Meathead or Pinhead? by Chris Rich

Meathead or Pinhead?

by Chris Rich (from his blog "Geezeworld" ; http://www.myspace.com/brooklinetaichi

I've lately been focusing on my amateur social anthropology hobby by doing an apocryphal query into the qualities of two opposed clans, the meatheads and the pinheads. My own allegiance is to the meatheads or the modern day counterpart to Thomas Jefferson's Sturdy Yeomanry.

While I'm a hopeless Roosevelt Liberal, I have an abiding respect for fellow meatheads who may not agree with my politics. The values I share with Meathead World are more important for now. Meatheads are essentially pragmatic sorts and are goal oriented. They have stuff to do, usually turning on making a living and building a family or building something. They are the nations driving wheel.

A typical meathead is like an archetype of Odysseus, the Resourceful Person. Meatheads can fix broken things and make wonderful things when left to do so. They are rarely distracted by preciousness of the "lofty and the beautiful' proposed by one of those dead wretched Euro-Philosophers that Dostoevsky laughed at. Fyodor was a meathead.

I get uneasy when I'm not among a reasonable cohort of meatheads. Right now, living in effete, terrible Cambridge, I am in a Pinhead epicenter and there is constant aggravation derived from this Pinhead immersion.

Pinheads are 'role' oriented. Goals are secondary compared with role maintenance. A dedicated pinhead is forever immersed in his or her own bad home movie, a legend in their mind and yet, not mindful or perceptive, more likely oblivious.

So when Pinhead management is your lot or you befriend these hapless trainwrecks plan on em fucking shit up. Pinheads will eat your cd's because the goal of not chewing them is as nothing beside the role of playing em loud while drunk.

Pinheads will beg favors and then not follow through and leave unseemly messes because the follow through was a goal thing and some distraction,(Pinheads are easily distracted by shiny things), led them off to role management.

Pinheads tend to be high maintenance. And here am I trying to help music, what an idiot move for an irredeemable meathead as 'artistes' of every description tend to be pinheads as art making is, after all, more of a role, a beret to wear, than it is a goal.

I am friends with a number of honest meathead artists in outcast jazz, folk and punk rock but the usual goofs I end up shepherding are astonishing unmindful, flailing pinheads from hell. Boston/Cambridge is a pinhead petri dish.

I suppose it all could be viewed as an aspect of civilization. Meatheads are grounded in ancient hunter gatherer contingencies while Pinheads would die in such a demanding milieu. Civilization is a Pinhead enabler.

So for my fellow meats who read this, thanks for doing your part to keep the human thing running. For you hapless Pins who read this, sorry to harsh your mellow, rain on your parade and poke a hole in your role but you really are horribly vulnerable to problematic events such as a likely replay of the Great Depression coming soon and your effete incompetent dime store intellectual lives are your own worst problem. Must suck bein' you.

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