poe thoughts and scribbles for my aching soul

After 3

Libra: After stripping. In lesson six I teach children that they are being watched. I keep each student under constant surveillance and so do my colleagues. There are no private spaces for children; there is no private time. Class change lasts 300 seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students are encouraged to tattle on each other, even to tattle on their parents. Of course I encourage parents to file their own child's waywardness, too. I assign "homework" so that this surveillance extends into the household, where students might otherwise use the time to learn something unauthorized, perhaps from a father or mother, or by apprenticing to some wiser person in the neighborhood. The lesson of constant surveillance is that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate. Surveillance is an ancient urgency among certain influential thinkers; it was a central prescription set down by Calvin in the Institutes, by Plato in the Republic, by Hobbes, by Comte, by Francis Bacon. All these childless men discovered the same thing: Children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under central control. It is the great triumph of schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best parents, there is only a small number who can imagine a different way to do things.

Cancer: After registration. It’s going to be a hellish day already from the way the clouds shroud the sun. It’s tense, taking the first roll out of your car to see what haunting labyrinth awaits in front of you. It’s outside walls resemble those of the palaces of great tycoons, and the guards who stand next to you don’t make you feel anymore comfortable. Welcome to, what us common folk call, the DMV. Thankfully, you picked a great time to come here as there’s pretty much nobody else here. That should’ve rang off some alarm bells, but I don’t think yours are functioning up to performance. Get onto the ramp and head up inside, I’m sure they’re just as excited to meet you as you are to meet them. As the doors open up for you, the eerie atmosphere of the being the only person there, aside from that guy in the corner eating Pop Rocks, creates a very cold feeling.Your hand approaches the receptionist bell with a shaky palm. The bell has been rung, it’s over and done. Fifteen minutes have passed and nobody has popped up from the dreaded desk… how peculiar. Thirty-three minutes have now passed and still nobody shows up to ask for your birth certificate and billing information to renew a license that was doomed to expire. Now, any rational person would realize that the old dude sitting the corner was most likely part of cleanup crew, and this place must be closed. But you’re no ordinary person, as your senses tell you this must be a sting operation. Quickly, seize the man, tie him to a chair, and threaten his life until these assassins show their faces! Nobody’s getting outta here, with their lives renewed, until you get your license renewed.

Virgo: After ageing. Remember your childhood nemesis? If you don’t, then that’s not okay. You can’t just live a normal life without having some emotional burden causing unnecessary drama in your life. We need to revive your old grudges back from the dead to forcefully open up old wounds again! First, we gotta start out this process of emotional infantilizing by throwing away all of your sense of position in the world; you gotta act like everything revolves around you, and anything that happens to you is of world-shattering proportions. Now that your inner child is starting to get a grasp on your soul with their tiny hands, you must let them take it over. Look back into your oldest memories; recall when she accidentally suffocated your pet turtle, when she took your shoes without your permission, when she ate your Fruit Roll-Up. Yes, the inner child within you grows restless and your state of mind is starting to degenerate. Next, we take this to the next level: find out if she still lives in the same house you always associated her with. Next, tag along something that’ll make you earn her trust, and then, in ultimately irony, let your gift have the duality of being both a sign of trust and a weapon of murder. These wounds are so old that the tissue they cut is barely recognizable. On second thought: we may be going a little too far with this. Look, let’s try to settle your dispute with her in a way that hits home with a battering ram. We shouldn’t cause any harm to her through conventional means, rather we should prove ourselves to be better than her. There’s only one way that this plan can end satisfyingly: a dance competition.

Sagittarius: After conversion. Everyone's version 2.0 of themselves now, didn't you know? After the so-called Great Invasion of the Northern Hemisphere, the entire human race had their brains teleported out of their skulls and placed right into artificially grown bodies. Oh, it was an absolute shitshow: the media was losing their minds as they were screaming live on air as bulky creatures grabbed them by their skulls. If you ask me, I think they were politicizing the event way too much. I mean, are we really gonna let something like this prevent us from focusing on the important issues like the national debt? And it’s not just the news media, I can recall my neighbors whining at me saying that I need to help barricade the neighborhood with whatever I got. I don’t know about you, but I’m not giving up this couch to help spread political hysteria to my own community. Aside from that, they were also crying to me about how their children have already been taken or whatever; I could’ve cared less about it. The strange part, about all that nonsense, was that nothing really changed though. Cancer patients still had cancer, amputees didn't get their limbs back, and you still have that embarrassing mole on your ass. Nobody really knows why it happened, because it was pretty useless, and if you ask me, completely made up so the coastal plutocrats can gain some political prominence with their weird-ass “brain swapping stories”, but whatever. Come on, we gotta go meet Brian Vogel v2.0 for that D&D campaign. You have to keep the “2.0” on his name whenever you refer to him, as he’s obsessed with this event as well.