100118 I hear the rain singing about winter like a drunk in a bus station. it taps on teh glass door with the same absent urgency of the old man in Atlanta tapping on my shoulder to get my attention cuz he needs someone to put a finger on the twine that ties shut his cardboard box of worldly belongings. worldly. worldly belongings. there’sd something depressing about doing this right now. is it because of self-medication? like, does that just make it that much harder to wake up and do this shit? I already pressed snooae once, which means that i’m hearing millie’s shower noises right now instead of ten minutes from now. I’m just not feelin it today. i have to pee. did i mention that the feeling of having to pee has become so familiar to me it’s like a bad cup of tea that follows me around everywhere i go. it’s pernicious, it’s ubiquitous, it’s... i forget the other word i was trying to think of Lightning. Nothing like an autumn thunderstorm to presage the end of everything. fussing and blustering, it rattles the windows as if it’s never going to get another chance, sometims in the middle of the night, it must have passed over the house in REAL close proximity; there was a flash-BANG! followed by a long, wide, tumbling rumble across the landscape. you could imagine being out there in it, hearing it from miles away, feeling it roll like a bowling ball thrown by god, sonically knocking down every peasant’s little built up illusions as it careens from valley to valley, as the runnels and ditches fill with rain, as my stupid neighbors sleep and hopefully get washed away. did i mention that those little bastards drove right through the front yard again? I don’t have proof it was them, but who the fuck else would it be? why am i talking about this? This doesn’t make me any kind of writer except a bored teenage girls trying to get on So you Think You can Fucking I don’t know. I just like I said, i just ain’t feeling it this morning and i have nothing to say and millie will be down here soon and i have to pee. I”m going to risk getting up to pee. shit. the shower just turned of. shit. i’m almost out of time. shit. You really can’t hit snooze, not even once. shit. Oh poor me, this is so fucking hard to do in my life in my house. i am a little chinese man living in a one rented room with his fourteen family members and we have to tuck in our elbows to give each other room to fart. everybody works all day and sleeps for six hours and then works all day, and so what is the point of life? Why do we bother? Why are we enslaved by this weird, illogical compulsion to continue living no matter how shitty the circumstances? Why are there sneering big-hatted white guys, getting wider and big-headed and more and more smug every day, thinking “life” is something entirely different from what we think it is? how come we’ll never be one percent sure they’re not right: that they just have some kind of innate superiority that is why they end up with the best houses and cars and food and money and shit. they eat chinese food by the shovel full while we sit here knowing that what they’re eating isn’t really chinese. probe at shame like a tongue poking a loose tooth. a tooth that’s loose cuz you don’t have proper dental care cuz the white guys with stubble and sunglasses and pickup trucks took all that too. there is apparently no natural law that says things have to be fair. why are some people born subservient and poor and never seem to be able to get out from under all that? Why do we fight all our lives for an incremental improvement, subject at any moment to catastrophic failure, sending us sliding back down the fun twisty waterslide of no security? why do some people have massive networks of resources invisibly shoring them up? Why do they have so much invisible support that they can go around claiming their innate superiority and no one that matters really questions it? Why is it that when we point out that they have these built-up frameworks of generation after generation of stocked up advantages, like hundreds of years worth of stacked up snowballs outsie the snow fort, does everyone pretend not to be silently thinking, well, yes, we all have to be nice and pretend that there’s some kind of systemic thing going on, because we’re not allowed to think thoughts like “you’re just weaker and we’re just stronger and smarter.” The thought police literally block those thoughts from our minds. as soon as those thoughts enter our minds they get sprayed with a highly volatile weed killer and wither before they can blossom into actual language. no one is allowed to be innately superior in this society, and because we’re not allowed to think those thoughts it means we can’t acknowledge them, which in turn means we can’t imagine any alternatives; we can’t turn it over and over in our minds, and so we can’t use our imaginations to even begin to speculate about maybe being able to get inventive enough to FUCKING DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT. We are prohibited from even trying to play the game with any genuine sincere efficacy, because we Are PROHIBITED FROM EVEN BELIEVING THAT THERE IS A GAME. We are trained so thoroughly to KNOW FOR 100% CERTAIN that we are victims of something big and huge and invisible and evil and unassailable, that it saps our will to truly think we could ever even begin to try to throw ourselves against it. The fat white guys have offloaded our resistance away from their mortal, vulnerable, pasty, fallible selves and they’ve deflected our potential energy into something so VAST, so unimaginably PERMANENT AND INVISIBLE, that it all gets absorbed and turned into more lore for the ongoing story that things aren’t fair and we are victims. All because we aren’t allowed to think anything at all as concrete and obvious and simple as one fighter in the ring thinks about the other fighter: that this guy is stronger and faster and meaner, and keeps getting in good punches and outsmarting me and i’m going to go down in a minute here unless i can tap into something primitive and sometimes hidden and magic do as you will. you can’t fight back if you’re programmed to think that everyone is equal. in a state of pure equality, there is no fighting. there is only arguing about the rules in an abstract philosophical way. just ask Harrison Bergeron. he wasn’t an essay writer. he wasn’t even a novelist. what he was is too scary for most liberal-minded good citizens to contemplate, outside of the safety of irony and cynicism and an educated awareness of what “science fiction” is. If they ever thought Harrison was real, they’d shit their pants. And that’s why my neighbors’ teenage kids are mean and sneering and poison-faced, and don’t speak the same language as their parents, and don’t respect anyone, and drive across my front yard any chance they get. I shopped for and bought their fucked up attitude back in the 80s, when the first shopping malls started to go up, and we comfortable privileged white kids rode our bikes to them and thought they were pretty exciting and special.