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.