November 13, 2003

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  Bricks:  A parable for our time

  
  

  Once there was a very strange place where people hit themselves with bricks.
  
  In an odd way, they liked the way it made them feel, kind of dizzy and light-headed.
  
  It relieved stress, they said. Eased their inhibitions, said others. Made them more attractive to others, said a few really deluded ones. They came up with all sorts of good reasons to hit themselves with bricks.
  
  And most people didn’t hit themselves too hard or too often, so it really didn’t hurt them, they thought. And the people who made and sold the bricks made lots and lots of money, and the government made lots more money taxing the bricks, so that was all right.
  
  And some people would get together and have bricktail parties, and would hit themselves with expensive imported bricks, and that was all right.
  
  And other people would collect bricks, and have Russian bricks and Scotch bricks. Some people who really liked German bricks would get together and have a Bricktoberfest. And that was all right, too.
  
  But some people would hit their hands so hard they couldn’t drive a car, or use a computer properly, or do much of anything. Some people hit their mouths so hard they slurred their words. Many, many others hit themselves in the head so hard they died. In 1988, the Supreme Court of that strange place called this “willful brick-conduct.”
  
  At one point, things got so bad the government tried to ban bricks altogether, but that didn’t work. People made bricks at home, or smuggled in bricks from other countries, and some people got very rich by making or importing illegal bricks. They were called brickleggers.
  
  Then some people who very nearly died from hitting themselves with bricks got together. They called themselves brickoholics. They said they were powerless over bricks, and made many rules about what you had to do in order to refrain from hitting yourself with a brick. They even came to worship the men who started the whole thing and, like some religious people who always write g-d, they never wrote out the full names of their saints.
  
  That worked for some people, even though they would get together and celebrate their nobrickety by hitting themselves with cakes and coffee cups. Sometimes they even got little tiny round brickettes from their doctors to hit themselves with, but that was all right, they said. As long as I don’t pick up that first real brick, they said, anything else I do is okay.
  
  Then another group came along, and said it didn’t matter what you hit yourself with, it was the hitting itself that did the harm. Some of them used to say that hitting yourself with a brick was unnatural, but it was okay to hit yourself in the head with a stone. They called this “getting stoned.” Anyway, they eventually said that they were addicted to all hits, with the possible exception of candy bars, cakes, and coffee cups. But they DID tend to stay away from the little tiny brickettes they could get from doctors and other pushers.
  
  For some odd reason, those two groups, the brickoholics and the hitters, never got along.  Even odder, the brickoholics were welcomed by the hitters, but the hitters were not allowed to mingle with the brickoholics.  Hitting yourself with a brick is much higher-class than hitting yourself with a rock, said some of the brickoholics.
  
  Then still other groups came along to help people who hit themselves with  decks of cards and horses and potatoes and pornographic videocassettes and all manner of odd things.
  
  Then scientists and doctors started looking at crazy people who hit themselves with bricks, and got lots of grant money to try to figure out if the people made themselves crazy by hitting themselves in the head with bricks, or if they had to be crazy in the first place to spend so much time and effort hitting themselves in the head with bricks. They learned a lot; they MUST have, they wrote so many clever books and papers on the subject. And got so much money from the people who made bricks.
  
  A few people said, hey, it really hurts to hit yourself with a brick-just stop it. It’s really dumb. They were not very popular.
  
  It is time to stop writing now, but this parable may never really end.
  
  Even now, there are people, bruised and bloody from the last brick, struggling over whether or not to pick up that next brick. Maybe this time, it won’t hurt so much, they think. But it only hurts more.
  
  And the really awful thing is, they never just hurt themselves

  • 8:04 pm
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