Hallway Conversation

       I begin this writing with a deep sigh and a strange confusion filling my mind and flushing my cheeks. Sometimes, I wonder why I'm always in the right place at the right time to hear the ignorance of a select few. I'd like to think it is Socrates breathing a crucible to me upon the turgid air that spews from the light tan A/C contraption, but it's most likely just my keen sense of hearing what I'd prefer not to have heard that gets me every time.
Trying to study in a crowded hallway in Kaufman Hall just after Mardi Gras is one of the most difficult tasks I've experienced this week. Then, above the buzzing din of the crowded causeway, my ear latched onto a clear conversation. I make this next statement from my own heart and hope it will become more evident as the story progresses. The small conversation that badgered my senses was utterly one sided and filled to the brim with hypocrisy. I know in the deepest crevice of my soul that everyone has committed an act of hypocrisy at some time or another. However, the people involved in this speech, who were so adamantly devoted to the idea that the hypocrite is one of society's biggest problems, were showing their true colors. Hues of ignorance, arrogance, and jealousy babbled forth in a rabid pungent froth. Perhaps I was an unwilling witness to this auditory display to strengthen my faith. I must say that it has definitely worked. Their irrefutable stubbornness and blind eyes to the truth made me glad I am learning to embrace the way of the Goddess. But the conversation must be brought into the light for anyone to be able to truly understand my point of view.

I could hear their voices echoing in the dreary cement and metal stairwell to my left. Trying not to be obviously disturbed, I simply raised my head and looked straight forward to the 'Please No Eating of Drinking in this Room' sign printed on thin yellow paper with wide yellowing wrinkled tape. As the two people (a man of undetermined age and a woman of youth with small stature) passed, my eyes wandered up through the small section of 'country blue' paint to the classroom's number. 207. I was determined to dive back into my studies, but the man's overly loud voice was incessant. I was forced to listen since he boomed above the crowd's sparkling buzz and cheerful laughter. He dominated his conversation as well as the three or four others that spanned the multi-colored, 'corner store' type tiled floor that lay neatly between he and I. Cool on my bottom and cool on his heels, though he was the kind of man oblivious to his surroundings. I glanced to my right, my eyes following another student's supple tanned legs as she traveled away from or on to some higher learning. Then, my gaze fell upon him. I was curious, mostly about the noise level rather than the content of his speech.

His back was to me, and now as I write, I find that fact very ironic. To continue, his hair sprang up from his overly large head in a spray of pale almost dusty blonde that reminded me of an electrocuted Fancy Feast pet. His body was lanky, anorexicly thin. His clothes hung, never clinging, at the utmost barely touching his skin beneath. My eyes wandered the length of his back, then to his backpack which was practically flattened and lazily slung about one shoulder. His free hand had a firm, boney grip on two thin paperback books -- one white (it being the longest) and one a bright somewhat fluorescent blue. Everything of, for, or about him was thin, just as thin as I find his thinking. His jeans were visibly worn and draped down his legs onto dingy white tennis shoes that were most likely never used for tennis. For a split second, he reminded me of Larry, from his body not his voice. Larry was always so kind when he spoke, and this man most assuredly was NOT.

The young lady to whom he spoke looked a tad younger than my fragile waning twenty years. She seemed more timid in her surroundings. Her dark unevenly colored hair was slicked tightly back into a strange swirling bun/frenchtwist hybrid. Her pale face was framed by tight ironed-in spirals to mock the innocence she had apparently lost some years back. That's what I could tell as he leaned to one side, resting against the black lockers, and she turned her head at the same time. Her outfit was hard to distinguish as she stood stick straight holding loosely onto the facade of a prim and proper high class lady. She seemed to be wearing dark unnatural colors. The brownish maroons and deep cherryish ruddy orange sorts that clothed her have never been colors that existed in the world of the Goddess -- the world of the purest forms of nature. As she spoke in a mousy raspy small voice, she tapped a long slender curved handled umbrella against the floor. Stabbing it repeatedly for its mere existence. It, the umbrella, was dark, as she was dark, as the lockers were dark. She blended into the nothingness that poured from her male companion's lips.

The first statements that I could clearly distinguish in his rapid bantering were about man versus animals. The two had been rattling on and swapping fake sugary pleasantries. Then, he cleared his throat with a coughing giggle, and he said something to the effect that humans reign superior over everything else because " 'We' are the only ones with feelings and emotions". He continued and made statements about the stupidity of common animals and how the plant/animal kingdoms were only in existence for man's use. I was shocked and appalled to a great degree. How could an imperfect human being take any other species for granted? Just thinking, aside from the major point, now the phrase 'I'm only human' has come to represent the fallible non-superior nature of the homo sapiens. This unenlightened creature that stood highly on his own opinion just down the hall from me had no respect, no love, no adoration for his fellow beings. I certainly hope he doesn't have pets, and if he does, I openly weep for them. He talked on and on about his personal philosophy concerning the 'inferiority' by quoting that overused overinterpreted section of his holy book where man is 'given dominion over the animals'. I always thought of this phrase as a vague parallel to the BDSM I have experimented with. Just for a reference, in case anyone finds this after I'm long gone, BDSM refers to Bondage, Domination, Sadism, and Masochism. Though I've never delved too deeply into this 'latex and love' lifestyle, I do think that my overall knowledge in this area gives me some point of comparison on which to base my next conclusion. I think that if, by some miraculous alignment of cosmic bodies, man was given dominion over animals and all of that, it does not mean he (mankind) has the right to use them for his own pleasure and treat them as infinitely inferior. Dominion, to me, means a high degree of respect and watching over and entity not controlling it. For a Dom/sub love, respect must exist in all areas. I ached to put some reason to his thinking, and I could come up with very little. However, a commonly accepted theory states that people and animals differ because we have the ability to reason. I can see that point-of-view, though it is distant, but if anyone has ever studied any complex organism, they would see glimmering life abounding in the animal's eyes. The chimpanzee is so human that it shares over 95% of its DNA structure with the human race. The tiny molecules that form life, that we all share, are so similarly arranged that you can see it in their eyes. They have been enlightened; they know what some humans refuse to accept. Animals love, feel physical and emotional pain, communicate, travel, play, mourn, care for things that some people take for granted and, most importantly, they celebrate life. How could that puffy haired, thin, flat man to my right dismiss all of these things? Maybe he never stopped to watch the Discovery Channel -- who knows.

Another thing amazes me. He can so easily slip into the belief that the human race is superior. Maybe it's some desperate attempt to validate his own existence; maybe he's just arrogant. It is possible that he never contemplated his own ideas / beliefs. Of course, from the way he blindly followed his religion, this statement rings true. It is difficult for me to understand how someone can believe (or claim to believe) something if they never question it. That thought reminds me of the Hemingway I read this semester. When the aged waiter took that religiously well-known quote and inserted the word 'nada' into it. He [the character] had a spiritual revelation, and our hallway bandit had not reached this catharsis from what I could gather.

By this time, my heavysharp-cornered literature book had most likely fallen onto my thighs as my senses intruded into his world. He spoke on until his female companion changed the topic. She asked him something about a religious group meeting that would soon be taking place. He stopped short, mid-sentence in fact, to reply. He inquire if a particular person that he had been acquainted with would be attending said meeting. She returned a somewhat affirmative grunt, and he made a ragged hissing sigh like a freshly punctured rotten tire. It sounded fake, overly dramatic, overly breathy, like a televangelist on the brink of bankruptcy. She was obviously taken aback by his reaction and made some comment to steady the credibility and good nature of the mentioned acquaintance. The crowd was beginning to clear from around their conversation, but he still spoke so very loudly that I visually searched his body for the volume button. I ached to turn him down or turn him off. Not that I wished to turn him on in the first place, by NO means.... He made his next statement with a sarcasm that I cannot quite grasp. He stated that the mutual 'friend' was not welcomed at those meetings and that maybe he should be left behind next time. My teeth began to grind as he described the other male party [who was not around to defend himself] as "too much of a free thinker that may lead the others astray". What droves of remedially inclined sheep. He should have just BAAAAAed his responses and left the rest of us unwilling audience members alone. At that very moment, I wish I had been wearing a Lil Bo Peep outfit so I could have herded him off to a severe beating. Just for the record, I have never and would never beaten a sheep or any other creature. Furthermore, I now regret calling him a sheep -- I do not want to sully the good name of such a peaceful animal by comparing the two. My mind was reeling. What business is it of his? Basically, who the fuck died and made him boss? Though that is a rhetorical question, the answer is NO ONE. So what if that other man wants to "corrupt" the people at the meeting. In the grand scheme of things, that matters about as much as what I had for breakfast 7 months ago. That heartless, judgmental, frozen bastard standing a few simple steps from me thinks he has the right to say what is, what isn' t, and what should be. I utterly loathe him.

And soon his lady friend grew tired of his rambling, and she wandered off to her class with him tagging intimately behind. Her expressions never really changed from the blandly soured pursed-lipped stare as she told him goodbye. I was glad to see she was rid of him, atleast for a while. He spun around on his cold rubber soled heel with a snap turn from high school band days, and he bounced away with an air of rank superior prowess veiling his true nature. His timid fearfulness and cornucopia of ignorance was masked to the general population. But...... I could see right to the core of this long rotting apple and the center of the center was brown mushy oozing ignorance.

He exited down the stairwell. His flat legs were slapping out a dull monotonous tone. I watched his book bag hanging on him like a skin on a big game hunter's floor. A breath of relief plunged into my lungs as he walked to the stairs and was finally silent. I could hear my own breath surging in a feverish rage. Nothing rouses my anger more than the blatantly blind and the purposefully unenlightened. The hallway stood still. The rest of the crowd was gone, and I alone reveled in the ringing silence. Alas, I know deep in my heart that his mouth will never stop. My ears curl up and hide as I think about it now. I would spit on his slimy rotten core, but such heartless disgusting creatures are a waste of my time. Besides, even my warm spit could not make him 3-dimensional long enough to care.