Order Sixty-Six

I missed a necessary doctor’s appointment this morning. I just laid in bed as the alarms I’d set last night went off; seven-thirty, eight o’clock, nine o’clock. I might still be lying there if the loathsome fucks next door didn’t start in with their goddamned bass noise, as per usual.

Hey, maybe I should thank them. Unfortunately, I have lost the desire to deal with other human beings completely. I have “shut down”. I considered shutting down my websites as well this morning. I meant to wake up early to beg my roommate for bus fare so I could make my appointment, and I just said “fuck it”. I don’t want to use Atlanta mass transit any more. I don’t feel safe around other people and I probably never will again. Thank God I’m broke. I don’t want to leave my bedroom.

The past two days taught me this: I have no friends. Every single human being on the face of this earth is a potential enemy in hiding who will shoot me in the back the moment their masters order it done. And once I’m dead, they’ll lie about me to numb their guilt. They’ll say I deserved it, because I said or thought the “wrong things”. They’ll throw parties and cheer my early exit like fetid ghouls.

Any faith I had in humanity is extinguished. I am physically sick to my stomach. This is beyond rancor, or animosity; this is chagrin on a Brobdingnagian level. I’m too disappointed to hate the persons responsible. I’m disappointed in myself, for opening up my life to the people that I have in the past. Half the world (or more) had their little “mask off” moment, and I’m expected to somehow pretend that these are human beings worthy of compassion, and not the shitting monsters I’d always feared they were.

I don’t want to entertain you anymore. I don’t want to make you laugh, or brighten your day with a clever thought or a cartoon. I want you all to go the fuck away. Keep your distance. As far as I’m concerned, every one of you is a threat. Don’t even make the mistake of approaching my family. If you see me on the street, turn and walk the other way, or I will. There is literally nothing positive that will result from encountering me. I’m back in NYC “street mode”; after all, I was born there in the early 1970’s, when it was a literal urban death-maze. I won’t even look your way or acknowledge that you exist. I don’t want to, I don’t have to. As a matter of fact I would hate to.

For most of my creative life, I have tried to maintain at least some affection for my audience and for the things I lampoon, even when I do so harshly. I don’t feel that affection now. I feel the overwhelming urge to use my art and humor as a weapon and hurt people where it will cause the most damage. I want to draw cartoons that will burn your homes to the ground. I want you to feel as sick and demoralized as I feel. Hopeless. Worthless. Despised. I want to take everything you love and rip it to bloody pieces in front of your eyes while I laugh.

Only I can’t laugh. That’s how disappointed I am.

I can’t laugh anymore.

I should’ve known better. I should’ve listened to guys like R. Crumb, Jim Goad and my roommate when they told me that all of you are bad. I just didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t think I could carry on in life, if I truly believed that there was no hope for humanity whatsoever.

Well, I guess now we get to find out. You proved to me, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that there is no hope. You proved that there is no reason for me to trust you, ever. You proved that I should never feel remotely safe around you. You proved that I’d be a fool to even turn my back on you.

You made your choice; I can’t feel sorry for you. I feel sorry for the people who’ve behaved like compassionate human beings in the past two days, who are now lumped in with you by species, and irrevocably dragged down to your level. It’s not their fault, they did the right thing. But a million good deeds add up to zilch thanks to a single malicious act. To you, a martyr is just another method of dehumanizing your imagined enemies. And all the while, you fail to realize how you’ve made yourself the enemy. The only one you’ve successfully dehumanized is you.

If someone’s first impulse upon seeing a human being’s neck blasted apart in a geyser of blood (by a sniper’s bullet as they were speaking at a public gathering) is to log on to social media and willfully defame that human being with erroneous political acrimony, I strongly suggest that you expunge that someone from your life before you learn the hard way. They don’t deserve to be debated, informed, or even heard. Just walk away.

For all you know, they’ll do the same to you. For all you know, they’ll be the one pulling the trigger next time, when the target is you, or someone you love. Hell, even if and when you die of natural causes, they’ll be on social media laughing and quoting you out of context to make you look like something you’re not.

They literally showed you that they’re that kind of monster.

If you want to keep company like that, I guess you have to learn the hard way, like I did. You’ll have to face the realization that almost no one you know thinks for themselves, and that nothing but a few words keeps them from taking your life. That’s the world our children live in now. No compassion, no humanity. Think how they want you to think, or be killed.

I’ll refrain from blowing smoke up everyone’s asses with parting words about how “we’ll all be OK”, or that “tomorrow will be better”. Tomorrow will be worse. Everything will get worse, until we die, and then none of it mattered anyway. Nothing does matter. If your opinions differ from the narrative, expect to be murdered by zombies, and for the narrative to continue on unchallenged, forever, even if it’s all a lie. The zombies don’t even look like zombies. They look like you. And there is nothing you, I, or the fucking man in the moon can do in a thousand lifetimes that’ll change that.

Absolutely nothing.

But at least we know who’s to blame.