Living is a terribly humiliating proposition. If you make it through a single day without embarrassing yourself or feeling mortified for someone else, you’ve absolutely beaten the odds. It’s all a very telling sign that so few of us are able to do the things we feel we are meant to do, and instead, only get to do what we are forced by our needs to do, things that feel unnatural to us so that we are able sustain a life in this humiliating world we’ve constructed.
Consider the weary traveler. They have a lot on their mind, trying to get to the airport through traffic, thinking and hoping they haven’t forgotten something at their house or in the hotel, wondering if they’ll be able to get to their gate in time because their kid was screaming all morning and wouldn’t brush their teeth, so now they’re running late, just praying that the bag of drugs doesn’t break open in their colon.
Now, they’re at security, and they have to suffer the indignity of flubbing up a simple pleasantry because the TSA agent is going to say, “Have a nice flight,” and our distracted, broken, human traveler is, without a doubt, going to say, “You too,” and feel like a complete ass for at least the next 30 minutes, possibly, the rest of their day, probably, for the rest of their life.
This is how we are humbled, by tiny fractures in our egos. This is what frames the self-confidence of even the most eloquent and confident of our kind. We all say and do stupid shit. If we all could allow ourselves to acknowledge it, this fact should moderate our most arrogant and reassure the meekest.
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Thought & Other Absurdities is a collection of modern witticisms, thought provocations, & other absurdities from the mind of Joseph D. Newcomer, author of Diminishing Return, El Camino Blue, and the soon-to-be-released through Dead Star Press, SciFi mind-fuck novel, Darkest Day.
Originally posted on the Thought & Other Absurdities blog at JosephDNewcomer.com, these brief essays are rife with the social commentary and compassion-invoking prose you have come to expect from Newcomer, but with a more direct and pointed purpose than his novels. This collection is designed to offer the reader daily vignettes of societal considerations to engage the mind well beyond the few moments it takes to read each entry. It is simultaneously thought-altering and painfully relatable.
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Joseph D. Newcomer 
Very well said. It’s all about the tiny cracks that emerge from time to time. But still keeping it all together. 🙂
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Reblogged this on Joseph D. Newcomer and commented:
I realize it’s weird to repost this since I just posted it last week, but I wanted to let everyone know that you can now listen to Thought & Other Absurdities as a podcast. It is available on several outlets and there are more to come. See where it’s currently available on Anchor here https://anchor.fm/joseph-d-newcomer .
I listen to everything on Spotify so here is that specific link. https://open.spotify.com/show/3KT8D6t6CSsjzUknp4Y28g?si=GFznEzv9RKKxjizIbmPNPg&dl_branch=1
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