XXThe Hiss Quarterly || Volume IV, Issue 3

Oh too-smart man of stopped-up fate,
the spurned, you know, can't procreate.

My sad clever friend, the world to its great loss craves communicants not Zarathustras. This will only add to your sense of solitude, but I confess there are times when you exceed my grasp. Though I find myself appreciating, as Eliot would say, even where I do not fully comprehend. Our reasoning faculties need shorter shrift, don't you agree? Poets are our essential dunces. Let's have more useful idiots plucking flowers from passing clouds!

I believe Lamarck's giraffe is your kindred soul, another victim of over-speciation. While its long neck is an evolutionary response to high leafy branches (the longest necks historically prevailed), in times of drought when the higher reaches have been exhausted and sustenance can be found only in the lower climes, our erstwhile champions stumble. Evolutionary triumph devolves into ineradicable cul de sac. Singularly constructed for dizzying heights, the giraffe's long neck is far less adept at stooping. Evolution is the attempt to outwit the manifold guiles of Mother Nature. But we tend to dwell on origins. I'm struck more by the undifferentiated oblivion that greets all species when their luck invariably runs out --an oppositional Noah’s Ark. Sometimes the dissembling is frozen in the amber of television’s glare. In the last Republican debate, three candidates raised their paws in opposition to evolution. Darwin would call this stooping for votes. Verily The Age of the Pygmy is upon us. Have you tried appealing on your knees?

So your intelligence has evolved to the point where it now dines upon itself. Ludicrous as an appendix, it burns holes in the rote sleepwalk of everyday life. Let's not forget the peculiar human additives of envy and self-inflation, responses you never fail to elicit. Many a wise man has succumbed to moronity-in-the-aggregate, the dull-witted thunder of a million hooves. Gravity, the physicists assure us, is a profoundly weak force. And yet it is exactly what keeps us all down. To be spurned by the larger group --albeit for petty reasons-- is no less a recipe for extinction than eunuchism. So salvage some pride, pack a bag, and keep your balls! Anticipating a hostile reception, the hermit always banishes himself first. From some high summit, Nietzsche said 'loneliness is guilt'. Stooping to modernity's below-the-belt tastes, Dr. Ruth might offer: 'avoid long-necked lovers'.

To the masses goes pure sloth! Born to plod and liking it that way, they are hardly gluttons for strenuous thought. Forget aptitudes. Most people are simply too lazy too plow through the Western canon. Not when they have themselves close at hand to pore attention over. And what an interesting navel you have my dear! Even the mediocre nurture a sense of exceptionalism. We are each precious little snowflakes holding up our end of a dull wet blanket of snow. Add to this inertia a narcissistic proclivity, the resentment class’ gnashing of teeth over Dead White Europeans (what could 'they' possibly know about 'me'), and voila, the uber-self-absorption movement finds its hooves. Why venture past the doorstep when you can hyphenate your identity and embrace tribal comforts? Know thyself. Fuck the others and the pigment they rode in on.

The affluent, working closely with high-profile developers, have fashioned a fully amenitized response to disguise what, to the properly jaundiced eye, appears as a full-scale retreat from the graffited polis. That is the gated community. The alligatored moat, so gauche and 'last year', has been replaced with an invisible gilded electric fence where all things are blissfully extra-Constitutional. The kangaroo court comes in mauve and Navajo white. The security guards hold black belts in killer smiles.

Covertly, they want to regress you to the mean. Overtly, they will resist publishing you, as that is tantamount to publicizing their own shortcomings. What possibly can be gained from empowering the smarter man? I concede nothing here has helped as you knew it all already.

It's true
they know not what they do.
Inadequacy --not insight
is the motherlode
they take from you.

I've said it.
Now take distance
from me too!