I have taken to wearing shirts that my job gives me for the explicit reason of not fucking up clothes that my loved ones or myself have spent actual dollars on. This is usually not a problem, as I go to work and then go home or someplace like it where people don't bother me. However, when I got on the bus tonight, the bus driver did not even bother asking me if I work where the label on my shirt would indicate, he just opened with "do you work in the meat market?" I responded no, sat down, and pulled out my book, prepared to read for the next twenty or so minutes. Then I realize that the bus driver is talking. Talking about grass-fed, organic hot dogs that his friend read about in the New York Times. Talking about how grass fed is better because cows weren't "meant" to be grain-fed. How when they are grass fed, the beef has more omega-3 fatty acids, and according to paleoanthropologists, ancient people had a 1-to-1 ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acids, and that was what nature intended. Maybe I have been working the same job too long, maybe my lapse in vitamin regimen was affecting me even more than normal, or something else, but for the first time in a long time, rather than talk about "what ancient people" or what have you, the first question that occured to me was "what the fuck do I care what 'nature' intended?" After all, according to Thomas Hobbes, without the (not intended by nature) Leviathan of government, our lives would be "nasty, brutish, and short," and as Tennyson so concisely put it, nature is "red in tooth and claw." As far as I'm concerned, what nature intends for us is to struggle for about thirty or forty years and die of scurvy, or malaria, or poison berries, or wolves. Fuck nature. Fuck it right in the ear for wanting that for me and the people I love. Personally, I'd rather get cancer at sixty and choose to end it all than have my guts ripped out by a rabid hyena at twenty five. Because we don't do what nature intends, we eat better, live longer, and are more comfortable. So what is it with people who want to go back to what "nature intended?" For that matter, the whole idea of intention is flawed. We have evolved to be this way. From a certain perspective, the internet and jet planes and all the rest is just as natural as the amoeba. The amoebas and ants should be jealous of us, not the other way around.

Talking with Maya last night and discussing a mutual friend who we both looked up to at one point in our lives, and who has since become a broken hollow man. I raised the question of whether we should have heroes at all. Maya argued that there should be people who are not your parents (because they are the people whose flaws we notice first and most acutely) that you look up to. I'm not sure how I fall on that topic. Perhaps it's the relentless cynicism, but I tend to think that considering someone a hero is simply setting myself up for disappointment. Or perhaps it's just the terminology. There are certainly people I am aware of who represent one or another aspiration that I have for myself-I would like to be as arresting a writer as Charles Bukowski, but I have no illusions about what he was like as a person; I would like to make films that are as meaningful as any number of filmmakers whose work I respect, but I am also aware that all of these people are flawed. I tend to think that a personal hero represents a paragon-one whose life you feel you should emulate, and there is no one who fits that bill for me.

On another note, I have seen in two different locations a billboard for Wendy's that advertises buying a coupon for four "Frostys," the proceeds from which purchase will go to research and combat diabetes. It struck me both times that this is rather insulting, somewhat like advertising that a portion of the proceeds from sales of beef lard will go to combatting heart disease, or that the purchase price of a carton of cigarettes includes a donation to the American Lung Association. (Actually, I'm pretty sure that Phillip Morris-no wait, Altria has actually run that racket. Sickening.)