Mostly because my whole modus operandi as a lower-middle manager is to
1) Tell people who are doing okay that they're doing okay
2) Tell people who are getting stressed to manage their workload better
3) Tell fucking cretins to TURN DOWN THE FUCKING SUCK
MOTHERFUCKER there are some cunting stupid morons out there.
On the plus side, yesterday I ran for 22 whole minutes without having to take a walk break, which I had always reckoned was physically impossible. I'm pleased because being able to run for 20 minutes without a break was the first non-orgasmic goal I'd set myself in physical terms I think ever in my life, and also because once I got to 15 minutes I started feeling like I could just keep running forever; I stopped because I knew it was a good idea to stop, not because I wanted to. It felt great.
Yah, so I didn't slow down once, unless you count an impromptu frolic with a cattledog who was also using the cricket pitch, who thought she could herd me until she realized she could play with me instead. Part of the reason I'm so conflicted about the dongo issue is that cattledogs were bred from dingos, and they're lovely, so Jeebus, man, just let those dogs fuck away.
Running outside has given me some interesting dog experiences. The sweetest was at the same cricket pitch, one just where the countryside begins next to the town, that I cycle to get to. I was biking away from it from an angle I don't usually take when suddenly a pack of baying dogs led by a giant staffie came roaring out of somebody's driveway. I stopped the bike and held out a hand to the staffie, who was obviously the boss, and who calmed down and shut up as she recognized me as a human instead of an evil, two-wheeled death machine that was coming to destroy her family and steal her food.
Once she looked reasonably calm I pushed off again and immediately the silly girl started howling her head off and chasing me once more. I stopped and held out my hand a second time; this time, when she sniffed it, I swear she looked sheepish, as though she was ashamed of having forgotten I was human, and trotted off with her head hung in shame. Staffies are very easily antropomorphized, I know, but I'm pretty sure that's what happened.
Fuckin' staffies, I love'em, if I didn't think breeding dogs was evil I'd totally beg the F-word to let us get one. I wish they were my work-underlings sometimes - not sure how good they'd be at industrial journalism, but at least when I scream at them to turn down the suck, they'd have the graciousness to look ashamed of themselves.
martedì, febbraio 08, 2011
Jesus of the driveway
So we got rid of our rats by boarding up the holes they were coming in through. Easy. The thing is, the agency had already put down poison for them so yesterday we got the spectacle of one slowly expiring on our driveway, and I couldn't scrape together the balls to kill it and put it out of its misery. I couldn't stop thinking about it - how it would feel when it heard the birds, or smelt a cat walking by; how its little animal brain was dealing with the pain. It gave me a bit of an existential crisis to be quite straight with you - that something as precious as life is so easily taken away because one disease vector (us) didn't want another disease vector (the rat) to be alive anymore.
Completely honestly, it gave me a total Jesus moment - it's a powerful religious story, when you get a reminder of how shitty, brutal and commonplace death is, to be told that someone who was God let himself be killed by people for no particularly good reason. Other religions are fearfully death-y of course, but I don't reckon there's ever been a deathcult quite like Christianity, in the sense of it being a religion where you are told that your God chose to share the worst fucking shit that could ever possibly happen to you, or to any animal, just to show how much he loved you.
In that vein: I question the relationship people have spent the last 100 years drawing between the advent of scientific explanations for things and the petering-out of religion in developed countries, which only seems to apply to Christianity while everyone in the world is getting more or less clever, and which assumes, I think unreasonably, that most people have a high degree of familiarity with the scientific explanations, or even an awareness of them.
I think it has more and more to do with a universal unwillingness to consider death as the end of you. Every religion makes its peace with the idea of its proponents rolling on and on into the grave, and most of them even deal with the idea of the extinguishing of you-as-a-person; even the Christian idea of heaven, depending on who you listen to, means an existence totally in harmony with God's will, rather than happily sitting around on the clouds playing harps and eating Philadelphia cream cheese, and certainly rather than continuing to be yourself up there.
I think, rather than ascribing our irreligousity to scientific explanations for things, it can be ascribed more to our utter unwillingness over the last century to admit that the Self is fragile, mortal, and will one day be utterly annihilated in both existence and memory. Christianity does offer some pretty mixed messages on that one, I'll admit, but at its core it's a deathcult ruled by an all-encompassing holy spirit and frankly doesn't leave a tonne of room for the cult of individuality, and it doesn't leave room for a society that will watch death played out balletically in its films and movies, but doesn't let its old people or sick people die at home.
Anyways, now there's a dead rat on my driveway and I'm trying to get the F-word to deal with it because it's gross.
Completely honestly, it gave me a total Jesus moment - it's a powerful religious story, when you get a reminder of how shitty, brutal and commonplace death is, to be told that someone who was God let himself be killed by people for no particularly good reason. Other religions are fearfully death-y of course, but I don't reckon there's ever been a deathcult quite like Christianity, in the sense of it being a religion where you are told that your God chose to share the worst fucking shit that could ever possibly happen to you, or to any animal, just to show how much he loved you.
In that vein: I question the relationship people have spent the last 100 years drawing between the advent of scientific explanations for things and the petering-out of religion in developed countries, which only seems to apply to Christianity while everyone in the world is getting more or less clever, and which assumes, I think unreasonably, that most people have a high degree of familiarity with the scientific explanations, or even an awareness of them.
I think it has more and more to do with a universal unwillingness to consider death as the end of you. Every religion makes its peace with the idea of its proponents rolling on and on into the grave, and most of them even deal with the idea of the extinguishing of you-as-a-person; even the Christian idea of heaven, depending on who you listen to, means an existence totally in harmony with God's will, rather than happily sitting around on the clouds playing harps and eating Philadelphia cream cheese, and certainly rather than continuing to be yourself up there.
I think, rather than ascribing our irreligousity to scientific explanations for things, it can be ascribed more to our utter unwillingness over the last century to admit that the Self is fragile, mortal, and will one day be utterly annihilated in both existence and memory. Christianity does offer some pretty mixed messages on that one, I'll admit, but at its core it's a deathcult ruled by an all-encompassing holy spirit and frankly doesn't leave a tonne of room for the cult of individuality, and it doesn't leave room for a society that will watch death played out balletically in its films and movies, but doesn't let its old people or sick people die at home.
Anyways, now there's a dead rat on my driveway and I'm trying to get the F-word to deal with it because it's gross.
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