I Am Distinctly Species-ist.

Let’s be clear here.

Something is not dreadfully wrong. Wrong as in ‘unnatural’ anyway. Recently, a guy in a foreign country (as it turns out- most countries are foreign) made his way to the supermarket and beheaded a British woman that worked there. Now then. This is a bad thing. No doubt about that. If you ever get the opportunity, do not behead me.

However, beheadings, or rather- sudden, weird and extreme violence will happen. With so many people this’ll happen. One thing that is becoming extremely clear to me now is that, numerically, people make us weird. And obviously not the good kind of weird, the beheading kind of weird. Maybe it’s because all the roles in society have been taken by others, or maybe they’re better at whichever role it is that you’re aiming for.

Like weathermen. If I suddenly decided that I wanted to tell people it was raining, I’d bet that even my neighbour might be better at that than me. Let’s have a little demonstration, but please bear in mind that this is mere type:

It’s going to rain.

There you go, now you know. I even did it in bold, and of course, even if you’re reading this in a few years time, the chances are that it is still ‘going to rain’- that’s a perpetual state of the planet. It’s going to rain. There- I just did it again, really quickly. Do you want to hire me? No, you do not want to hire me. Why? Probably because I don’t have a large colourful board behind me (as far as you can tell) and my neighbour might have beaten me to it. Not to mention that ubiquity of ‘other’ weathermen these days. Every weatherman I have ever met has not been me, and that is discouraging, to me at least. In my opinion, chances are that I’m not going to be a weatherman and my neighbour is.

And I don’t even know who my neighbour is, but that is the point.

I don’t know who the fuck’s out there, so I might as well take my chances and cut your head off. I can tell the police afterwards that I had every right- I was defending my weatherman career.

An unfortunate fact is that you can always become a serial killer if you want. It is the most un-ignorable way to get attention, and unless you live in a death-penalty nation-state then you’re probably going to be looked after as well, particularly if you play the mental-illness card. That is a card in the pack of every human, because we are, after all, all slightly unwell and easily unhinged. It is a method for survival in this super-tribe.

Ah…the super-tribe.

It would have to come to a point where, with every other role being presently filled and often much better than how you would do it, that the only way forward (inside your massive, echo-ridden mind) is to carve (literally) your name into the desk of the human experience- culture. Charlie Manson- I have heard of. You- I have not heard of.

I would make amends. I would also suggest that rather than machine gunning (a brilliant verb) yourself onto the front pages, I simply suggest you say “Good morning” slightly more often- it might be that enema of luscious normality you were craving. Especially if you get one back, rather than people just saving it for Christmas.

I have one, other, suggestion. Species-ism. I say that we unite as a species and take our frustrations that we naturally aim at one another and turn it towards another species entirely. As for now, we don’t have that human-level intelligent enemy that alien existence might bring forth, with which to wage some filthy war, but we do, however, have cows.

Cows. I don’t have anything against cows in particular. It’s just that (and I consider this a positive aspect of myself) I appreciate other humans more than I do cows, and that’s a compliment to you as well.

For now, I say that the cows should have it coming to them, bless ’em, but only in the name of our hopeful and perpetual love for each and every other human. Making each other valuable is all we can, and all we really have ever been able to do.

So, in the name of the species, ‘Fuck Cows’.

Sam.