time keeping track of all of mine. The important thing is that these habits exist, and arise, and pretty much everyone succumbs to them on a daily basis, often on purpose.11 But why? Humans have been so lucky12 as to possess the most superior intellectual capabilities of all living creatures. By our measure, at least. Shouldn’t, then, we have figured out by now some way to avoid the same fate as our stupid beasts, who stupidly shit on our carpets, stupidly wander into post-elementary-school-bell traffic, and thereupon become, literally — and perhaps appropriately, via an ironic twist on the principle “you are what you eat” — stupid shit upon the concrete? This should have been an easy accomplishment for us homos, achieved long ago. Humans today purport to have the whole world figured out. We have developed roughly eleventy billion languages,13 themselves comprised of “words” comprised of “letters”, which are themselves comprised of hand-strokes via writing instruments of our creation. We have developed innumerable forms of “media” whereby we interpret (and, more to the point, can interpret, and, in any event, seek to do this incessantly) every human being, action, and creation we interpret as deserving interpretation. We have devised vast tales14 that have inspired probably the bulk of human suffering and decay since humans began recording (via the aforementioned writing instruments and media forms) what we now call “history”. That’s some serious, serious shit. And we still haven’t figured out — or, perhaps more appropriately, “committed to” — even one universal way by which we can cease harming living things, including ourselves. This all begs an explanation. And, at the risk of coming across preachy, arrogant, or otherwise unappealing to the same or opposite
11
And don’t deny it.
Some people might say “designed” or “blessed” or something else similarly bullshitty.
12
Including ones we design as being spoken by other species, which said species we in turn dress up as and otherwise portray in television shows and movies, and, subsequently, based on their popularity (that of both the language and its “native” species), write whole dictionaries so people can speak “correctly” or be “fluent.”
13
14
We call them “religions.”