Everyone deserves our spite

In an age where few had left any fucks to give, I knew of one who took a kind of rebarbative solace in being against. Against infinite resignation. Against intransigent empathy. Against supposing that truth is a woman or that we might find a chaste place to stand and assess and measure and judge and condemn. Dirty-handed complicity isn’t underhanded or a fall from grace; it’s a baseline condition.

This person lived a quiet life, doing honest work, telling everyone who was naked that they were naked, and going a-sauntering when it seemed the time and hoeing beans simply for the sake of counting bushels at harvest. Only a measure of solace he drew from this, though, not the full compensatory redemptive sort: consistency in this pessimism against any and all comers (what are you rebelling against? Whaddaya got) the heated forge out of which the constancy of his character might be welded. Can’t hide the seam, though.