Ridiculous proverbs, entry one

What you don't know can't hurt you.
Oh?
Little irks me more than this asinine perception we have that the world is our plaything; the only reality that exists is present within the impenetrable bubble that surrounds our lives. It makes me think of the common children's' ploy when wanting to disappear; they their hands over their eyes, believing that if they can't see you, they cannot be seen.
Life is an incredibly complex thing. Not enough people seem to realize this, but orbit is not created around individuals. We are merely single cogs in an incomparably enormous machine, not the warehouse in which the machine is kept. Some of us may rise to the level of Supervisor, those who ensure that the cogs operate as they desire. Every cog has a certain degree of influence on its contemporaries, and as it grows in size or power it grows in influence.
What the hell? I'm ranting about man's importance on the general order of society now?
Basically, people in general are obliviates. I don't attribute it to general stupidity; I don't believe that humans in abstract were created devoid of intellect. It does stem, however, from people desperately wanting to feel a certain way about their surroundings. People don't like to acknowledge that danger exists, they enjoy living with a false sense of security. Why? Because the alternative, in most minds, is paranoia. Constant fear of anything and everything; an inability to take anything at face value. Making a husband's late arrival at home into a crazy sex-and-drugs filled foray to downtown Detroit, turning no newspaper in the morning into a hysterical 911 call about the inferentially dead delivery boy. But that's not the way it is.
The majority of us were created very rational. We've been programmed to think in one extremity or another; Jack Bauer assumes the worst about situations because It's a necessity in his line of work. bykrgothboi3918 simply doesn't care, because he doesn't find life worth living. So he turns a blind face to reality and pretends that if he shuts his eyes, clamps his hands over his ears and loudly repeats hamenaHamenaHAMENA, nothing bad could possibly happen. All this whilst he's living in a roach-infested apartment, spending his parents' pity checks on dope, and listing 'Semi-Pro air-guitarist currently employed by punk group Crashn Emotienz' on his Myspace 'Work' tab.
This 'get real' rant was brought to you by everyone who's genuinely sick of delusions.

The unexplainable nature of the sports fan

I am devastated today. It's tough to spin the emotion and tough to admit to it, as it stems from such an insignificant source. But I have a confession to make that will come as no shock to many of my close associates.
I am a manic sports fan.
Like many of my kind, I obsess. I'm perpetually contemplating different scenarios, analyzing vulnerabilities and strengths, killing myself over retrospective hypotheticals. It's irrational, It's ridiculous, It's unhealthy, but It's the way many people are.
Last night, I had one fervent desire on my mind; to blot out any memory of that afternoon's events. I watched a movie, (Juno: 7/10. Greatly overhyped) three episodes of Arrested Development (Why do good comedies get taken off the air while My name is Earl and King of Queens receive rave reviews and ridiculously good ratings?) and haphazard minutes of Terminator on Fox whilst credits rolled on the respective film I was viewing at the time (Cheesy, cheesy, OH MY GOD IT'S A FREAKING MOUSETRAP).
But as I watched Ellen Page trying too hard to play a punk, Michael Cera being awkward, and Summer Glau talking more than she ever did in Firefly (Another good show... damn you, networks) all I could see was Patrick Crayton dropping passes aimed squarely at his chest, Jacques Reeves facemasking a wide receiver who was diving out of bounds, and Leonard Davis jumping on top of Michael Strahan after the play ended.
Right now, all that's flashing through my head as I count down the minutes to my first class of the semester is a bogus offsides call o Demarcus Ware, Tery Glenn and Terrell Owens playing with Jell-O ankles, and Tony Romo throwing the ball away for an intentional grounding penalty with no pressure on him whatsoever.
Why do we do it? We subvject ourselves to this torture and nev er question the establishment, never question our reasons for allowing these people to break our hearts time after time. Is it wishful thinking? The fantasy aspect; living the game of football vicariously through the eyes of one's favorite team?
I can't figure it out. All i know is that when pitchers and catchers report in a month, I'll be at the forefront of the admittedly tiny Rangers bandwagon, waving my comically large foam finger and cheering on a hopefully average team. When the Mavericks make the playoffs, I'll get behind them one more time, because I'm just that gullible.
And when the Cowboys go on their next great journey, I will jump right back on that Texas-sized U-haul wagon and assure the masses that this time, America's team is destined to vanquish all comers.
If a man can't dream about stuff that will never happen, what the hell can he do?

Society's Leeches

I don't go downtown much. I'm a homely suburbian guy who doesn't like to get his nose dirty and is frightened off by buildings taller than Shawn Bradley and streets dirtier than his own lavatory. But yesterday, a job interview necessitated that I visit the large Public Library in Downtown Dallas.
The first thing that jumped out at me was the sheer lack of houses. I didn't see a single privately-owned residence during my drive through that sector of the city, despite my desperate attempts to find something comforting I could cling to. I realize that there's a complete lack of space, but you'd think that some big-shot would want to build a nice place within twenty minutes' commute of his office building.
There's a lot of futility going on. One of the more humorous things I've seen lately comes to mind; one guy was bundled up to the point where the only unobscured portion of his body were his eyes. He was sitting on a kind of go-kart with two large brushes on the front, going back and forth across the street andd essentially vaccuming. A couple of questions jump to mind. Firstly,
Who the hell deemed this machine worthy of months of design and production meetings? Is there any way that this is a constructive use of someone's time and his employer's expenses?
Second... the man is basically wearing horse blinders. I didn't see him turn his head the entire time, esumably due to the fact that he was wearing a neck brace in a desperate attempt to get anything between his flesh and the raging wind. How is a dude who can only look straight ahead supposed to clean the streets or keep from colliding into a large sewer rat? And how is this vacuum possibly more effective than a bunch of those kids and senior citizens who adopt highways?
One thing got to me more than anything else. That thing? Homeless people.
Let me start by saying that I'm not trying to rip on people who have caught an innumerable quantity of bad breaks in their lifespan. Some guys have been preordained for crappy fortune since before they were born, and that's God's business. I do have a problem, however, with those people surviving on their colleagues' vomit and an occasional hamburger, living for nothing but inebriated debates with each other and the occasional fistfight. There's more to life than taking a midday nap in a public toilet stall and mumbling incoherently to children about mentions of the apocalypse in Job. The bible's a fine pastime, as long as you make it that. Don't come out of it remembering nothing but Old English recitations about things you don't understand.
Refer to the aforementioned street sweeper. Even the most incredibly useless tasks imaginable have a wage attached to them. Most of them require less previous education than the average public high school. Gary from Under the Bridge, however, has chosen to revel in his own waste and other people's orange peels rather than hypothetically contribute something to someone at some point. That's what bothers me. The utter complacency that it takes to be completely and utterly passive about adding to someone's life.
The fact is, a lot of what we do is futile. Decisions are made by a few powerful people who gained our approval on a ballot and those who paid them to win us over. But there's a great deal of difference between giving up on every action of your day- and knowing that what you do may not inspire millions to change the world, but trying anyway.
Or for that matter, just serving up a burger and a non-shifty-eyed smile to Executive Bob and his three lard-filled family members.