I made a few observations at the Hungarian Pastry Shop the other day that I thought were worth noting.

#1

There are all these house sparrows, song sparrows, european sparrows flying around, hopping from table to table scooping up crumbs. There was this adolescent calling quite loudly, fluttering its wings, whining, begging its parents to pick up a crumb and stuff it in its mouth, when there are crumbs everywhere and the lazy thing could’ve just picked up a damned crumb itself.

The scene appeared quite adorable to most people, who smiled and picked off a piece of their cake and hand fed it to one of the birds, and the rest would come in a frenzy over to get a piece.

It’s cute, sure, but my god did these birds irritate me, so domesticated, totally dependent on us and $10 cakes for sustenance. There is no necessity in their lives: they have no natural predators, no foxes or lynxes, and all the house cats are too fat and spoiled themselves to do any real hunting.

Who are we in relation to these birds? Who is a parent in relation to a basement-dwelling adult child? What is our country in relation to the third world? We shower them in abundance, get them hooked on the drug of material plentitude and easy credit, make them dependent on us and our system for their surplus-sucking quality of life, render them fat and impotent. And if you dare show even a hint of will-power and self-sufficiency, you are a predatory species, a problem child, or a terrorist country who must be eradicated.

Now imagine when the petrodollar and the easy credit and the security forces fail — when the breadcrumbs stop falling, when the Manhattanite professionals lose their credentials and can no longer afford that overpriced pastry — then those birds, those kids, those countries are gonna be on their own and they will need to find their independence, to become self-sufficient, to band together/break apart and survive.

Certainly many of the fattest of the birds, the most useless of the adolescents, the most “globally”-dependent of countries will not make it, but such death is necessary to remind us that life cannot forever be a glutenous kingdom of heaven, that it is a struggle and that this struggle gives life meaning.

#2

There’s this old man who’s trying to walk his dog past the pastry shop, but it decides to sit its ass down at the door and not move. The old man tugs on the leash, which is pink and attached not to a neck collar but harness around its chest, and the dog scooches forward a bit before putting its rear in reverse and sitting back down in front of the shop. This animal was asserting its right via peaceful protest for a god-damned pastry.

This dog is probably used to every other day going with this washed-up intellectual to the pastry shop and sitting at his side while he reads the latest uninspired and lifeless work of fiction of the NYT bestseller list, waiting for him to drop down a piece of his croissant.

This dog used to be a wolf! It used to be wild, ferocious, traversing tens of miles daily hunting for prey. Even worse see the man whose ancestors domesticated this beast for his own benefit and survival, now allowing this lesser animal dictate his actions, now dependent on this thing (closer to a stuffed animal than any sort of living being) for “emotional support.” Somehow we’ve made even our pets into little consumers; maybe soon this dog will have its own digital wallet, receive its own stimulus checks, and purchase its own croissant.

All these elderly septua/octo-genarians don’t have any grandchildren because their millennial kids aren’t getting married till thirty, so they fill the void by showering their dogs with their love and their savings — gifts and treats and home-cooked meals — like they’re grandchildren. These dogs, with those big eyes, are (or are made to be) perpetual beggars, dependents, without opinions or conflicts or wills, they never grow up and curse their forefathers and pave their own way.

Most of these old people tell themselves that these dogs must be very happy with all the abundance, with no obligations whatsoever, but my god, I say, what a horrifically miserable life! They are drowning in all this abundance, cooped up in apartments, scratching at the door wanting to roam and fight and and live! These dogs have no necessity: their biology mandates that they hunt and scavenge and reproduce they just eat some old hag’s duck confit with their balls chopped off, wallowing in heirless plentitude until cancer — the biological indicator of poisonous overconsumption — swells their body up to the point of failure.

There is nothing more infuriating than the condescending, “who’s a good boy?” “who’s a good girl?”. It deprives this animal of its wildness, it tries to make this fierce force of nature into another lamb of god, another complacent consumer in the global supply chain. I look forward to the day when a dog, hearing that phrase, bites the ankle of the person who said it, when it bites that hand that feeds it.

#3

Now there’s this homeless guy, going around to tables asking for money. He goes up to this one guy — sort of gentrified-y, indie, (if I had to guess) gay and left-leaning — who pulls a Chobani yogurt out of his bag and hand it to the man. Then, the homeless guy shakes his head and rubs his belly implying such yogurt wouldn’t agree with him and refuses the nice indie man’s offer. Now even the homeless are picky! Even they have this god-forsaken choosiness! There’s no survival pressure at any rung of the ladder…only overabundance; we’re a bunch of flies drowning in a pot a honey.

Sure survival isn’t nice, it’s hard and difficult but when it is somewhat evenly distributed, when a whole society from the bottom to the top — the homeless to the penthousers — are hit with an inescapable, existential call to action, then you’ll find real equality, then man finds meaning.

#4

Now, this is a sad one. I saw two Asian parents with a child. The child was resting on his mother's lap. I would guess the parents were in their late thirties but perhaps exhaustion had aged them. Looking only at the child’s face, he appeared to be about eight, but his body was underdeveloped, the size of a toddler's. He was frail, his limbs shorter and thinner than usual and his feet small and permanently turned inwards. The mother then turned the child onto his chest, placed him over her lap, and hit his back as if she were burping him (note: I considered using the “it” pronoun here, as this child had so little agency, was such an object being acted upon that he hardly in this instance possessed the personhood implied by the “he” pronoun). Then, the mother took out a large syringe filled with some semi-clear liquid and inserted it into a tube connected to the child's stomach cavity, presumably to feed him.

There's a prevailing belief in the sanctity of life, that every life has a right (under God or some vague notion of “human rights”) to exist. But there comes a point when one must ask whether a life deprived of all agency, will, ability (the things that make life worth living), a life of total dependence, a life on the brink of and nearly indistinguishable from death worth living? The whole life-death dichotomy is (like most dichotomies) a false one: a sickly baby, a diaper-wearing old man, they, on each end of the cycle of life, are closer (temporally and practically) to death, whereas the self-sufficient and capable thirty to forty year-old approaches the zenith of what it means to live (connect the dots and you’ll find one period of a sine curve, trough to trough).

Then think of the life-sucking effect this child has on his parents, think of all that they were unable to do, all the resources they poured into preserving a being closer to a corpse than a living creature. We think the death of a child to be something unquestioningly bad, but this is a distinctly modern notion. Think if this child had not survived simply due to the natural survival pressures of the world being exercised upon him (let alone the old-school option of just leaving the thing in the woods), then these parents could have another healthier child (or two or three) and the whole family would be better off (and so might the fitness of the whole species).

The purpose of life (says Nietzsche) is finding the right time to die. If this child had any agency, he would recognize that his right time to die would be immediately because he is a total burden on all those around him, depriving them of vitality, while being incapable of living himself; but, because the child has no agency, he is unable to take any action on that conviction. The only players with any agency in the matter are the parents (or, in a more Huxleyean situation, the state), who, it could be argued, are categorically imperantur (commanded, required; see the categorical imperative) to fulfill the life’s purpose of this agentless child. Now, instead, the deathliness of the child engulfs their lives, sucks up their life-forces. Thus we see how the preservation of life — in the cases where that life is weak and unable to fend for itself — leads to the proliferation of death.

I made a few observations at the Hungarian Pastry Shop the other day that I thought were worth noting.

#1

There are all these house sparrows, song sparrows, european sparrows flying around, hopping from table to table scooping up crumbs. There was this adolescent calling quite loudly, fluttering its wings, whining, begging its parents to pick up a crumb and stuff it in its mouth, when there are crumbs everywhere and the lazy thing could’ve just picked up a damned crumb itself.

The scene appeared quite adorable to most people, who smiled and picked off a piece of their cake and hand fed it to one of the birds, and the rest would come in a frenzy over to get a piece.

It’s cute, sure, but my god did these birds irritate me, so domesticated, totally dependent on us and $10 cakes for sustenance. There is no necessity in their lives: they have no natural predators, no foxes or lynxes, and all the house cats are too fat and spoiled themselves to do any real hunting.

Who are we in relation to these birds? Who is a parent in relation to a basement-dwelling adult child? What is our country in relation to the third world? We shower them in abundance, get them hooked on the drug of material plentitude and easy credit, make them dependent on us and our system for their surplus-sucking quality of life, render them fat and impotent. And if you dare show even a hint of will-power and self-sufficiency, you are a predatory species, a problem child, or a terrorist country who must be eradicated.

Now imagine when the petrodollar and the easy credit and the security forces fail — when the breadcrumbs stop falling, when the Manhattanite professionals lose their credentials and can no longer afford that overpriced pastry — then those birds, those kids, those countries are gonna be on their own and they will need to find their independence, to become self-sufficient, to band together/break apart and survive.

Certainly many of the fattest of the birds, the most useless of the adolescents, the most “globally”-dependent of countries will not make it, but such death is necessary to remind us that life cannot forever be a glutenous kingdom of heaven, that it is a struggle and that this struggle gives life meaning.

#2

There’s this old man who’s trying to walk his dog past the pastry shop, but it decides to sit its ass down at the door and not move. The old man tugs on the leash, which is pink and attached not to a neck collar but harness around its chest, and the dog scooches forward a bit before putting its rear in reverse and sitting back down in front of the shop. This animal was asserting its right via peaceful protest for a god-damned pastry.

This dog is probably used to every other day going with this washed-up intellectual to the pastry shop and sitting at his side while he reads the latest uninspired and lifeless work of fiction of the NYT bestseller list, waiting for him to drop down a piece of his croissant.

This dog used to be a wolf! It used to be wild, ferocious, traversing tens of miles daily hunting for prey. Even worse see the man whose ancestors domesticated this beast for his own benefit and survival, now allowing this lesser animal dictate his actions, now dependent on this thing (closer to a stuffed animal than any sort of living being) for “emotional support.” Somehow we’ve made even our pets into little consumers; maybe soon this dog will have its own digital wallet, receive its own stimulus checks, and purchase its own croissant.

All these elderly septua/octo-genarians don’t have any grandchildren because their millennial kids aren’t getting married till thirty, so they fill the void by showering their dogs with their love and their savings — gifts and treats and home-cooked meals — like they’re grandchildren. These dogs, with those big eyes, are (or are made to be) perpetual beggars, dependents, without opinions or conflicts or wills, they never grow up and curse their forefathers and pave their own way.

Most of these old people tell themselves that these dogs must be very happy with all the abundance, with no obligations whatsoever, but my god, I say, what a horrifically miserable life! They are drowning in all this abundance, cooped up in apartments, scratching at the door wanting to roam and fight and and live! These dogs have no necessity: their biology mandates that they hunt and scavenge and reproduce they just eat some old hag’s duck confit with their balls chopped off, wallowing in heirless plentitude until cancer — the biological indicator of poisonous overconsumption — swells their body up to the point of failure.

There is nothing more infuriating than the condescending, “who’s a good boy?” “who’s a good girl?”. It deprives this animal of its wildness, it tries to make this fierce force of nature into another lamb of god, another complacent consumer in the global supply chain. I look forward to the day when a dog, hearing that phrase, bites the ankle of the person who said it, when it bites that hand that feeds it.

#3

Now there’s this homeless guy, going around to tables asking for money. He goes up to this one guy — sort of gentrified-y, indie, (if I had to guess) gay and left-leaning — who pulls a Chobani yogurt out of his bag and hand it to the man. Then, the homeless guy shakes his head and rubs his belly implying such yogurt wouldn’t agree with him and refuses the nice indie man’s offer. Now even the homeless are picky! Even they have this god-forsaken choosiness! There’s no survival pressure at any rung of the ladder…only overabundance; we’re a bunch of flies drowning in a pot a honey.

Sure survival isn’t nice, it’s hard and difficult but when it is somewhat evenly distributed, when a whole society from the bottom to the top — the homeless to the penthousers — are hit with an inescapable, existential call to action, then you’ll find real equality, then man finds meaning.

#4

Now, this is a sad one. I saw two Asian parents with a child. The child was resting on his mother's lap. I would guess the parents were in their late thirties but perhaps exhaustion had aged them. Looking only at the child’s face, he appeared to be about eight, but his body was underdeveloped, the size of a toddler's. He was frail, his limbs shorter and thinner than usual and his feet small and permanently turned inwards. The mother then turned the child onto his chest, placed him over her lap, and hit his back as if she were burping him (note: I considered using the “it” pronoun here, as this child had so little agency, was such an object being acted upon that he hardly in this instance possessed the personhood implied by the “he” pronoun). Then, the mother took out a large syringe filled with some semi-clear liquid and inserted it into a tube connected to the child's stomach cavity, presumably to feed him.

There's a prevailing belief in the sanctity of life, that every life has a right (under God or some vague notion of “human rights”) to exist. But there comes a point when one must ask whether a life deprived of all agency, will, ability (the things that make life worth living), a life of total dependence, a life on the brink of and nearly indistinguishable from death worth living? The whole life-death dichotomy is (like most dichotomies) a false one: a sickly baby, a diaper-wearing old man, they, on each end of the cycle of life, are closer (temporally and practically) to death, whereas the self-sufficient and capable thirty to forty year-old approaches the zenith of what it means to live (connect the dots and you’ll find one period of a sine curve, trough to trough).

Then think of the life-sucking effect this child has on his parents, think of all that they were unable to do, all the resources they poured into preserving a being closer to a corpse than a living creature. We think the death of a child to be something unquestioningly bad, but this is a distinctly modern notion. Think if this child had not survived simply due to the natural survival pressures of the world being exercised upon him (let alone the old-school option of just leaving the thing in the woods), then these parents could have another healthier child (or two or three) and the whole family would be better off (and so might the fitness of the whole species).

The purpose of life (says Nietzsche) is finding the right time to die. If this child had any agency, he would recognize that his right time to die would be immediately because he is a total burden on all those around him, depriving them of vitality, while being incapable of living himself; but, because the child has no agency, he is unable to take any action on that conviction. The only players with any agency in the matter are the parents (or, in a more Huxleyean situation, the state), who, it could be argued, are categorically imperantur (commanded, required; see the categorical imperative) to fulfill the life’s purpose of this agentless child. Now, instead, the deathliness of the child engulfs their lives, sucks up their life-forces. Thus we see how the preservation of life — in the cases where that life is weak and unable to fend for itself — leads to the proliferation of death.