From the outside, the human circus of lying, stealing, and shitting explosively on everything of value looks more vain, stupid, and pointless every day
As does gawking at that circus, a hobby only a masochist would consciously strive to extend past whatever constitutes a tenable point of despair
I am obviously a human, in too many senses in fact, but I view the human circus from an external perspective. This is not because I am above it, but because I am not and never have been interested in participating in most of its standard modes (learning, working, breeding, owning, and gloating). I used to want to play a supporting role in the circus, because on a micro level, some humans, maybe even most, have their charms if you give them half a chance.
Now, nothing about the circus appeals to me. Even the ugly, spastic rush that arises from hating one of its newly unfurled acts isn’t enough to draw me into it anymore.
“Modern civilization” is now a crass failure except from the perspective of a relative handful of stinking thieves, triumphant whores, and surprisingly mild-looking, if insectile, rapists. This is because the disciplines of paleontological and cultural anthropology can be rolled into one summarized neatly as follows: The human monkey, despite its generally flickering and unreliable mind and bellicose nature, has managed to develop tools allowing a smattering of them to exert granular levels of control over the rest, proving that a planet eight thousand miles through the middle is hopelessly tiny after all. Then, those self-appointed topmonkeys went to work fulfilling their ineluctable scorpions-with-thumbs natures by needlessly hoarding from the dungmonkeys and needlessly killing them over bullshit.
I believe that the late Unabomber (code-named Ted Kaczynski by the FBI) touched on many of these issues, although the means by which he bolstered his manifestos were unfortunately far dumber than their contents and certainly sapped his message.
The most diabolical thing about the human monkey is its relentless refusal to own up to its own capacity for hubris in the face of not having the right answers, or sometimes, the nerve. Mark Twain, a brilliant man who properly thought little of us all, observed that
The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner. Such is the human race. Often it does seem such a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat. Doesn't make any difference who we are or what we are, there's always somebody to look down on.
Too many humans think we soar above the rest of primate fray merely in recognizing most of our instincts for what they reveal: that the behaviors oriented toward species survival represent a war between genes conducted in physical vessels, nothing more, with this set-up bound to create enormous amounts of obligatory suffering in a sentient mind. Such is the only mechanism known for any sort of animated biomass to develop and persist. Consciousness is a dubious-at-best gift.
Most active participants in the modern human circus, unless saddled by infirmity, grow roots in the world’s soil, such as embarking on long, meaningful careers and having kids. This clearly gives them tangible and important things to do, but also forces all but the boldest to deny or downplay evils that affect them but often lie far beyond their control. A perfect example is denying the extent to which both the U.S. public-school system and its college-campus environments have become perverted, learning-free hellscapes, a natural defense from someone with children being or about to be processed through one or both of those systems.
Those of us who sort of get by with no firm aims other than to stay out of other humans’ way and not leave trash everywhere while earning the right to food and shelter via traditional means tend to not wear rose-colored glasses. If you are healthy and have a brain and chronically unmarried or un-partnered past a certain age, and are not a trust-fund playboy, it’s probably not a matter of luck or exquisite patience. It’s probably a manifestation of intractable cynicism.
If you’re a member of this lively crowd, you’re likely to have experienced yourself being drawn philosophically away from friends who share your general thinking patterns and information sources, but are participants in the circus and have little choice but to pretend the twin worldwide marches of authoritarianism and its handmaid, forced lunacy are really just a few bad actors who can be voted out of, or otherwise expelled from, the system: A few corrupt senators here and there, Fauci types who maybe goofed a bit but meant well, vaccines that sorta flopped but hey, what a miracle of accelerated medicine, cable-news hosts who aren’t lying but either making gaffes or “adding context.”
The world isn’t riddled with evil humans, but it contains enough smart-alecky greedheads to throw the entire idea of perpetuation the species into question. If the human, which can be seen as the only truly free animal thanks to its capacity for introspection and systematic decision-making, is not to be free in its own “civilization” owing to the psychoses of zealots, why bother?
Absurdities are now the norm on U.S. Government websites, notably that serving the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Everyone who visits the CDC website, in fact, sees almost nothing but absurdities there, although many humans can’t identify or accept them as such.
Sometimes I’ll see a state-sponsored absurdity of just the right type when I’m already in an especially cynical frame of mind, and before the usual cascade of conscious judgments begins, that a thought-stab comes: Everyone pretending things like these are fine and being cancelled for opining otherwise is why I need out opt out of observing this circus forever.
This portion of a page on the CDC website affected me in just such a way.
You could of course say, assuming you recognize how insane this is in the first place, that it’s no big deal that the CDC is indulging a few weirdos with the “chestfeeding” fantasy. You could also not fool yourself and admit that the government is simply gaslighting the American citizenry into frazzled submission. Insanity like this makes it easier to normalize the equally absurd, if somewhat better disguised, concepts the CDC is pushing elsewhere, such as dangerous and ineffective injections and weight-reduction surgeries and drugs rather than exercise for chubby children. Even knowing the CDC is nothing more than a subsidiary of approximately four giant pharmaceutical companies makes this level of vicious disregard for actual public health almost impossible to process.
I just never expected to be a citizen of a country with a fascist government. If you don’t think we have one of those, you may have missed Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s testimony before U.S. Congress the other day, which was largely about government censorship and which the government literally tried to censor. That event is the catalyst for the depth of the dismay in this post, even the CDC image was its trigger. This country has been absolutely ruined well beyond recognition by avaricious technopaths with the politics and ethics of Jabba the Hutt.
And I also didn’t expect so many humans to be so thoroughly and proudly feeble-minded and tribal in the face of the unexpected barrage of propaganda that starting knocking us around in early 2020. As time passed, I expected more longtime Democrats to understand what had happened to the party, grab their longtime values, and jump ship in anger rather than become victims of that propaganda and engage in provably wrong, idiotic tribal bellowing.
Alas, Trump Derangement Syndrome is a genuine phenomenon; while MSNBC and CNN hosts cheerfully lie about anything and everything, when they start in on Donald Trump, some of them get a glazed-eyed look and they clearly see him as a unique vessel of horrors rather than as the blithering con-man who already served one term in office without the world ending. Everything that has happened since he left office is ten times worse than anything he dreamed of doing, and everyone can see it.
It has become easy for me to see the average American human as an ignorant, mannerless, unsightly, tribal mammal and becoming more off-putting in every respect by the week. Were I not still so focused on the same institutions and humans I have been for decades, such as distance running and certain friends and family members, and just ignored absolutely everything that did not directly affect my in-the-moment existence, I would perhaps see less stank and more flowering potential. And if I had the usual things in my life that normal humans pay attention to and strive toward and around and about, I’d be finding silver linings in things whose facets now present only crud-caked rust, even if I’m grateful for humanitarian reasons that I don’t have these things.
Before all this nonsense started happening, I had assumed that I would always be able to find a reasonably satisfying means of earning a living until it was time to not do that. Even before I lost all hope, I was never someone who intended to live past the point of being able to move around well and think clearly, because that’s a really dumb and ugly process unless you have relatives to justify this. There is no honor or dignity in being worn out, purposeless, feeble, and having left nothing of interest or value in your wake and continuing the eating-shitting-sleeping cycle. I did want to go to Europe for the first time, and began preparing for this in late 2019 (ya snooze, ya lose).
Now that both the economy and my outlook on humans and the world they’re sculpting have radically changed, that is not my future. I am no longer interested in taking up space and watching things happen and filling in the blanks with endorphin-generating activities. It all looks too gruesome. And I am not capable of just doing my own thing and ignoring it. Even if I had unlimited resources and didn’t have to work at all, I would spend much of my waking time seething about this or that injustice, lie, slaughter, or murderous scammer in a position of high authority and wanting to forever divorce myself from the unavoidable seething.
My basic problem is that I have to work to stay alive, as I refuse to freeload off humans or governments, lack the incentive to work despite opportunities and stand no chance of developing that incentive going forward, because staying alive just means more seething and misery for myself and humans I talk to. I avoid becoming overly close to new friends these days because that would be the equivalent of taking an emotional hostage. I’m not being pious or pitching a “nobody gets me” theme; it’s just a simple fact that it’s an immoral move to cajole unsuspecting humans into your close orbit, continually talk about killing yourself, and wonder why they worry about you or why their feelings might be hurt. And while I am not one bit concerned I might drink again, even if prompted—that would quickly return me to the even-more-miserable bowels of the “healthcare system” for expensive pre-suicide medical processing—I do worry that I might fuck again if prompted, because while cravings for a poison are somewhat unnatural and eventually subside, I’m the kind of asshole who would have a sex drive at 75 if allowed to survive that long and cause problems as a result.
A number of experiences I have not written about and a few I have from my time spend in rehabs and detox units have informed my processing of the covid-19 sub-circus. Some of these experiences unquestionably helped me see what was happening far earlier than I would have otherwise even with the benefit of a couple of years of medical school and working as a dedicated science writer for a few years. It might have been helpful to refer to these when first blasting away at the shots, but that is a whole avenue of my life I am never going to explore publicly because all of it is disgusting, and at this point half the Internet is devoted to disgraced humans doing disgusting things on camera and bragging about it.
I will say that despite wasting decades of my life thanks to poor functioning and not being especially energetic about resource accumulation even when sober, I have managed to spend time around exactly the kind of humans I would have anyway, and more or less lived as I pleased. I believed for a while that I would be in the U.S. Army for quite a few years longer than I was and never really wanted to own property. All I really wanted to do is run around outside and find humans and other animals to hang out with, and that is mostly what I have done, even when “forced” to do other things. Most humans, even here in the U.S. never had the chance to pick their own path. I did, and despite screwing up a great deal along the way, I’m still doing the same thing, even if I see no point in earning more living-time. That’s something.
As long as I have Rosie, unless I manage to die in my sleep, I’ll still be here no matter what I say about hating everything and meaning every word. If not for her, I already would have quit paying rent and starting living in my tiny car in various places far from here. I may be her third owner, and I have had her for over five years. She has been with me for most of my days in times of prosperity and happiness and she’s with me most of the time now. In the few times I have gone away, unless my friends are lying to me, she hasn’t done especially well by her standards and she generally doesn’t let me out of her sight. It’s one thing to kill yourself when all of your friends are humans, because as much as some of them might understandably bitch about it before and after the fact, they at least understand it. It’s another thing to confuse a dog that has been nothing but loyal and given me a reason to exist. Whatever my final thought is, it probably won’t be pleasant, and it may even be a joke, but it’s not going to be “And on top of the other things I wrecked, I abandoned Rosie too.”
I haven’t really been looking at running results, or even running websites. I seem to have lost all interest in following anything where I see the same characters, some of whom I have been familiar with or known for quite a long time, saying things they know or false or going along with the senseless raving of senseless characters. Most humans committed to making a career out of running these days, outside of formal coaching jobs, are morbid assholes, while those who aren’t have no choice to adjust to demoralized standards of coverage and discourse. And if I continue to keep high-school and collegiate running on my radar, I’ll be tempted to resume paying attention to the chest-beating dopers at the top level, which means digesting what their drooling fans and followers say about them.
And I hate it all now. I wish I had never gotten involved at all; I would have found the cheerful jogging I do today without ever having run a single race or read a single word in a running-related book or magazine.
So, to the extent I will be writing here regularly, it’s all going to be more about what has led me to adopt my charming perspective on human society and its needless but apparently inevitable transformation into a massive gushing sewer of social and political pathologies, ills that will not be reversed within the lifetimes of anyone alive and will only be eliminated by worldwide nuclear war. On which note, the human monkey should have been denied access to most of the more impressive toys it now has under its emotionally riven “control.”
One useful toy would be a button available only to me or a trusted designee that makes everyone who has engaged a cellphone app while driving for more than ten unbroken seconds within the past thirty days disappear. I don’t mean the cunts who insist in texting at red lights and cause five-second delays after it turns green, although most of them could be relegated to oblivion as well. I see this all the time, and one of these days I’m going to bunt someone smack into a guardrail at 60 miles an hour with my douchewagon for precisely this offense.
I bet that adding together the humans who stare at screens while riding bikes, scooters, skateboards, or other biomass-conveyors on sidewalks or public paths to the no-shits-to-give texters-and-drivers would yield a number greater than 60 million in the U.S. alone. All of these assholes can simply go, even if their disappearance would only throw into even more stark relief how dismal most the survivors are. The next time you decide to get in a text war with one of your shitrag buddies on a busy highway, be aware that there are humans out there who’d put a whole hail of bullets in your head for this given the chance, swipe your phone, and publish your texts for a giggling world to see and your relatives to mope over, especially those who were involved in the exchange.
Last note: I’ve been in the habit of responding to as many direct emails and public comments as I can, but I’m going to be less attentive to that now. It helps and it’s fun, but at the same time it’s not and it doesn’t, and I think readers know what I mean by this. I can take smaller breaks from myself and the chaos above and around me without committing to the eternal one that I have to postpone for a while.