Might makes right

To you. To everyone, the world really.

I just started reading Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand.

Of course, of course, I had heard of it. I had been exposed to it.

I even lived in a house with it. I remember specifically looking at a shelf where the book lived with The Fountainhead, and Foucault’s Pendulum.

These were all very fat paperbacks, with exciting, compelling covers that I never once cracked. They belonged to a woman. She was a woman when I was a boy, and she did her damnedest to drag me into modernity with her.

She was six weeks younger than me.

When I met her she was smarter than me, while I knew her she was smarter than me, and by all probability is still a lot smarter than me.

After starting the book yesterday, and realizing that it is prescient in nearly every detail to the world of today, I couldn’t sleep. Not a wink.

I lay there thinking. Not about the downward slide of this country, or the captured prose fifty years in the offing, not about the electorate knowingly refusing to learn or actually know anything.

No. I thought about her, and the person she might have been, and may be. We had never, to my recollection, had a political discussion. I think she had that book when I met her. The person that would form in a fire like that must have been great.

I wouldn’t know.

She read that book and could see the future approach. I read it now and see the past. I read the futures not lived, and the failure to change the world on every page.

I am so sorry to everyone. If I had been the mischievous reader then that I am now, this mess could have been avoided. At least steps could have been made and others fought to get us off in a better direction.

I wouldn’t be the person I am now, that is certain. Whatever that means. I wouldn’t have had the ridiculous adventures I have had. I wouldn’t have done ill to the world. Or infrequent good. The folly and misfortune wrought by me would not have rippled out.

I am sorry again. Not because I have enjoyed my life, but because that is all I have done

It’s a hell of a thing.

Living.

Strange how that happens if you let it.

Tragedy.

How about it?

How about a really good story that you know is not going to end well?

You are still going to read it, right? If you are me, then you are going to read it over and over again, each time new, and each time with the fresh and fervent eye that you [me] hopes will finally seize upon that detail, forgotten by the author, ignored by the publisher, and undiscovered by critics, that single, lifesaving detail that will allow this tale to go on.

That’s if you are me. Lots of people read lots of books. People can go through their lives not reading the same book twice. There are lots of books to read. Too many, I think to read them all.

A person need not dwell on the few books any one of us should chance across in our days, but that person is not me.

I am some other person. I am a slow and methodical reader. I read the words, and let them soak in. I stew in the context and steep myself in the precious art of the writer.

It is also the way that I speak, and it has a tremendously limiting effect on the number and types of relationships that I can have, and have had. Not only do I speak slowly, and precisely, but I use words that can take on different meanings, but they are used properly when I do, and if there is offense to be taken, it is always by me, and it is always because people do not listen to the words you use, always because people do not pay attention to the things that you say, urgent as it is that they get their chance to speak.

I also hate to be interrupted.

I am not a dullard. I speak the way that I write, and I write the way that I speak, and as sympathetic an ear as you are right now, can you honestly say that you wouldn’t break in on me if I were talking to you? Wouldn’t you? Even if it wasn’t out of disrespect, you might think I needed help getting around to that point buried in all that context.

I do not need help, I want you to be in my thrall. I want you to hang on my every word, to hear them and let them change your life.

You might say pathetic. There is a better descriptor, one more accurate. This is the word I read over and again in conversation, hopeful, and not the least bit jaded:

Tragedy.

Chickens don’t fly. They just don’t. If they did, they would be some other kind of bird. The ones that try can get their feet off the ground, but they tumble comically back to the earth after a few flaps.

There are some that assumed they were chickens, because that is what they were told all their lives. These ones pulled back their wings and took flight. Turns out that they were ducks or some fucking thing, this metaphor is stretched to the breaking point.

Now all the people who made their living blowing up at the chickens realized that the effort was for naught, and stopped breathing. Without the updraft the chickens did what chickens do; they fail to fly.

The falling chickens don’t hit the geniuses in the federal government that folded them up in the first place, they hit all of us.

That is really spectacular.

Now comes the really good part. The part that makes me realize that I would never have the intellect to work as an elected official.

While everyone is dodging the falling fowl, and sliding through blood-soaked gristle on the sidewalk, I have already heard the rumblings.

Cunts in Congress saying that we can’t have all these chickens falling from the sky, it ain’t safe after all. They are debating the whole idea of flying based on the types of birds they put up in the sky, not on birds that do well there.

They completely ignore the fact that the birds in the sky do just fine when you leave them to fly, but the whole system flops when Charles B. Rangel says who should fly, and who should not. Just because Ol’ Charley thinks they should be in the sky, does not mean they know how to fly.

He did this, and now we are subject to his whim. Now he will say that there needs to be oversight of who is allowed to fly, when he is the exact fucking twat that put us in this situation.

I am not going to ask the arsonist who lit the match how to put out the fire, and I am not asking economic advice of Charley Fucking Rangel.

I can take comfort, at least, in the fact that he cannot be enjoying his life. I imagine his security contingent is pretty strict. I am sure he is in lockdown to prevent any of the people who voted for him from getting at him. Hatchets and torches are still pretty easy to get, and I am sure the people left in the neighborhoods that he destroyed would love to get their hands on him.

There comes a point when you have to start caring, and I have a pretty high threshold. It does not effect me what the people of New York want to do with their vote, but when they elect a guy for decades that stands on high and starts throwing paper chickens off a cliff, its hard not to get hot.

When he starts telling me I should work harder to save the chickens, I get downright violent.

So, stay inside for now, Charley, you are not in jail yet, and you should hope you get there before the proletariat gets their hands on you.

You’ll be fine. I am sure prison life will suit you.

Let me tell you, though, if I see you in the Dominican Republic in a couple of months, I am going to stick my finger right in your eye.