Loving Ourselves, Deeply

EVERY PSYCHOLOGIST, psychiatrist, and sociologist in America understands that we the American people are currently engaged in a narcissistic orgy, which differs from normal American behavioral patterns only in degree. Just ask the experts. They all agree. We are immersed within our vacant selves. My lady friend, the one who carries a compact mirror, a razor blade, and a small plastic bag of powder in her purse, right next to her "smart" phone, spends more time using the mirror to gaze admiringly at her visage than she does laying out lines, and that's going some. Powder and phone, always close, always being monitored, zombie like. She always smiles, careful not to show her teeth, which are stained with tobacco and rotting from oral meth-induced dehydration. A selfie for every occasion! She applies make up before pointing the phone at her face. She hasn't the slightest awareness that her every word and deed bespeaks drug addiction and narcissism. She has apparently given the matter no thought. Who can know? Isn't the apparatus hidden, the behavior chipper? She never uses curse words, says she does not drink, and does not like the way marijuana makes her feel. No coffee. Meth and a pack of Marlboro Lights a day does the trick, butts on the ground, without a thought as to who will clean up after her. Her sniffing is constant, with a rhythm of its own. I'm no better. My drug of choice is coffee; my mornings are lost in self absorption, checking those abs, sacrament of the baby booming "me" generation. Hold the decaf. There, but for the grace...Three hundred million Americans, gazing lovingly at their smart phones, which gaze back, looking for themselves, never finding it. If thou gaze long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into thee (Nietzsche). We are lost and in love with the abyss of our reflected selves. This is a country in which the surest path to the presidency is a self proclamation of sexual predation, extreme narcissism, extra hair, and a tangle of anti-social personality disorders. We the people approve, if only tacitly. It is no longer possible to engage in intelligent conversation in he United States of Amnesia, if ever it was. The phone will beep, the next text will come in, and it must be answered immediately. We avoid each other better when we send texts with absurd abbreviated spellings. How very clever of us! If I'm speaking, she responds to her phone. If she is doing the talking, the phone can wait. Only the banal will suffice. All intellectual content is verboten. No politics, public affairs, or religion, please. Nothing of real importance. Just small talk. Into our abyss we plunge, never giving a thought as to how to get out, never even wanting to.