She sat there, sweating even though she hadn’t moved in over an hour. Fans blew air around her apartment languidly. The heat was unshakable. Her back still ached, despite all her muscle knots releasing thanks to the humid air surrounding her.
She sighed, telling herself winter was only six months away. That’s all. She stretched her neck to the side, noting a pop as bones ground against each other. This was part of her life and had been for years and years. Decades, in fact. All of it. The muscular pain, the joints being stiff, bones clicking and creaking as she moved.
She should have been labeled disabled twenty years prior, but the girl didn’t know when to quit. She had to earn money to exist one way or another because America is unkind to the poor and the disabled, forcing new applicants to try many times before accepting that they are unable to function in normal day to day capacity. They wanted undeniable proof you couldn’t be enslaved, in other words.
The cat resting peacefully in her lap didn’t help with the intense heat wave rolling through her home town. She idly stroked over the fur on the cat’s head, wondering when there’d be a reprieve. Another cat approached her chair, murring and trilling to announce himself, happy to be offered her free hand before sniffing it and wandering off. Two out of three ain’t bad, she thought to herself. Her eldest was upstairs, hiding away from life. She thought he might expire soon, but maybe not.
She hoped not. This would be her very first companion animal loss. She was fixing to grieve bitterly for it, too, despite feeling some of the grief of loss well beforehand. Years before. She used it to remind herself that she ought to treat him well, make sure he understands he is loved and cared for, and that she was there for him. She used that logic to continue to appreciate each of her animals deeply in turn.
She thought about putting them all down as a single unit. They’d lived with her for their entire lives, half her own lifetime. They were each older than 18. They were pretty crotchety and cranky these days, having arthritis in their hind legs. Of course, her previous veterinarian described it as discomfort. What a heinous bitch, Crystal thought. Is that how she slept at night, refusing to tell people their animals needed pain medication or to be put down? Just for what? A human being to cling to their animal?
Everything lives longer than it should these days. Everything except our food. We slaughter that as immediately as possible to make room for the next animal to feed the open, hungry mouths. We cannot bear to allow them to live a full life, mind. Instead, we slaughter them in barbaric practices instead of allowing them to age to the end of their life cycle first.
We ought to be ashamed of ourselves, she thought. When do human beings get slaughtered for another animal? Oh, never, right. We should be. We’ve grown fat and complacent. We’ve no right to this planet, either, wiping out over 85% of all life on it to sustain more humans. And yet, we try to live as long as we can, birthing as many babies as we “want,” failing to understand we’re already dead.
You’re dead, you know. Your grave hasn’t been dug yet, but the planet is going to die any minute now. I hope the plants and animals come back and take over in our absence, but I highly doubt it. I daydream of there being a space ship out there, holding the DNA of all the life we destroyed in our stupidity and ignorance and narcissism. Spacelings! Please come destroy humanity and hit the restart button!
Oh. There isn’t one, but this server is already tame, you guys. There’s nothing left to surprise us. There’s no soul left to the land, except a few wild pockets here and there. I daydream of making tons of money and using it to buy tracts of land all over the world, allowing them to go completely wild once more to support the rightful denizens of Earth: the birds, the water fowl, the beasts of burden, the wild things.
Maybe you can help me, fellow Earthling. It’s not that expensive, paying taxes on land that doesn’t have a property on it. It should be less than $1,000 per annum in most places. If you have plenty of money, buy it and set up a trust to pay the taxes for 100 years. Give the wild things places to be.
I have a skunk under my deck. Not just a skunk, though. Rabbits and a raccoon, too. A cute little family of misfits, seeking refuge from the elements. You don’t have to build them anything, just give them space to exist, people. I could be an asshole and get them trapped and released somewhere, but I like them. I’m going to adopt them officially once the cats are out of the picture, I think.
You have everything you want but nature is going to take it back one way or another. We can choose to tithe to Gaia or she can blow that super volcano under Yellowstone. In fact, I bet if I pray for a super volcanic eruption, it’ll happen. That’s how I’d like to see everything wiped out. Let nature return. Let survival of the fittest reign once more. Not survival of the fucking weak human beings that cling on to life for eons past their expiration date. Let people who don’t eat right die already! It’s their own damn fault for not seeking out health information as the times evolve, as knowledge increases, as we learn what is killing us.
(I’ll tell you a secret: sugar and mold. That’s what’s killing us.)
Some days, I wish I could talk to the mold. I wish I could tell it how to more effectively kill humanity. Once it takes over the world, then the cities will crumble and nature will reclaim the land. It tries to all the time everywhere I look in the form of overgrowth and wild vines. We could just let it win. We could just succumb to our doom. We already destroyed the planet, you know. It just hasn’t finished self-destructing. We hit the button for the self-destruction sequence about ten years ago. (Hello, Chernobyl II. You are on our horizon, I know.)
We’re too narcissistic as a society to learn from our mistakes. Mr. Musk, though, thank you for seeing we’re stupid AF and giving us another path to follow. (And everyone else working on renewable energy and EVs.) To sip fossil fuels is to breathe death, ultimately.
Have you ever smoke indoors? Ever notice how the air gets… awful?
We’re doing that to the outdoors. One day, we won’t have fresh air. There will be no escaping that one, I tell you now. Not unless the whole world starts growing cannabis ASAP, and even then it might not make a fucking difference.
Fun fact: hemp is more efficient at carbon storage than trees.
Did you know that forested areas are, on average, five degrees cooler than other areas? (Fahrenheit, that is.) And yet, we keep slaughtering nature’s cooling mechanism, complaining about how hot it gets everywhere. We’re moving plants to different continents, messing up the local ecosystems because we’ve removed the predators. Yellowstone reintroduced wolves and noted it restored quite a bit of the eroded river bank.
What if we reintroduced lions and tigers and bears for the average human to avoid? I wonder how that’d fix this place. I pray for something, anything, to wipe out most of humanity and allow this planet to breathe again. (Here’s looking at you, outer space.)
On the other side of everything, I also feel like we deserve to live. We have (some) good ones, too. If only God could come to give us his judgment.
“You there. No, not you. YOU. With the hair. I hate you for raping children, die.”
What if we just gave pedophiles the electric chair? Well, maybe a noose. That’s more eco-friendly. Death by injection is fine, too. Though… what are we doing to the soil with that shit? The ground we’re buried in and under? Is it poison to earthworms? Voles? No thanks, let’s return to that noose idea. Or maybe the guillotine. (Perhaps we can go back to the Roman empire’s mentality and televise it like barbaric assholes, too. I’ll show you for being so vile! And let that serve as a lesson to the rest of you!)
What if we murdered anyone who destroyed things for fun? You know, arsonists you just set shit on fire because they “can’t control themselves.” Do you think they’d find that self-control somewhere? How about people who murder others for their own satisfaction? Self-defense is different, if you ask me. Incidental and accidental deaths are still quite different.
You know, I heard a story about a man who drove home drunk in his truck with his buddy hanging out the window. He beheaded his friend on a wire on accident. I think he should die. Think about how that’s haunted him his entire life, for one thing. I’d never be able to forgive myself. I doubt he has. He should be able to say, “I don’t want to live anymore. The error of my ways is too grievous. I didn’t deserve that friendship and I hate myself. Please end me.”
Of course, he’d have to speak to someone like me first, to make sure he really wanted to be ended… it’s the only way to stop people from making irrational emotion-based decisions for something so permanent. But… so what if they do? Isn’t it their right to control their own life? I think so, but others don’t.
Why not? What’s wrong with you? You don’t have to ask for your own end if you’re happy. And, if your friends had to notify everyone on Facebook or something that they are planning to euthanize themselves, that gives you time to talk them out of it if you really love them. But, then again, if you really love them… who are you to stand in their way? Either way, they owe you an explanation, I reckon.
You know, it’d be so much better that way, instead of people drinking themselves to death. Instead of people eating themselves to death. Instead of people starving themselves to death. Or colliding with force against something. Or forcing a train to try to stop in time, which is super expensive to the freight companies by the way. And completely traumatizing to the HUMAN BEINGS that pilot the fucking trains, you ninny. You are not in a fucking vacuum, stop acting like you are.
Stop being cremated, assholes. Get buried under a tree. Now there’s a fashion statement. “I am feeding this tree’s roots with my body’s afterlife.”
I wish we’d stop cutting them down to make MDF. I wish we’d stop making crappy shit made to break out of fiber board. Nobody wants shit that breaks, you assholes. Minimum wage isn’t high enough! It should be $20/hour, if you ask me. And, more people should rent out their unused spare rooms to people who don’t get 40 hours a week. We all want our own back yard, our own mansion to fill with shit we don’t actually love or really use, and endless free time for entertainment. Only really rich assholes get that, my friend.
It’s unnatural, that. Being able to be completely lazy. To exist without having to work to even feed yourself. But it’s the new American dream! To never lift a finger or want for anything ever again. You know what happens to those people, hoss?
They get weak and they get scared. If they didn’t start out racist, they become racist. If they didn’t start out with prejudice, they develop it by the time they’re fifty. Hell, my parents, who used to be bleeding heart liberals. Now they support racist retards who rape everything. Rapists should die, if you ask me. We’re overpopulated as it is, so if we’re looking for something to determine who lives or dies, that could be it.
Unfortunately, I think all people have raped, intentionally or not. The seriousness of that accusation ranges from pushing a child to eat a food they hate to actually violating people to murder. (Murder is just an extreme form of rape, IMO.)
I’m a total pacifist, so it’s not like I’m going to hurt anyone. Except unsuspecting flies. I hunt those bitches down without reprieve. I have gotten pretty good at it; I only need one try with a fly swatter, as long as they are at rest. There’s an actual art to killing flies, I’ve learned. You have to get them from behind, because they can see you coming from most angles.
I want to thank Daryas, by the by. He didn’t have to share anything with us at all, but he did. Tough stuff. Deep stuff. To face something you are responsible for and change is so touching to me. It means you are growing up, that you accept you make mistakes, and that because you make mistakes you aren’t perfect.
Perfection is the narcissist’s illusion used to control and rape.
And one more thing… It’s really hard to face someone who reminds you of what you did wrong. I admire him for having the courage to do it daily while we proceed with “logic therapy.” This is where I ask questions to challenge the assumptions of someone conversing with me and just wait to listen for the response. We can all do it, if we choose to.
I’ve made him angry. I’ve made him sad. I’ve made him wistful. I’ve made him mad. I’ve challenged his will to live, his will to die, his shame, and his guilt. I’ve invited him to fix himself as he sees fit, giving him a new perspective. A new point of view. Fresh eyes to see the bigger picture instead of focusing on one detail in particular. The bigger picture is this: Self-defense isn’t wrong. Suicide is wrong. We should have a system for euthanasia so people can go out peacefully with dignity when they want to, to help those who are just psychologically tortured get into a therapist’s chair. Or even my chair. Anyone’s chair, anyone who is willing to actively listen and ask questions when they don’t know how to respond to the emotions on display. (I’m autistic, after all. I have no idea. My feelings are completely unrelated to the way others feel in the same exact situation. You could blame it on my architect brain.)
Please talk to someone who is willing to listen to you. Someone who will validate you more often than not. If you have friends who routinely ignore your feelings, tell them to get bent and find a new tribe of friends. If you feel lost, lonely, and alone, then at least hit me up before you hurt yourself. (Super_Fox#8259)
We are all victims and victimizers, simultaneously. And by failing to listen to people, no matter how delusional they seem to be (or actually are!) we are victim-shaming them. We are letting “Satan” win. (I’m not religious but I figure all of you understand that sentence just fine even if YOU’RE not religious, either.)
Please be well, son or daughter. Someone loves you, you just don’t know it. They’re shy or quiet, they feel like a burden when they talk to you, they don’t understand social cues, or they forgot to respond to your message for three months because they had one really hectic day and you don’t message often enough at all.
Angel-Sansara 