Sixteen Volts

Since the water was supposed to be turned off for repairs in this building and it was so nice out there, I decided to make this season's first "megawalk". I walked along the Eglinton Avenue, starting from the Islington subway station and then about ten miles later ending up at Yonge Street at the famous "Young and Eligible" area. As good as walking on a treadmill has been for my legs, occasionally walking in real places that I haven't seen before is much more interesting. I also visited two libraries along the way, and one of them, the Maria A. Shchuka branch, had quite a collection of graphic novels. I took as many with me as I could comfortably carry and then continued along my merry way. Later on the way home on the subway and bus, the trip did not feel too long since I had things to read. My legs are pretty sore now and will probably be even more sore tomorrow morning, so perhaps I should go sit in the hot tub to give these poor feet a treat.

Before that, as I was looking at my SiteMeter page, I noticed that the post "Visit These" at "2 Blowhards" recommends my writing and describes it as "wonderfully droll" and "fearless". I am happy for this honour and welcome all you new visitors from that direction. I first mistakenly believed that the word "droll" roughly means the same as the more common word "boring", since that's at least what it ought to mean based on what it sounds like. But then I checked the dictionary, and I guess that it's a positive adjective to use. It's always good to learn new words.

I guess that in one sense, I am pretty "fearless" in writing all this stuff. But it is mostly that I have had a lot of practice in this, and I never properly internalized certain rules of thought control that most of you North Americans seem to take for granted. You know, the ones that dictate that you must proclaim absurdities such as that a typical homeless person is a valuable member of humanity from whom we could learn a lot about real life. Second, I'm fortunately not really in a position in life where I would have to "watch what I say", as the famous expression goes. Giving up to fear would be pointless, since most of the threats that are used to keep heretics in check turn out to be empty or hot air if you call their bluff.

Whatever good qualities my writing contains, they have all come from me trying to learn from my eternal idol The Danimal, whose razorlike logic and posts have taught me that there is no shame whatsoever in pointing out things that are obviously true, and this practice doesn't need any euphemisms or sugarcoating. This little grasshopper is slowly learning to understand this, and I can already say without a moment's flinching or hesitation that, for example, old women and obese people are ugly and therefore worthless to most people, as demonstrated by their actions. The next step that I aspire to is to be able to automatically use the handy words "defective" and "loser" whenever some hypocritical people demonstrate by their own choices and actions that they believe that these words apply to some other people. Perhaps one day I will even be able to come up with diamond paragraphs such as

In a way, the parables of the happy defectives are not unlike the antebellum propaganda of the happy slaves, singing their happy songs as they picked cotton in the fields all day.

Defectives typically play word games in an attempt to evade the stigma their defect generates. The mistake in their reasoning is to associate the stigma with a label, rather than with the underlying defect the label describes. People are not stupid enough to be fooled by word games for long. Invent a new word to describe something that most people find disgusting or inferior, and in due course they will learn to associate disgust or inferiority with that new word.

Christ, if I had only had Danimal Archive available to me when I was eighteen years old. I can only hope that right now, somewhere out there, there is some young nerdy guy who finds this archive and makes a good use for it. If there is even one such person, then my collection work has not been in vain.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Tuesday, May 02, 2006 at 3:21 PM