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Humanity really isn’t all that special, or evolved, or even nice. Wanna know how I know? I’ll tell you how I know.

Rubberneckers.

You know the ones. Accident at the side of the road, and everyone cranes their neck for a better look.

Some of us are so dead inside that even the scary, primal, direct-from-our-caveman-ancestors kind of jolt like the one I’m talking about is preferable to the numb, empty feeling that we carry around in our chests day-in and day-out. It’s like punching a wall just because you haven’t experienced pain in a while, and you want to re-familiarize yourself with the whole concept of ‘Ow, that hurt.’

Maybe it’s the involuntary (and one-hundred percent free) shot of adrenaline that you get when your subconscious starts wigging out at the sight of something dangerous, possibly fatal, that has just happened. When cavemen were roaming the mountain ranges and plains, if they came upon something like the still-bloody remains of what appeared to be a fellow caveman, survival instinct took over, and the pre-language equivalent of “Get the hell out of here right now!” would start playing inside their heads at the loudest possible volume, glands would get squeezed for every ounce of action-juice they could muster, and the caveman would flee to somewhere safe. Heart beating in their chest, they’d finally make it back to wherever it was they called ‘home’ and count their lucky stars that they didn’t end up like whats-his-face. That whole fear instinct lets us know that danger, or the potential for danger, is somewhere nearby, and that fleeing to safety is one heck of a fine idea.

Does that feel good to some of us? Living in a society that is relatively safe from violent animal attacks, fatal acts of nature and other caveman concerns, is that sort of thing something that we miss?

See, I’m not saying it’s precisely an addiction . . . but there’s a reason why reality television does as well as it does.

It doesn’t matter if you believe that human beings are inherently peaceful creatures who should all be vegetarians and live in harmony with nature so that everything can be about peace and beauty and everything wonderful. Fact of the matter is this; humanity didn’t get where it is by being weak, or passive, or gentle. We are the apex predator, folks, able to kill any other animal on the planet. If you are a living creature on this planet, you have ‘man’ listed as one of your natural enemies, and it doesn’t matter if you’re an elephant, a shark, or a baby kitten. Sure, human beings are aggressive, brutal animals, but by God . . . we’re very, very effective.

Thing is, you don’t take thousands of years of aggressive, violent, bloody instinct out of an entire species overnight.

And what does reality television focus on? Why, it focuses on angry people, or excited and crying people, or people who are *this* close to getting into a fist-fight. They focus on what’s ugly, or competitive, or humiliating, or aggressive, or violent, and they broadcast only those moments to as many people that will watch. The hours and hours of peaceful coexistence gets piled up on the cutting-room floor. They’re trafficking misery, the ability to judge and feel smugly superior to the poor hapless bastards you’re watching, thankful that you’re not one of them.

Maybe that’s a little closer to the truth than people are comfortable with. Most people aren’t as happy when good things happen to them as they are when bad things happen to people who aren’t them. Maybe it’s that shot of adrenaline that wakes us up from the cold, the numb. Maybe that satisfies the blood-drinking savage in you, the one you’re suppressing day-in and day-out.

The next time you pass a wreck on the side of the road, try to ask yourself why you’re looking. Then, when you have a second, look up the word ‘junkie’.

Update: Black Glass – still chugging away at 50%

Yeah, this whole Wednesday update got kind of dark on me. Maybe it’s a reflection of the fact that I’m barely halfway through the chapter right now. Maybe it’s because of a bunch of stuff. Maybe I just need a good night’s sleep.

Hey, that’s a hella plan!

Was going over some personal writing, and it made me chuckle. Sure, some of the chuckling was because of things like spelling mistakes and whatnot, but mostly it was due to how I handled stress in my old life working for a company that shall not be named. Hint: It rhymes with “Smell us”

Here’s a quick sample, one that I posted as a response to seeing a newspaper article about a guy who was planning to cook the world’s biggest hamburger:

Ooo…now I’m impressed

We have people working around the clock to solve hunger, cure disease, eliminate cancer, and save lives. Firemen risk life and limb to pull victims of house fires from flaming wreckage, EMT’s jump out of ambulances and race to save someone’s life. Police protect us from harm, both those who would do us harm and from the menace which is our own poor judgment, with hardly a sincere thank-you being spoken.

Yes, these heroes do the unthinkable, the spectacular, day after day after grueling unappreciated when-does-the-hurting-stop day.

So, of course, the media devotes an entire ‘news’ story to this guy, who’s making the world’s biggest burger. (Link to story) Congrats on making the world’s biggest lack of impact on anything worthwhile or useful.

Maybe I can top this guy and feel important as well…steal attention away from those mundane things that actually affect people’s lives, like the Herculean effort it took to minimize flooding damage, or hostage negotiation that resulted in a life being saved. Maybe I should try to set a Crisco-drinking record with dozens of media personalities there to witness the spectacle of me spewing viscous liquid onto a wall 12 feet away. Or how about I set the record for ‘Most times slapped by a fish in under a minute’ after inventing my new fish-slapping machine, the “Fish-slap-o-matic 500E”.

Or how about I let Guinness know that I’m about to set a stunning new world record for number of prank phone calls to undeserving unimaginative attention-grabbing brain-damaged monkeys making news by cooking really dumb things!

Gimboid. If you want to be famous but lack the courage to do anything meaningful in order to become famous, you don’t deserve it. Somebody did something important last night, so how about before you put your hand in the air and start waving around like a snake hooked up to a car battery you start thinking about what your media whoring is costing people like me, people who want to see headlines like “Man rescued from grizzly bear by hiker!”

Much better than headlines like “20 people suffer heart attacks eating world’s largest burger”.

Oh, and by the way…that burger is going to taste like powdered ass. Think big pile of sucks plus ‘meatloaf’, and then multiply by 40.

Ass.

So, yeah. Angry, angry young man. Still, I used words like ‘Herculean’ back then, and am forced to applaud myself for it.

Anyway, on with the updates:

Quarry – Outlining 50% done
Speaking of older writing. . .

Yes, very crazy fun stuff happening there. I’m concerned about what I thought would be the two climax moments, because I don’t know how I’ll get there with this new outline, and I’m not certain that their resolution would still be ‘clever’ under the current set of circumstances. That’s one of the problems when you’re writing character driven stuff – if your character happens to be a genius, then the stuff they come up with as solutions for dilemmas have to be really, really smart. A guy with a 185 IQ just doesn’t fall for the same sort of traps that a guy with a 65 IQ does.

Thank god I’m so freaking smart.

But the outline is progressing nicely, and while I might have to do some word-count estimates to make sure I’m still on track for a 125k novel (or less . . . wouldn’t that be nice?) I think I’m about halfway done.

Shakespeare – The Scottish Play – Act 2 Scene 3
*Spoiler Alert* Macbeth just killed King Duncan! What a dick!

… Anyways, things are progressing nicely with the Scottish Play, and there are parts that feel even funnier and less forced than the stuff I really liked in Romeo and Juliet, so this could be a good sign. Even the stuff that Shakespeare wrote down all stream-of-consciousness-like that I read and think “What?!” and read again . . . even that stuff I’m somehow making funny and poignant.