The men chastise their women for their sewing circles. These women, they imagine, sitting around and sipping tea or caffe lattes with nothing better to do than gab and gossip about shoes and handbags, celebrities and soap operas, whose children are on the downhill slide and who in town is fucking who.
These men chastise while wholly ignorant of the irony of chiding their women’s vapid and vacant chatter within the wasteland of their own sewing circles.
These men chastise, then prattle on and on with their own vapid stories of yesterdays – drinking beer or Folgers instead of tea or lattes while they chatter on about sports and politics and how, if they ran the show, things would get straightened out. And they jabber on about the glory days of 10th grade and who in town’s been elected to what and why and fretting over how long some construction project that doesn’t affect them in the least is gonna last. These critics, so gleefully engaged in more long-winded bloviation and gossip than goes on in any barnyard hen house – them, too gleefully engaged to notice the stank of their hypocrisy. And whatever tinge of bad breath, body odor or smelly socks they might detect, each is too busy running his mouth or in preparation for running it to understand the odor might be coming from him, not one of his buddies on either side. They also love a taste of the “who’s fucking who?” drama, though they’re loath to admit it outside their own circle. They gotta be stealthy about it, like that swig of booze at the morning coffee break.
It seems that a mark of a true fool is not seeing himself in proper comparison to others – like the possum, by way of fur and claws, seeing itself as more lion than mouse – willfully stupid to those things about size, strength and courage. But the possum has an excuse, at least. It’s dumb. But these men, they’re not necessarily dumb. They just can’t shut up long enough to really pay attention to anything outside their sewing circle. Can’t shut up long enough to get a clearer picture of what they really are. It’s less dumb than arrogant – the arrogance in being so willfully ignorant – a dogged stubbornness in holding onto that willful ignorance – so as to never see what they truly are.
These stupid cocks crow and crow, not just to announce a new day, but all day long, from sunup to sundown and even through the fucking night. Crowing and crowing, oblivious within the noise of their ridicule that their crowing is the same goddamn thing as the cackling of the hens, just louder.
mrobins71 