Talking Heads

The following is a phone conversation I had with a friend. Enjoy, and please don't hate me.

**********

“So what are you doing for your spring break, Jesse?”

“I’m going out to Milledgeville, about 2 ½ hours away, to hang out with my friend at his dorm.”

“What are ya’ll going to do there?”

“Go mudding, he’s going to make me watch the entire first season of Dexter, and… we’ll probably set lots of things on fire.”

*laughs “Sounds fun.”

“Yeah that’s my idea of a good weekend. Mud, murder and fire.”

“What are you going to set on fire?”

“Whatever looks like it should be burned. Well, not anything living. Except for plants, trees, bushes, stuff like that.”

“Not much of a tree-hugger I take it?”

“Definitely not. I’m not interested in driving around cars that make no sound and look like a Rubik’s cube.”

“Don’t you want to save the environment?”

“Dude, human beings and all of our crappy, smoking, smelly machines make up about 1% of the CO2 in the world. All of the termites in the world create more CO2 in a year than all the cars in America do in a year. So instead of driving around shitty cars, I think we should have a mass termite holocaust. Which we could only do by dumping lots of nasty chemicals into the ground, which would be the pinnacle of irony.”

“Where did you hear those stats?”

“A British journalist. Jeremy Clarkson’s his name. Never looked them up to make sure though. But no, I don’t care about the environment. The environment can kiss my ass. I’m never going to own a Ford Focus and drive a vehicle that has an eco-friendly top speed of 80.”

“So you’d rather rape the land?”

“Yes, yes I would. I think you’ve got it, man. I want to rape this land, and rape it good! The previous generations clearly didn’t give a shit about us and the next generation will see us as the worthless history they shouldn’t have to learn, so they won’t give a shit about us either. Why in the world should I sacrifice fun in my life for a generation of people that I don’t know, don’t care about, and who don’t care about me? The answer is that I shouldn’t. We figured out how to cope with the shoddily-built industrial cities that the past generations saw fit to burden us with. We used our technology to deal with it. Let the new residents figure out our mess. I’m not the earth’s landlord; I don’t care what happens to it. And you don’t either.”

“I care.”

“Why?”

“Because we should. It’s important to leave things how you got them.”

“Oh is it now? What, like how we treat rental cars so well? Give me a break. It’s a fad, it’ll go away eventually.”

“Ignoring problems always makes them go away.”

“Most of them, yeah. Because they weren’t solvable or real in the first place.”

“You’re such a pessimist.”

“I see the glass as half-empty because I saw the damn fool who came in and drank the first part of the glass. I know it used to be full and now it ain’t.”