[<< | Prev | Index | Next | >>] Thursday, November 23, 2000
Hate and Evil
An entry for a very loud Thanksgiving morning... I thought it would be quiet here just once, but nooo.....I'm developing a serious hatred for Kula. The predominant sound here from dusk 'til dawn is gas-powered garden tools, with the occasional jack hammer thrown in for variety. On half a dozen occasions in the last month alone it's been loud enough to wake me up with my teeth clenched and my shoulders in my ears. Once it was the owner of our own house trimming our hedges, throwing off large chips of wood to strike the window above my head at random intervals. The neighbors aren't but a few feet further and between them all they keep the noise pollution schedule overbooked. One neighbor trims his entire lawn with a gas powered weed whacker (not a lawn mower) and I'd swear yesterday he was at it for nearly five hours, maybe ten yards from the window of the room I was trying to work in, trying by unfortunate coincidence to integrate 3d sound into my Megacorp project, trying to hear the subtle nuances to figure out whether it's tracking movement properly. I ended up going to bed at 5:30am because the quiet time at night was so precious. I ended up waking up a few short hours later and rolling around in bed the rest of the morning because the noise had moved from the office side neighbor yesterday to my bedroom side neighbor this morning. They're following me. They are evil. Why the hell does everybody here use gas powered tools? Nobody in this neighborhood has a yard larger than the reach of a cheap extension cord.
People suck. Humans are idiots. I think it's just that simple.
When Jaffo first discovered my journal, he concluded from the recent entries at the time that I'm a misogynist. Nothing's further from the truth -- I don't hate women, I just hate feminists. I hate them for the same reason I hate most 'ists--they begin with a set of emotionally mandated axioms which they hold above question.
Garrett* and I were discussing the other day the idea of making a movie where the person who is "obviously" evil at the beginning you realize by the end is actually the good guy, and vice versa. It would be easy to do with a Randian theme, with some emotionally empathetic socialist crusader as the audience favored hero from the start, and an evil capitalist villain viewed from afar, all the usual implications and assumptions encouraged... And then as the movie progresses, you start getting closer and closer to the "villain's" life, until by the end you are watching it from his point of view and realize that he's actually the good guy, that it's the other guy who's ultimately (though perhaps not entirely knowingly) been causing all of the grief and tragedy. We couldn't think of any movies that have done that. Can you?
And then by pure coincidence we saw it that night, except I can't tell whether they did it on purpose. Tell me, who are the good guys and who are the bad guys in The 6th Day?
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