Tales From the Third Lobe - Network of Holes, Diet of Poison, Monster of Love

About the author: Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird. About his bi-weekly column: Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week. View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...

It's just a network of holes. The more you pull at the edges, the larger the holes get. Everything is covered, but nothing is retained. Large things leak through, everything else is marked and cut by fine threads.

I'm not taking care of myself. Throat is scratchy, like I've spent the night in a bar smoking—not that there are bars around here where you're allowed to smoke, and not that I can afford to pay someone else to pour me a drink. I need a shower and a shave. My hair looks like Nicholas Cage's in Raising Arizona. My beard looks like George Ohr's in a high wind.

Sackcloth and ashes aren't in style, so I'm sporting a t-shirt with one of Brett Helquist's illustrations from Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events bearing the inscription, "Things are looking worse."

When New Orleans sank bubbling and screaming into the delta, I stopped eating. Maybe once a day I'd remember to put a handful of something unnoticed and quickly forgotten in my maw. I've lived on cold coffee and warm bile and images of empty people with empty eyes and empty heads living on empty promises and buckets and buckets of no hope at all.

The betrayal is nearly complete.

I read David Quammen's book, Monster of God, which I expected somehow to detail the predator/prey relationship when man is the prey. In the face of the world outside the window, the book failed miserably. The writing was good. Quammen tried damned hard. But embedded in his own anecdotes and analyses was the message that people are monsters to each other, and that there are no monsters worse than we can be. No matter how much we are affected by the thought of an animal shoving us to the ground and ripping a juicy meal right off of our thrashing bones, we are affected more by the knowledge that a man with a gun and an official document from some government or other can take everything we own—our property, our family, our homes, our history, and our hope. We are so much less hurt by the knowledge that an animal who tries to eat us is merely looking for food to keep itself alive. A man with a pistol and a commission is uniformly working on the behalf of the wealthy and well-fed, any everything being taken from us will go to rot on the stockpile.

Now that I think about it, the book succeeded—just not in the way I wanted it to. I wanted it to draw me a picture of how people identified with the predators that they feared—how we make room in our heads for the entities that feed on us. What I got out of it, especially with the pictures of the tragic mishandling of Katrina's aftermath on the backside of my retinas, was a much grimmer message. Our lions and tigers and bears don't kill us because they are hungry or defending their own territory from competitors. The predators that kill us kill us because they hate us. They hate us because we are cursed by God, as is evidenced by our poverty and need, because fatness is a blessing. They hate us because our need makes them feel guilty for what they have, and that guilt fuels self-loathing and self-loathing begets anger and anger spawns hatred and hatred gives birth to murder by whatever means can be made acceptable by any form that corrupt government can allow.

"How dare you look longingly at my house or my car or my surgically sculpted daughter? I worked hard to be born to a family that would bequeath me this money, kissing up to a grandfather that beat my grandmother and ass-fucked my dad and spilled millions into universities and libraries so that the police would turn the other way when dad took it out on local prostitutes and broke my own goddamn arm, twisting it behind my back so that I'd lay still and take it? I earned every penny that I used to numb my conscience with drugs, that I used to buy up your filthy block of tenements and all of the grocery stores within walking distance of your overcrowded apartment so I could carefully balance the wages you earn flinging boxes in my warehouse with your rent and what you have to pay for your food so that you can't even fucking afford to visit the neighborhoods where I live and play, blowing off steam from the monumental stress and effort of keeping your lazy criminal ass alive but firmly in your place. I live the life I deserve, you worthless piece of shit!"

There's your real monster, friend. They're not extinct. These are the people one the boards of ten different companies, pulling down six figure salaries from each, contemplating running for senate because the pension plan is better and they can tweak the laws to give themselves better contracts and tax shelters. Fortunately they're a minority even among the wealthy, but there sure are plenty of them. It's easy to pick them out of the crowd, though; they tend to be the ones in charge.

We've carefully constructed their preserves and made it illegal to hunt them because they've convinced us that their existence is critical to limit the numbers of our own species.... And we sickeningly admire them, we venerate them, because we hate ourselves. We want to be like them, because we want to be them someday. We want to fuck who we like in a tight new orifice we just created with a pointed stick and buy the cops that would ordinarily bring us to justice and use them for our own personal protection—use them for condoms for fucking other people. We want to kill the little people and eat their fat bits in the street and sleep in a cave on a mound of the bones of our prettier victims. We'll kill out of gluttony and hatred. And once we're in charge, we'll cut holes in the laws so that it's perfectly goddamned legal for us to exist. We'll make ourselves a protected fucking species.

We don't paint our shamanic images on the walls of caves anymore. We print the images of the animals we admire in the pages of People and Forbes and on the front pages of USA Today and Time. We file past the newsstands and worship and build ourselves masks so that when we put those masks on, we feel more like these deadly creatures we admire so much.

And this is the poison I slurp that rubs my throat raw from the vapors of hot bile and acid. I have no desire to be fed on by someone I could kill with two fingers shoved under a ribcage or a quick accidental-looking elbow to a trachea, and I sure as hell have no desire to join the ruling class and dine on the flesh of the poor and despised. I want to be comfortable, but not at the expense of keeping the poor in their cages. I feel no need for more than my share, but I fear the delusions that would convince me that my share comes out of someone else's stringy backside. Besides, isn't it more rewarding, isn't the flesh fattier and tastier, when you eat the rich?

Society is composed of agreements we make as to who eats whom and under what circumstances. Everyone has to eat and someone has to get eaten sometimes, so we try to make the rules, if not just, then fair, if you get the distinction. When food gets scarce, everybody gets the same chance of survival, optimally speaking. We see the injustice and we try to cut down on the randomness, making sure we guarantee the survivability of those with greater merit, those who are more valuable to the rest of us. Don't eat the children. Don't eat those in possession of all the collected wisdom we need to defend ourselves from the assaults of mother nature. Don't eat those strong enough to defend us from our enemies. In fact, why don't we just eat our enemies? Why not just the criminals, the ones who choose not to live by the laws of society? Why don't we just eat those who aren't us?

But it never fails. During the lean times, we have to sacrifice more. The people in charge change the definitions of who is us and who isn't, to make the group known as "us" smaller and make sure that they are never the ones who get sacrificed. Sensing injustice in their own ranks, they start pushing and shoving each other and trample everyone else in the process. The survivors create more holes in the laws to absolve themselves and each other in the name of peace and getting things done and life goes on. And the process repeats itself, creating new holes where the fabric of society gets stretched thinner and thinner, until eventually we are left with a loosely connected network of holes that can stretch any way it is pulled—as long as you don't mind the holes getting bigger.

Our current set of agreements was designed for these specific purposes: to establish justice, ensure domestic peace, provide for defense, promote general wellbeing, and secure liberty for ourselves and our children—and provide these things for everyone, not just the wealthy or those already (or even hereditarily) in charge. BUT: there is no justice for people who aren't wealthy and white and Christian and heterosexual. Our peace forces don't go into certain neighborhoods. The common people aren't defended from any threat, man-made or natural. They are expended as resources for the wealthy. General feelings of wellbeing are at an all-time low. Liberties—especially those regarding free travel and assembly and religion and speech and the pursuits of happiness that in no way impact the happiness of anyone else—are being discarded left and right, especially for the common man. Evidence of equality is diminishing at an alarming rate, vanishing with any illusion of a middle class and diversity of race, creed, and culture within it. Or above it.

Our federal government, by the measures of original intent, is failing. Has failed. We have made room at the top for our beloved monsters. And we shuffle around in herds, trying not to look too young or too old or too weak or too sick. The smarter of us look to escape the pens, but we also try not to look too smart, because that sends us to the top of the list to be culled, to be put down in case we're contagious.

The evidence of the failure is our illness. The evidence of our failure is our daily diet of bile and whatever poor drugs our masters allow us that makes us feel better, because drugs are cheaper and more available than food. We don't think of them as drugs anymore because to us they have become food. Bile, caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol. The evidence of our failure is the loosely connected network of holes in our laws, in our news coverage, and in our stomach linings. We have holes in our thoughts—things we don't allow ourselves to think about—large enough to lose two million people in. We are nothing but a huge network of holes, and we are falling through them.

And we've made room at the top for the monsters that eat us. The monsters we love more than we love ourselves.

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Vidicon was the Buddha but the pay was lousy.