Yesterday I turned 39, and what a long strange trip it's been.

If you had told me 10 years ago that'd I'd be exchanging email with total strangers and collectively gloat over the demise of people too stupid to live, I would have said, "You're a loony." 10 years ago I was swathed in black, listening to Cocteau Twins, :zoviet*france:, and This Mortal Coil, smoking nasty cigarettes and being very depressed and angry, as the Saturn Return of the great Three Oh loomed upon my life horizon.

Now, I am caffiene and nicotine free, and in a much better mood. I still listen to :zoviet*france:, though. This thin veil of civilisation, these vague electrostatic charges on the outermost limbs of our frontal lobes- so fragile, so fugitive, and so very evanescent, is in a state of continuous interchange with our barbarisms, and brutalities that bubble up from our medulla with such force and conviction. Is it evolution to provide a society to be kinder and gentler, where people can live in peace and harmony with no threats to thier homeostasis, or, to quote a piece by :z*f:,

"Or is it all just an illusion?"

And will we live in a world of murder and death until we ourselves as a specie are murdered and dead and gone? Will it be a Brave New World of predetermined genetic development, or will it be a world of people living in a giant trash heap left by their ancestors as they follow the herds, living in tents like their ancestors did?

What can it be? As we mine the materials from the earth, per the laws of thermodynamics and complexity, we distribute them in a form less usuable as it oxidises and atomises throughout the biosphere in a thin useless dirt- will that be our gift? Billions of tons of aluminium oxide dust and worn out molecules of petroleum polymers blown about by cancerous winds under an ultraviolet sky?

Evolution is not teleogical, that much is clear, but the human project is. And if the human project takes the reins of evolution in its grasp, then evolution becomes teleogical and subject to human will. What then? Heaven? Or Las Vegas?

"But my darling says 'Leonard just let it go by That old silhouette on a great western sky' And I strum out a tune and hum right along And they're gone like the smoke Yeah, they're gone like this song."

Buddha transferred his teaching through the twirling of a flower. Perhaps one piece of wisdom from this is that the universe is a flower, it grows from the dirt, expands in lovely colourful glory and eventually dies like everything else, but at the moment we see it as a flower, and it is beautiful.

And so perhaps it is that evolution is an aspect of the flower's development, and some little buds choose to open wrong and are consumed by the Flower Picker, under advice from a Victorian Gentleman with a great white beard and the foolish flowers shout: "Take Me!!!"

Take Me, they scream in their naivete, and the other flowers laugh at their stupidity as they are picked and die so young and foolishly.

But the plant grows more, and more flowers abound. Eventually the plant itelf dies off, succeeded by its offspring. Eventually all the plants will die off as the sun switches to its helium cycle and bloats into a red giant swallowing mercury and venus, then ,switching to carbon and finally to an iron cycle, whereupon it will dispose of its atmosphere, destroying the earth in the process. Life will have been long gone from the earth- long before the sun's switching to a helium cycle, it will have gone through several major atmospheric and core shifts resulting in the outpouring of massive radiation that lasted for centuries- scouring the solar system of its carbon based DNA life forms.

But for this moment, it is in full bloom and beautiful.

While we castagate, excoriate, and otherwise abuse the pitiable fools who form our daily stream of amusement in their sad anonymous deaths, we should also be thankful for them and treat them as the sacred sacrifices that they are. How many times have each of us pulled some stupid stunt and not had to pay even a minor price for our madness? But the ones we laugh at, (and laugh we must- so their mortal mistakes might have some positive use) the ones who pay the highest price for their mistakes - they are our greatest teachers. We do not teach them- they are too stupid and wouldn't listen when they were alive- but their deaths are lessons to us all- to ignore the Victorian Gentleman, heed not his deadly advice- to live calmly, intelligently, and with courage and skill.

And to flame the living shit out of anybody who pisses us off.