Our Grotesque Penchant for Being Human

I noticed the bathroom’s one stall was locked.  As I was peeing at the urinal I heard a rustling, a soft moan issuing from the stall, and then a flush, a cough, and the opening and closing of the door.  A man was staring at his face in the mirror above the left sink when I approached and washed my hands to his right.  I looked at him and he continued to ponder himself in the mirror, working over his hands methodically in the running water.  He began a monologue that seemed to be to himself: “Fate and its omnipotent sense of humor presents itself at your worst moments when our grotesque penchant for being human prostrates us as punchlines against the comic storyline of societal values.  ‘Because it’s there,’ sums up the essential pattern of causation that relegates us to inevitable vileness: the only reasonable conclusion is that civilization is absolute lunacy, and that the paths we take in place of the straight and narrow can only be judged as obscene by our developed, civilized consciences.”  He shook his hands in the sink and left me wondering if it was possible that someone just pinpointed George Costanza as a determinist hero.  I suppose if you get an audience to laugh at the irony of the human condition, the positions in which we find ourselves, you create a population of accomplices that exonerate you by their understanding.  Moments before I was too taken aback by the honesty I just encountered to be to have been outraged.  We don’t need to place people in courtrooms to dissect the pathology of our demented geniuses if we just let them unremittingly spin their justifications.