It’s lonely, being a saint
S O last weekend I am on Wikipedia reading up on the mental disorder “grandiose delusions”, as one does on a random Saturday. It had been brought to my attention that I might be suffering from this condition, you see. There’s an excruciatingly long story — involving a Midrand restaurateur and my insistence on not paying for a meal I didn’t order — behind me being diagnosed as delusional. In any case, according to Wikipedia the condition includes harbouring “fantastical” beliefs of self-worth and power, and of an exceptional relationship to a divinity or famous person.
I already spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about my mental health, so I was quite chuffed that the infallible source that is Wikipedia proved that the Midrand charred-meat peddler’s pop psychoanalysis was flawed. I do not harbour any fantastical beliefs about myself at all. My high estimation of my self-worth, power, knowledge and so forth is no more than an accurate reflection of reality. And I do count Barack Obama among my friends because he really IS my friend. I e-mail him at least once a week and I don’t mind that he never replies directly but incorporates my ideas into his speeches.
Sure, a lot of people have used adjectives such as “snotty”, “holier than thou” and “selfrighteous” to describe my general attitude towards other humans. The trick that everyone is missing here is that, well, you people make no sense to me at all. You lot generally have poorly functioning brains.
The other day I am a passenger in someone’s car and we are getting lost in the same Midrand that started all of this. I’d love to meet the town planner who put Midrand together so that he/she could share with me whatever powder they were snuffing when they designed the roads.
But I digress. When my friend realised that he was getting lost, he started slowing and then . . . turned the car stereo down to a barely audible volume. Ordinarily I wouldn’t mind, but it just so happened to be during the good part of Prince’s Alphabet Street and any educated human knows that you don’t interrupt a Prince song. So I asked him if the music was interfering with the GPS in his brain. He looked at me as if I had just spoken to him in fanagalo.
All you people do the same thing. You lower the volume when getting lost and then call me “high and mighty” when I call you on it. And you are the same people who walk up to ATMs, request R50, and then when the machine returns an “insufficient funds” slip on the grounds of your minus R3.86 bank balance, you stand there, holding up a 30man queue for three minutes, staring at the slip and shouting at it in the hope that the balance will miraculously become R100 000. Don’t deny it, because I’ve seen you do it. Am I suffering from delusions of grandeur when I point out that I never go the ATM when I have no money in my account?
And don’t deny the fact that when a waitron returns to your table with the bottle you selected from the wine list, you participate in that whole snobbish farce of having a little bit poured out for you to sniff at, taking a tiny sip, nodding approvingly, and pronouncing, “Just the right hint of plums and woodiness”.
Why do you do this when everybody knows you couldn’t tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi? And then you say I’m suffering from delusions of grandeur when I point out that if I order the 2003 pisse d’âne cabernet sauvignon, I grab it from the waitron’s hand and pour myself a healthy helping because, well, I’m not sending it back. And if it tastes like its name, I tolerate the first two glasses until, voila, it miraculously tastes better by the third glass. I am not delusional. You people just make no damn sense to me at all.