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Yes, I am going to kill you, but it’s not what you think. I know what you’re thinking. You look at me, a mail sorter in a drab, dying mid-American town haunted by the laughter of children who have now grown-up and fled for more thriving cities on the coasts, and you think, “Here we go again?” Right? "Going postal?" Right? Wrong, jerks. It’s just like you people to jump to conclusions. “Oh, look he’s doing this repetitive work. Oh, he’s been reduced to heartless, unfeeling killer, a cog in a machine.” And so on. My killing you has nothing to do with my job, and to be quite frank, I think it’s a little presumptuous of you to assume you know my motivations. (And by the way this is not an “unfeeling” act. I really want to kill you!) Before I start, let’s just get this out in the open. I love my job. Yeah it gets a little a repetitive at times, but what, yours doesn’t? Come on. Who are you kidding? You think you’re Indiana Jones out there getting into hair-raising adventures Mr. Mid-level data manager? Give me a break. Can your crappy office job bring laughter to a child? Tears of joy to a lonely old grandmother? That’s what I do by being an instrumental member of the elaborate team that reliably brings mail to your door every day. So enough with the post office clichés already. Fact is I actually have some rather insightful and interesting reasons for killing you. One: The death of teleology. From birth, we consigned to a spinning, meaningless void. In that light you should actually be thanking me for killing you. (You’re welcome, by the way.) Two: We are all characters in play staged by random force doomed to be played again and again and again ad infinitum (that’s Latin). It’s what Nietzsche calls eternal recurrence. “This life,” he writes in the landmark Genealogy of Morals, “which you live and have lived, must be lived again by you, and innumerable times more.” Someone needs to break the cycle. Oh, what. A mail sorter can’t know anything about Nietzsche? Three: Time is not fluid and cannot be changed, but is actually something of a frozen rope that stretches out before us. So my rope, your rope, the rope of the journalists who will write about this massacre, the ropes of the soon to be crying family members, even the ropes of the politicians who will use this as a touchstone for their dreary 2nd Amendment debate, they were all stretched out before them the moment their father’s sperm found sweet purchase in their mother’s egg. So what do you think about all your gross generalizations now, you jerks! Now where was I? Oh that’s right! Killing you…
Date Written: February 02, 2006
Author: scoop
Average Vote: 5