#148 Comb and earring

A lot of how we interpret the world has to do with how we perceive it. And a lot of how we perceive the world has to do with how we interpret it. That is what we call prejudice. We have pre-judged reality to fit our expectations. You know what I mean. If you expect to see a certain thing, or your mind is so inclined, you may actually think a lump of covers is a corpse in your bed, or a cloud is a dragon. The man-in-the-moon, widely seen by many in western culture, is, in fact, more like a shrimp-in-the-moon when you see it full. Especially in the early hours right after dawn. Or if you’re from Asia. There is a pretty strong body of psychological evidence that supports the notion that our brains try to recognize faces from the least stimulus. Try staring at mottled wallpaper some time or heavily textured plaster. It’s amazing the number of almost eyes, noses and mouths that come together to look like almost faces.
And I’m not on drugs when I say that either, or when I saw it. We used to recognize druggies in the restaurant I worked in the Seventies. Seventies pot smokers were pretty blatant. The first surge of rebellion was over and pot culture had settled into that blasé “That Seventies Show” indifference about pot. In the restaurant where I worked, we could always tell the pot smokers cause they were the ones trying to order a plate of snickers and gravy. Always a little suspicious.
My perception was put to the test the other day. I heard this Papa Murphy ad on the radio. It talked about every pizza coming with a bake and serve tray. Of course the announcer was talking kind of fast and to me it sounded like a bacon serve tray. And I thought what’s that? Some layering thing like Emeril does on the food channel? Lay down a couple of strips of bacon and cook the pizza over them for extra flavor? Or some Canadian bacon pineapple upside down pizza deal? My mind was prejudiced when I heard the ad. I wanted to hear bacon, they said “bake and.” Close enough.
Kind of like the interesting reporting of the news we saw during the Katrina aftermath. Poor black people were looting and poor white people were looting. And newspapers and TV broadcasts had identical photos of all the poor and desperate people trying to get supplies during the flood. Granted, some of the supplies included big screen TVs. But almost without exception the captions and the announcers said the black people were looting and the white people were commandeering.
America, ya gotta love it.