>>418Look at something more timely: the internet. A lot of MS word black pixels and tabloid sweat has been spewed celebrating and denouncing the freedom of it, but at the same time most of it only exists to get you to buy products. From Mexican lead pills marketed for everything from baldness on one extreme of the body and shriveling of the body in another to, again, humans. The “dark” parts of the internet that exist now, however, are exactly like the ones that existed very shortly after its invention. The degenerates and greedheads got the jump on it, as they do all new and great things. It’s just taken them a few years to dig a whole deep enough for them to profit off of it properly.
Given how much of those networks are just shock and troll sites and how much else of it seems to at least try to offer some actual service, that is probably an exaggerated view of it. Still, the internet offers one of the best examples of a technology that is often underutilized or simply used badly: it's the greatest invention in human history when it comes to potential for the sharing of information and for learning since the invention of written language, and it's mainly used for porn and other distractions.
And what better institution to fail at preventing actual harm than the US Federal Government? When they bothered to go after anything there and had the ability, what did they go after again? Child pornography? Human trafficking? You know, perhaps things that result in gross bodily harm to innocents in their very functioning? No, of course not, they went after drug dealers largely disconnected from the cartels killing people over the rights to supply said stupefying chemicals. Which, to be honest, regardless of any perceived want for legitimate freedom I would have been completely fine with if it weren’t for more pressing matters. Really though, they aren’t any more pressing; to say they are would be to suggest that said powers might actually be able to show more concern for preventing harm than safeguarding profit and perpetuating a doomed ban.
I suppose I should get back on the trail I’d lazily plotted for myself earlier on. So, in that interest, I’d like to say that while any explanation of who I am would be too self-serving to bear, I again also realize that the desire to be a writer is the same desire which would bring myself to commit a sadistic act such as forcing you through one anyway.
That admittance of wrongful intent doesn’t make me any more ready to deliver, though, but I feel like that sort of catharsis is something I should dip my head into. I’d channel a certain Charlie and say that “I’m nobody… A boxcar, a jug of wine and a straightrazor, if you get too close,” but everything but “I’m nobody” would be a wild overstatement. I wasn’t even alive by own judgment until a few years ago. Prior to that, I was a hunk of meat that loved its brother, wasted a lot of time and enjoyed not having to really try at anything. I’m probably not a whole lot more than that now, but at least I can stand in criticism, and I often do that when it comes to past versions of myself, and everyone and thing else. So maybe that’s the main thing I do, and should write about.
Keep this in mind: I don’t really consider any young children to really be people. Not “I don’t consider them to be alive,” I just don’t judge them as having any of the qualities that make up a worthwhile person beyond being warm and producing a lot of fluids and gasses while seeming to enjoy the processes associated. Those qualities that actually mark a person as being real in my mind mostly have to do with being capable of affection and reason though, so often it seems like other older people try descend to the point of no longer having to try to be real human beings. A lot of times I also do that, so for the most part it’s okay.
One thing that seems clear to me now is that the more you alienate yourself from that great panorama of artificial identities and goods the more you seem to not really need an identity of your own, in the aesthetic sense at least. I am mainly whatever I am that is doing what it does every given moment; the self that’s painted in my head out of past decisions is one that I abhor, but the fact I have a hard time feeling its being there saves me from most of the feelings of self loathing I might have otherwise.