people are either really stupid, really crazy, or both really stupid and really crazy. And the more I encounter these people and these situations, the more I feel the urge to rally around those small things I have that remind me of what makes sense in the world: my family, my friends, my interests, and my beliefs, self-isolating as those beliefs may be.

Belief is a loaded word, too closely associated with religion, which leads to the next revelation: I am an atheist. I don't believe in gods, or in afterlifes, and I'm not really interested in debating anybody about it. It's my business, that's all. I chalk it up at its base to not being a spiritual person in general. I have my own sense of spirit, and my own soul, but at the most essential level, I find myself to be neither spiritual nor soulful.

See, this is why I usually avoid this kind of confessional stuff--it does nothing to enlighten us, and likely causes you, my imaginary readers, to envision me as some really morose kind of dude. I'm not, really. In fact, I think the whole world could stand to be a little less morose. Thom Jurek at allmusic.com wrote a pretty good essay lamenting the dourness of rock music in the past decade or so, though I must say that any cultural commentary that concludes by suggesting that people should mellow out and go listen to some Whitesnake is kind of suspect. But who am I to judge.