I met up with someone a couple of weeks ago who actually changed my life in a heartbeat. Isn't it amazing when that happens? Such a profoundly ironic moment. He was drunk. I wasn't. He's not really an amazingly bright guy, and the combination of his intellectual limitations with the way they were amplified by his inebriation made it rather difficult to carry on a conversation with him. Nevertheless, he rambled, and I listened, and I realized something. Something terrifying. To quote Twin Peaks, "The Owls are not what they seem."

The man was babbling on and on about "the big picture". He noted, first, that there was one. Surprise! Then, he proceeded to correctly identify the societal problems stemming from the fact that 99.6% of people don't see it (I felt like a mentor, watching the student finally come to the same conclusions I had come to years before). [BEGIN SARCASM] Once again, I was shocked by this, I can tell you. I mean, I never would have thought that most people are really stupid and just don't get it. [END SARCASM] Ok, seriously though. The thing that really got to me was that he shouldn't have been talking about it. He didn't see the big fucking picture either. He was too stupid. The dude was preaching the ultimate truth directly to the choir and he didn't even have the capacity to comprehend the true wisdom of his own words.

What does all this mean? It's simple. I've spent my entire life feeling almost totally alone. Not the loneliness of a lost cat or a confused child that can't find it's mother; rather, this is something much more cosmic and far more serious. This is the loneliness of a child that wakes up one morning at eleven years old and realizes he lives among a society of apes, who will never, ever take care of him, shelter him, help him in any way, and who will inevitably destroy all that they know, despite what are often good intentions. And that there is nobody he can tell about it who will really understand. Step back out of the box for a moment, and try imagining the belief that you were privy to the most universally terrifying knowledge possible, and that you were certain that you were going to have to bear that burden alone, for the rest of your long and tortured existance. If you can imagine what that would be like, you're on the way to understanding the younger, less informed and far less depressed person that I used to be. The me that exists now is simply too far gone to explain. Nevertheless, I was still a child then, and could still be comforted by the good things in life (that is the definition of a child, you know: one who can put aside their fear and be drawn away from the problems in their world by all of life's little distractions - kittens, girlfriends/boyfriends, board games...). What kept me going was the simple knowledge that other people really did feel this way. Not that there were many of them, but certainly they weren't all that uncommon. After all, during my strange educational history I was constantly meeting warped individuals who were sincerely scared by the world and, in my boundless naivete, I was convinced that that was enough. Convinced that that meant they understood.

It wasn't until buddy came along that I really finished growing up. Really finished my synthesis into a fully polished character. Really got to the stage where I can't possibly become RE-illusioned. All at once, this guy just came along and awakened my consciousness to the notion that there was a middle ground between me and the impish, undeveloped little fucks that normally wander this planet. There are, I finally decided, people out there to whom it has occurred that there are bad things afoot on this planet, but that doesn't mean that they get it. That doesn't mean that they see the bigger picture.

Ellos son de una tierra llana, y tengo tres dimensiones. Ellos pueden ver sólo una rebanada de que yo sea.

The Owls are not what they seem.