Saturday 30 June 2012

E - Taking Out the Garbage

"Satan represents responsibility to the responsible, instead of concern for psychic vampires!"

When I was a kid, like most kids, my weekly "rite of passage" into manhood was taking out the garbage.

Every week, on Wednesday morning or the night before I would have to take all of the bins from behind the shed and put them in the front lawn. I hated doing it because, especially in the summer time, spiders practically infested the undersides of the handles so I would usually spray them with a hose first, or failing that, wear a pair of welding gloves I had from school.

Every week I would dread carrying those fucking things from the back to the front, as if it were some major chore. And there were a few times where I wouldn't be quick enough; where the garbage would just pile up for another week. On those weeks I never forgot; with bags spread out everywhere and usually, the neighborhood cats having torn into a few of them, what could have been relatively easy turned into a major task of cleaning up garbage. It was a real nuisance.



Life is like that, too. We are creatures of mass consumption, and the excess waste we produce as a by product of our everyday lives is heavy, and piles up quickly. It is the little stresses that accumulate; the harmful people we meet, the problems that we face every day. But after awhile, it gets to a point where you have to deal with it, to clean it up. You can only hide it so long before you have piles of shredded bags, bones, and dirty diapers littering your lawn.

My life has become a perpetual series of waste removal tasks. There was a time when I would allow harmful people to be, and stay in my life; either because of some misplaced sense of altruism, or because I thought they could change. But you can never expect people to change, especially as adults; people aren't good enough for change, at least not the ones who would take from your existence to begin with.

On that basis, it can only be said that people come in essentially two flavors; the useful and the useless. You can't attribute direct value on human life because there is far too much of it to go around; instead you need to identify people with utility, those from whom you have something to gain, to embrace them, and to eliminate all other imposing entities from your life.



Self preservation is the highest law. Just like forgetting a week to take out the trash, I learned the consequences of keeping people in my life who had no value to me, from whom I could gain nothing. The people I bother talking with at all, the people who I spend any of my time with: they don't realize just what a rare thing that is. It would be immensely arrogant for me to call them lucky; they are only lucky insofar as they enjoy actually having me around as well. But the fact of the matter is, if I for one second doubted their trustworthiness, or had any reservations about their quality, I wouldn't take a second look at them. In fact, upon my calculation of just how toxic they could potentially be, I may even be openly hostile to them just so I am clear on my intentions of staying away from them at any cost.


Quality is all that matters in life. Quantity means jack shit in a world with close to ten billion human beings running around on its damaged surface. 


Take the things in your life which harm you, and smite them hip and thigh. Take out the fucking garbage.

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