My life is not notable. I have never done anything particularly worthwhile and I probably never will. With the exception of beating “Starfox 64” like nine times in a row on my 12th birthday, my personal history is completely barren.
If the insectoid schoolchildren of tomorrow can read human letters, they will probably not read my 700-page autobiography “I Married A Millionaire! and other lies.” My friends and family all address me coldly and without joy. The Selective Service declined my application for the draft.
I am the kind of boring young man that dictatorships breed for the explicit future purpose of show trials and execution. My manner is not striking, my speech is not pleasing, my charm is not winning.
Not that I am upset about this: If the Goddess had given me energy or enthusiasm or wit, life might be better, but my command of Wikipedia would suffer intolerably. Some prices are too high.
Death and Death alone can change my situation, and I have no desire to speed that bleak workman along in his task. No, I will end my life in the natural fashion: locked away in the Mad Scotsman’s gilded safe of illusion, covered with sand crabs and honey, drowning in flat Dr. Pepper.
The only present option is obliteration. Ambition will only ever leave us tired, study will only ever leave us tired, affection will only ever leave us betrayed.
There are many ways of obliterating yourself, any one of which will do, but most of us prefer drink to prayer, fencing, or agriculture.
Cynics jestingly refer to drinking as “international law,” and their words refer to something like truth. Indeed, in the enormous, bloodied set piece that is Earth, nothing comforts quite like liquor. Obliteration calls, obliteration sings.
“Now we drink!” was the belief that drove our Founding Fathers to invent this nation of mutes and murderers, and it still lodges in the heart of loyal Americans everywhere. Obliteration is the light, obliteration is the way.
The Congress is convened by an embittered housewife, who takes a few ceremonial shots of Templeton Rye and tries to forget about the past. Sometimes I think about the backward nations who exclude alcohol from their legislatures, and I laugh. Obliteration will deliver, obliteration has delivered.
If I have ever seen American happiness, it was in the cold eyes of a con artist or in the steady hands of a marksman.
Life is not for us, and we will burn our way out with heads held high. In conflicts, we strike quickly and without mercy and our parents and preachers watch and smile.
Look at the schoolchildren, who chain smoke and hustle one another endlessly. How easily it comes to them.
Can there be any doubt that obliteration is our destiny as a people, that Fate has chosen us to be the assassins of feeling?
Our current religion is that of money and cool, but even it could be left by the wayside. The apocalypse does not ask you to earn or to style, but only to sharpen your axe and look east.
My friends make great sport of the Nine Judges, who carry themselves with arrogance and pride. I join them in their catcalls and whistling, and I even pitch the occasional pie, but I doubt myself. How am I any better than these puffed-up fools?
Certainly I have always striven for obliteration. When I was seven, my youth pastor congratulated me on my fine command of Biblical language but warned me about my obvious nihilism. The warning did not take.
I drank a fire-breather martini instead of attending my brother’s high school graduation; I convinced my dog that she was insane; I spent last January lying under a board. Life is not my goal.
But obliteration is difficult, and as a goal it tends to destroy its champions. Most people here do not recognize its inherent difficulties and think that the occasional weekend of drinking and theater will suffice. It will not.
Easy goals, however, are not worth the working for. If obliteration came easily, it would quickly lose all of its charms, and soon we would move on to some new petty obsession.
Brace up, my strong classmates! We will see the world burn sooner rather than later, and in that fine fire we will find a final warmth.