on changing nothing

Over the past few years since this author started taking care of his late father's estate, he has made friends with some of the families who live nearby. At one point, with one family in particular, he had eked out a niche as the aloof but friendly more-than-friend-but-less-than​-relative (i.e. as their Gay Uncle Sancho). Things were going well until he was encouraged by the family, the Bravos, to voice his opinions and get more involved with their lives. That experiment lasted for about a year; it resulted in bruised egos, inter-personal tension, and few of the affected persons having changed themselves for the better.

Looking back, the author is thankful for the experience; it has shown him that he has the power to effect positive change only within himself and that any effort on his part to help others lead happier lives is wasted toil rife with peril, woe, and recrimination. He has discovered that certain people (especially middle-aged American women) are likely to create and inhabit fantasy worlds that only roughly approximate the world he awakes to every morning. (In this author's experience, he finds that male Americans create and inhabit fantasy worlds just as often as their women do, although their delusion tends to run less deep.) These fantasy worlds resemble the other world, the consensual hallucination we often call the real world, so greatly that, to the outsider, they are difficult to keep apart.

When the real world invades the fantasy world and proves that the latter is built on the shakiest of shaky foundations, the fantasizer will go to extraordinary lengths to convince herself of the validity of her fantastical notions. Mrs. Bravo especially will make nonsensical statements and use misdirection and flattery to gain enough time to rebuild the buffers of her self-delusion, whereupon she will immediately re-inhabit her fantastical world, ignoring the inescapable Truth of cause-and-consequence each and every step of the way. If she watches a report on television about the dangers of drinking more than three alcoholic drinks in one sitting (something she does nearly every night), she'll shrug off her family's concern by jokingly calling herself an alcamaholic and then promptly pouring herself another glass of cheap red wine. If she participates in a conversation about the lack of industriousness and self-sufficiency among today's youth, she will say – without hesitation or remorse – that she expects her adult son to live in the basement for many years to come. What frustrates this whorphan most, however, is that fantasizers tend to have strange relationships with their pets, either showering them with love or completely ignore them, to the detriment of the beast itself and the other humans in the household (who, out of concern for the animal, must perform the duties of a respectful pet owner that the matriarch fails to perform). On some level, the author thinks of himself as a practical and self-respecting person who regularly challenges his own preconceptions, one wont to disavow himself of notions old and tired. He knows that he should let the Bravos be Bravos, focus on those things he has the power to change, and get back to the business of being a whorphan. Why, then, does he allow himself to be drawn into the madness of others? Hrm.

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