God only knows what you people think, but I hope it's at least pretty clear to anyone reading Walky Talky that I don't write this stuff for profit. Quite recently someone wrote to me to propose advertising on my blog; they were sent away with an incendiary flea in their ear. Nobody's going to make money off this bollocks in my lifetime.

Maybe a hundred generations hence, if WT happens to be one of the first cultural artefacts of the twenty-first century that archæologists decode, there may be some worth to it. Time and rarity can confer interest on even the most vacuous trivialities; any glimpse of daily life so far removed from one's own as to be almost incomprehensible has some kind of value. But right now, when blogs -- which is to say the random outpourings of random idiots -- are commonplace, who is to distinguish one from another?

Not me, that's for sure.

This really has been one of those weeks: gruelling, tedious, frustrating and tormented; and to no purpose that I can detect. Optimistically I'd perhaps cast it as a learning experience -- but do I really believe that?

Do we ever really learn?

Who knows?

When I was looking (desperate) for work a year and a half ago, one of Ian's suggestions of what I should seek from a new job was to be working with people smarter than myself. How can that come across as anything but grotesque? But perhaps there is/was some kind of sense to it.

I am, assessed as objectively as I can manage, an incredibly difficult person to work with; to be with; and, above all, to manage. Ian, who has spent more time with me than nearly anyone alive, no slouch in the smarts department himself and having the patience of a saint, describes me as the cleverest person he's ever met -- a description that tends to be inflected with a rather distressing measure of disappointment. He seems to have, despite more than 11 years evidence to the contrary, the same sort of expectations of me that I have of my darling nephew Samson: to be a force for good. To change the world.

What kind of debilitating, nauseating, unmatchable expectation is that? Have you any idea what it's like to have people think that sort of thing?

Jesus fucking Christ!

If you've ever read any of this blog, you'll know full well that I'm just another fucking moron; and there are more of us than you can comprehend. I'd like to say we should stand up and be counted, but the terrible fact is that we're doing just that; as, statistically speaking, we always have.

I can't help being stupid and useless. I mean, not stupid, exactly. But really, what does being smart count for? Any number of recent events -- now, as at any moment in recorded history -- stand as proof of the enduring power of utter idiocy:

Hey, let's advocate the murder of people who have some arbitrary connection with other people who did some trivial thing that pisses us off; or, at any rate, pisses off the power-hungry monsters to whom we've ceded what pass for our thought processes. Yes indeed, that'll edify the world, bring our detractors onside, reinforce what we laughingly imagine to be our values. Woo-hoo, let's join that fuckwit crusade! Really. It'll benefit us all.

And so, whatever side we're on, we lurch spastically toward the next holy cataclysm. It's what miscellaneous charismatic psychopaths want and who are we to deny them? It's the will of God, brother! Rejoice!

Rejoice, you fucking idiots.

I despair of the human race.

That wasn't at all what I started out intending to say, but there you go. Fuck me and fuck you all for allowing things to become as they are. I hope you're happier with being doomed than I am. Now pass me the Kalashnikov.