blissfully ignorant of current events
Even if you offered to give me a free haircut, I couldn't tell you what the top ten current news stories are. Even if you threw in a free blow-dry, neither could I cough up the top ten albums, movies, or celebrities. I'm a Mongolian idiot when it comes to the squishy, swirly world around me, and it bothers me not a bit. Not even a whit.
A long time ago before I learned to be ashamed of such things, I was reading a book by unforgivably happy 60s fossil Baba Ram Dass—Journey Inside My Anus or something like that. He wrote about returning to the USA after a year spent meditating among India's fly-swatters and scab-pickers. Soon after arriving home, Ram Dass realized he had no idea who the current US president was. Back when he was a Harvard psychology professor named Richard Alpert, a wrong answer to the question "Who's the current president?" was considered diagnostic proof of mental illness. But Ram Dass never felt happier in his life.
The acid-drenched greybeard was on to something there. Let's hear it for solipsism. The less I know about other things, the more I learn about myself.
