Why do we even try?

He was a scam artist parading narrow-mindedness masked as some sort of potentially debatable quest/expression of truth. But whatever his game was intended to do, it disturbed me so deeply that I was regretting the encounter for days after the fact.

What was it? It was a lesson in the nature of public events--particularly debate: as long as they can find a way to prove you wrong on some level, no matter how insignificant/irrelevant the point is, they are right. As a rule of thumb, this brings me back to a stronger understanding of a scene from a great movie I saw a while back, Thank You for Smoking. It's when Nick is teaching his boy about his job (always being right), and an ice cream debate ensues. In retrospect it's a great scene and unfortunately speaks greater truths than would be ideal. Alas, in a world where truth is aspired to over convenience about as often as you can believe what you see on TV, lamenting the lack of purity in our world is as useful as protesting the existence of plastic surgery...or poverty, I guess.

Well all that being said, I've still not described this off-centering event. Basically some guy in Santa Monica was bashing Atheism and Islam with a nice 2 mic, labtop-to-tv setup . I came in, annoyed with all the idiots who were getting angry at him and started presenting my own ideas. At first he seemed a bit lost for words, but eventually decided to use my apparently inappropriate use of the word "arbitrary" and when I refused to look it up in the dictionary he extended to me, he silenced my mic the same way he did all the wacks who preceded me.

I guess what hurt the most was that he fooled me into thinking I could have a reasonable, intelligent discussion about something I thought was genuine. What's worse is that my own opinions seemed to stir up a few other wacks who then started yelling at me; but these guys didn't look all right in the head so it made me want out of that situation asap. It's all a lesson learned in keeping your thoughts to yourself unless absolutely necessary, or unless you know they'll be safely accepted/or rejected by those you share them with.

That's still not the whole story, but I feel it's sufficient enough.

Many nights DTC,

Addison.