RE: Destroy the Big Bad
09-12-2016, 07:00 PM
(This post was last modified: 09-12-2016, 07:36 PM by ☆ C.H.W.O.K.A ☆.)
On this particular occasion I was sitting in a dentist's waiting room, thumbing idly through a Highlights magazine and interrogating the moral absolutes of Goofus and Gallant. Formally, it necessarily posits a world where morality is wholly divorced from consequence and intention, and instead comes from on high. It is wrong to color your walls with crayon, yes, even if you like it better that way. Even if it hurts nobody. You must help clean the house to spotless before guests arrive. No, it is not as if they will somehow think you've never made a mess. After all, the guests live in homes too, which also need cleaned when you are invited over there — the thought of simply living completely tidy in the first place is simply too preposterous for the panels to hold. For that matter, so is the thought of simply dispensing with the pretext (which everybody knows to be artificial) altogether. This pretext, manners, was then made synonymous with good behavior, with goodness itself, even though a man can smile and smile and shake hands and still have a heart of coal. Maybe that's who these comics were for: emotionless alien invaders who had to assimilate to human culture, to be more flawless than the actual people around them. Certainly, nobody I had ever met seemed to particularly care if anybody's shirt was tucked in or not. It was hard to even imagine someone so judgemental.
I was one motherfucking precocious 12-year-old. Maybe it's that I wasn't raised Christian, or maybe it's that I was on the cusp of adolescence and tired of feeling bossed around, talked down to, even though I absolutely deserved it and needed it. I was never ill-behaved — no, I can't say that with the temper I used to have. I was never rebellious for the sake of it. My idea of rebellion was cutting across the grass instead of taking the circuitous sidewalk route everyone else took, because it was a shorter, more efficient distance. As I grew older, I grew to see the artificial pretexts of the world as, though phony, valuable; the very foundation of society, as George Costanza might point out. Artificial pretexts, I would conclude, is all there is to human life.
The dentist asked me how often I brushed my teeth. "Never," I said. I grinned, but who knows for how long?
Charge: 1
I was one motherfucking precocious 12-year-old. Maybe it's that I wasn't raised Christian, or maybe it's that I was on the cusp of adolescence and tired of feeling bossed around, talked down to, even though I absolutely deserved it and needed it. I was never ill-behaved — no, I can't say that with the temper I used to have. I was never rebellious for the sake of it. My idea of rebellion was cutting across the grass instead of taking the circuitous sidewalk route everyone else took, because it was a shorter, more efficient distance. As I grew older, I grew to see the artificial pretexts of the world as, though phony, valuable; the very foundation of society, as George Costanza might point out. Artificial pretexts, I would conclude, is all there is to human life.
The dentist asked me how often I brushed my teeth. "Never," I said. I grinned, but who knows for how long?
Charge: 1