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Friday, August 10, 2007
The Reversal
After many years of focused self-loathing I have reversed the flow of hatred and entered into a lengthy phase of purifying misanthropy. I fear and hate other humans: their innate violence, apelike grins, and peculiar smells. I hate them in cars, in lines, and when they write things on the Internet. I am annoyed by assemblyline quirks, like knitting in public, or the wearing of certain hats.
When I ride my bike I barely see the gnarled toes and snail tongues of strangers, or their open-maw faces. There is no risk of conversation, although sometimes people yell things. (Two days ago some girl in a pack of girls yelled: "Fat nigga!"; I gave the group the finger and kept pedaling, which I guess is an improvement over 500,000 years ago when we would have thrown feces.) I am a point on a line in a grid and I assume correctly that every car, every body in motion, is put here to kill me. I haul myself over low-grade hills and map trajectories. I still look smiling on infants but in my heart there is vileness. And Brooklyn, with its glut of desperate wombs, has no shortage of upmarket strollers, the squeaks and caws of their passengers cautiously analyzed by their wrinkled mothers for signs of autism (bad) or genius (good). I am soon to get married, but given the general despair of the era and the fact that the oceans are now 58% molten lead I do not think of the joys of tiny fingers grasping my thumb but instead relentlessly catalog the disasters that could befall us, assuming of course that my ability to father a child has not been obliterated by all these years spent sucking down crooked molecules. If we have a child and the rats do not eat it first I will teach her (or him) to fear Sting.
"Be good," I will say, "or Sting will come with his lute."
"Where does Sting live?" the kid will ask.
"He dances alone in fields of gold. When he sings you fall asleep and die. But if you listen to good music he can never come close. For he is so afraid."
"Does he eat you?"
"No, because he is vegetarian. In Greece he is called Borefeus."
"I hate Sting!"
If there's life in other systems I'll hate that too, when it comes to claim our planet in the name of the NR!RRRG-7. You know how the Lisp geeks say, all code is data and all data is code? (I'm an XSLT programmer so I say the same thing, but it takes much longer.) I'm wrestling with the fact that not only are all of you apes, but I am as well, just as poisonous and treacherous with my plastic bags and air-conditioning. That is, I am code; you are data, and you are code as well, and the babies and cats are all genes crunching through a much, much larger machine that never, sadly, reboots. I hope we don't taste good to our conquerors.
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