HOW TO BE A WEIRDO AND STAY ALIVE

You'll undoubtedly start by sitting there and seething at the brazenness of their attacks on you. It does seem surreal, too - like some sort of B-movie in which zombies have attacked the town but nobody seems to mind. It's too late to try to lock the windows - they're already inside of you. With the tacit help of almost everyone around you, there are people who are trying to take that most sacred of things, your mind, and re-write it. Force it to mutate into an abomination, a grotesque, a genetically-engineered microorganism that secretes the miracle drug, the production of which is the only reason you've been allowed to live.

You produce only two things of any interest - your money and your servility. They amplify your fears and insecurities, pervert your lusts and desires, and mutilate your curiosity and beauty to buy themselves sports cars or cement their authority. And it's a pretty lucrative system, too - try to buck it and you'll see what I mean. It's not enough to say, "You go your way and I'll go mine". It's not even enough to act just like them. You have to believe like them, believe in the Truth of their System. Believe like Them or they'll kill you.

That's not just hyperbole, either. It's easier to see if you go from the outside-in. Look at the Middle East - Jews and Moslems gunning each other down, blowing up innocent children (even though both of their gods tell them not to) because they know that not Believing is a worse crime than murder. They know this, of course, because some evil fuck somewhere played to their fears. Wait - that's overplaying it; they know this because of a web of fear, shared by their relatives and neighbors and fanned by those who benefit from it.

Other examples get even more disgusting. Look at Northern Ireland. These morons are killing each other over membership in two nearly identical sects of Christianity! Is Ulster full of perfectionist theologians? No - everybody's just in agreement that the Other Side is a threat to Our Side, because that's how it is. This mentality isn't just a mentality - it's a way of life, it's an identity, it's Real.

Here in America, we still hate the Bad Guys, which we used to call "Communists" but now we call "Drug Pushers" or "Terrorists" or "Child Pornographers". Not that these are nice people. Not that they even exist in the way they're described. Just like anywhere else in the world, They just need a Bugbear to keep you in line, and the Bugbear can be a Jew who wants to steal your land or a Molester who wants to seduce your son. Either way, you get scared and Do What You're Told. If you actually happen to meet up with a Bugbear in the flesh, well, you should mutilate it without remorse - otherwise, this whole system of fear just falls apart.

But what if you don't feel like playing?

Subvert

In order for you to live in a world where you can believe what you want, you have to destroy the idea of Belief itself. They have so perverted reason that reason must be denied to them. They make their lies into marionette-slogans and jostle them before us as we gape slack-jawed; we must take our lies and make them into marionettes as well. They determine the forms of dialogue available to us, and - wouldn't you know - they have Home Field Advantage in all of them. We must obfuscate their forms - create our own abominations through syntactic miscegenation - until these too are denied to them.

And damn them for their deceitful absolutes! These are cornerstone and currency of their reign. Simple enough to be swallowed by the most ignorant, sleek enough to be worshipped by the most credulous. The most ludicrous of their lies proven by extrapolation from a tiny truth. If the warmth of your mother's bosom is Good, then the fires of Hell are Better. This is why we offer no quarter; to an initiate, I could admit that it's all just a bunch of hooey, but They would pretend to hear me say I'm lying more than they are. This is also why we sometimes compare our dialogues to taking a shit. The comparison is a sham - we're merely autosabotaging to keep them purblind. Something as foolish as the Cerebus of scatology keeps them from our gates.

And so, we weirdoes must keep one set of cards in our hands and another in our heads. We must be able to switch from honest inquiry to ideological vomit with switchblade speed.

And so, we weirdoes must perfect their notions of Us and Them. We must commit to causing enough chaos that we can pass among them undetected. We must make Doubt and Uncertainty members of our club so that no one will be able to tell one of us from the other (not by camouflaging ourselves as one of them, but by filling their eyes with such patterns that we elicit no recognition).

And so, we weirdoes must be more normal than Them.

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