Yeah, I know of him. He’s a wacko. But they’re all wackos. I wouldn’t say they’re attractive, though they could all use a good rape in my opinion. You know, for fun. Tie ‘em down, line ‘em up, and we can all have at ‘em.

The world we be a much more interesting place if that was the case. Instead, they’ll all be reading “The Art of The Deal”.

None of that was intended to be facetious, no.

I hate humanity, as a collective thing. There are plenty of individuals that I’m plenty partial towards, but in terms of anything larger–societal structures and systems, culture, biological drives, identities–I find the whole thing pretty loathsome. I pretty much hate any human who breeds. I think children are horrendous, vile things. There are too many of us, we spend too much of our energy desperately trying to restrict the actions and choices of each other, we’re can’t get past fucking natural essentialism of the body and mind, and we are so fucking stupid–our brains are basically hardwired to believe countless natural and logical fallacies. Moving through the world and society as it currently is structured fills me with dysphoria–these spaces and cultures and norms were never designed for me, and I put up with them, stealth through them, but fuck, I hate every moment of it.

We’re fucked up. It’s even more fucked up, because with consciousness and free will and scientific advancement I firmly believe we’re capable of improving ourselves beyond all of these flaws into something genuinely (trans/post)human, but we lack any collective will to do so. 

All of these beliefs should be pretty self-evident from the shit I write, honestly. Hell, “City of Bears,” the longest thing I’ve written, is designed around the fundamental shift of the human species to a single masculine gender, predicated on assumptions of longevity, rebirth and a fluid genetic structure. The sexiest fucking thing to me is literally ruining someone’s humanity. In my mind, being the most fucked up shit I’ve written–objects, animals, strange monstrosities–all of that is still preferable to banal humanity. 

So I don’t know if this is “edgy” or not, but it’s definitely what I believe.

Yeah, it was going to be a longer story, but that’s generally the case with everything I post as a sketch. I had a few ideas of where to go with it, but I wasn’t quite satisfied with any of the directions I could see the story going, and I also hated the voice of the character I was writing with, so it never went anywhere.

Nah, that’s still up. It’s called “Identity Crises”, but it has three parts, and you can find them all here. 

I have a strong misanthropic and nihilistic streak, in case anyone had any doubts at this point, after reading most of the stuff I write–especially recently. I think that humans–as resulting from our status as a consciously advanced species born through the horrific collective trauma of evolution–are generally vile, horrid things focused on breeding, with small minds and little empathy for any collective self. I think that the mountain of historical evidence indicates that we, as a species, tend towards societies and civilizations which rest on foundations of cruelty and oppression. Even before this election, I thought that we were existing in not just the twilight of the American empire, but in the twilight of human civilization, if not the human species. All this to say, I have never held out much hope that humans, in general, would do the right thing when given the chance. Our survival, on an individual basis, is generally predicated on doing the wrong thing. Evolution has constructed the perfect Prisoner’s Dilemma we can’t escape, and we have yet to create a social or political system which can effectively manage our own capacity for selfishness.

I am relieved this election is over, which isn’t to say I’m happy with the results (I did vote for Clinton), but the relief! This last year and change has been one big ball of stress for me. It was clear, from a year ago this time, that Trump was going to win the Republican nomination, which has left me wondering, since then, just how terrible we Americans would prove to be.

I thought Clinton would win narrowly in 2016, and then expected her to lose in 2020 to a cleaner, more palatable white nationalist demagogue who would take Trump’s playbook, expand his appeal with white women and white gay men, and dominate that election. That said, here we are–it turns out people have lower standards than I thought.

But the ending I see in all of this is larger than an end of an era or an end of democracy–either nationally or internationally. This, along with so many other trends and movements globally–signals to be the twilight of our entire species, and I am so glad for this. We are all terrible beings, and we have proven our poor instincts to be both intrinsic and unconquerable. At this point, our collective death could be soon, since we have just put our nuclear codes in the fist of an unrepentant narcissist, but even excluding nuclear war, it will happen eventually. This planet is dying, and we lack the collective imagination to escape it’s wrath in any way which doesn’t set our civilization back millennia, either through ecological repairs or through space colonization. I don’t think it had to be this way. I think humanity is capable of overcoming it’s evolutionary tendency towards self-delusion and self-destruction, but we’re in a race against a clock here that’s only speeding up. I suppose there’s a chance we still could, but the window is becoming impossibly narrow, and we have gotten exactly none of our shits together to make it happen. 

All that said, however, isn’t this kind of exciting? I feel a bit of excitement, I admit it. I spent most of the morning at work giggling to myself over this, while I listened to riotous queer punk to get some of it out of my system (Bottoms’ “Goodbye” EP + Against Me). We’re teetering at a cataclysm, with a gun to our collective heads. There’s always been a certain beauty, for us, in collective death, an obsession with our own self-destruction. When I turned on my computer this morning, my PC had the ruins of Rome as my lock screen, and that seemed so charming, in the context of this. Look at us, who thought we’d learned anything. Here we are again, back at the precipice. It looks deeper this time, and were those jagged rocks at the bottom before? We dimly recall how much this hurt, the last time we did this, but if we weren’t meant to hurl ourselves off the edge, why do we place ourselves there over and over, like it’s our own, corrupted design?