Still quite popular among the muscovites, but the dream is to be accepted by curmudgeonly weirdos

---

Everyone got so mean. I want evolution to run its indomitable elimination train over so many mean people ( eg, who take videos of retail workers to get them fired, for micro aggression or for being woke, both in equal parts - everyone is of a tribe that is culpable) and also despite urging for extinction of this cultural execrescence, here I sit, losing my shit, making it possible for random strangers to bring out the worst in me and make me stare at the mirror and puzzle over how truly bad, from a neutral Switzerland-like perspective, the worst in me is.

Howard Zinn, who opines that you can’t be neutral on a moving train, once gave a talk I attended 25 years ago. A man with a Russian accent asked him how he would arrange a system in which the man who cleaned the auditorium would be paid more. Or something like that. Zinn said he didn’t know. The questioner wore an expression that seemed to say QED. Capitalism wins by default. Reification by lack of imagination. And so on.

---

But somehow it would mean more if everyone who was angrily cool but substantive and not just superficially cool and ephemeral took these off the cuff sketches as pithy, well-rendered sentiments, compressed (sculpted even) in an uncanny and catchy way. What psychologists would DEEM, in all their deeming wisdom, peer validation.