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I’m reading Ray Charle’s autobiography. It’s nothing the IntellectualElite would probably have on their book list, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t somehow interesting. Then again, we aren’t all in the television audience.

Before reality television, people had this same fascination with other people’s lives, they just had to read about it. Autobiographies and biographies were the ways we looked into other peoples’ lives. We used to learn through first person or second person, but now we are oddly satisfied with third person.

And that should come as odd. It’s the worst view, yet i tseems we feel the most justified with it. Pause for one honest second and realize the downside to a third-person viewpoint. Instead of clouding the truth of a person’s life with his/her bias, or in the second-person viewpoint where someone has taken time to really study the matter, we suddenly put our own ability to judge a situation as paramount to either.

In a court case, the third person view would show you video of a man shooting another man point blank and ask for a verdict.

In the second-person view, the forensic scientist introduces the fact that a young woman and child off screen were wounded by bullets from the same gun, but carefully measured trajectories indicate the height of the shooter is 5 inches taller than the shooter on video. Both the prints of the shooter and the murder victim are found on the gun.

I’m not clever enough to come up with an interesting third plot-twist from the first-person testimony. Who can trump Jerry Bruckheimer’s CSI series. (On a slightly interesting aside, it was CSI shows that elevated the expectation of DNA evidence in procuring guilty charges for murder suspects).

So when I’m reading Ray Charle’s own words on how he liked, and I do quote here, ‘fingering some young pussy’, I was almost shocked the way old people are shocked when you say damn, or couch (it’s a DEVAN!).

I don’t know why. Wouldn’t blind boys like the feel moreso than sighted anyways? I mean…

I had prejudged based on my third-person experience. I’d seen Ray Charles on television in Pepsi commercials with kids. I’ve seen Ray Charles on television singing ‘America the Beautiful’ on some live patriotic telecast. I didn’t even know what the blues were back then, much less the soul he was well famous for having created and all the smack he shoved up his arms.

If I had gone by the movie about him, I would only be slightly more clued in, but still somewhat shocked about his early love of the vaginal texture sensation. This leads me to a slighly comforting conclusion.

You don’t know people you don’t know in person. Plain and simple. Seems retardedly profound, but once you catch yourself feeling confident in your ridicule of people whom are not in front of you, you realize there is a chance you don’t know their story at all. It could be your family, or your friends or people all over world via the internet and yet you just dont’ know their story.

It’s a two-sided stroke, of course. People don’t know you from afar, and your judged constantly for it. Hello Credit Score!

I’ve already given my thoughts on getting a college degree and what education is, but this plays more to the tune of what I did learn that I wouldn’t realize as clearly now

If journalism taught me one thing about life, it’s that there are more than two sides to every story, and none of them necessarily mean you have the truth. On a slightly more trivial side, but still applicable, it also taught me that a handshake and eye contact yield irreplaceable information about a person otherwise completely lost or unavailable by phone, e-mail or implication.

Why is it, after all, that even with a mountain of evidence telling exactly what happened in any situation, any investigative group will always conduct an interview, one-on-one?

The personal conversation is so important.