Because

The language your mother taught you through gentle cooing is nothing but is nothing but bestial groans randomly evolved into audio symbols of decaying objects

Because your father was a difficult birth, and your grandmother always wished you harm just to see him cry, and she has actually remembered your name all along, and never really had you confused with any of your cousins, she just wanted to give you that impression, in the hope you would be more likely to cut yourself that way.

Because you were drunk enough to fall in love with the first person to walk through the door, and you would have been much happier with the woman who walked through the door two minutes after the woman you're married to now, the one who is at this very moment fellating that Stevens boy from the third grade who called you shitface and gave you a gutpunch in front of the whole class.

Because you have never once in your life felt any spontaneous joy. The first time you saw fireworks you were content only because your mother looked so happy and seemed to expect you to be. The fireworks, lightshows, public revelries, in and of themselves, you have always hated with an old man's passion. Even that very first Independence day, when you smiled because your mother was smiling, even then it was so, yes.

Because you wake up in the morning and realize that, if that car you bought three years ago were struck by a meteor, you would only shrug and go back to bed, but if your car would be vandalized by another man, you would murder him, slowly, in a dark place, a cabin out west that you have rented just for this, and you know now that you have lusted for someone to vandalize your car this entire time, and that you never truly desired your wife or, come to think of it, any other woman at all, in all this time, ever.

Because it's Christmas, and that boy of yours, with that stupid smirk of his and that smell of urine that lingers even after he gets out of the shower, needs a present.





Buy him a worm farm, for the education. You can take out one of the worms, and pour salt on it, so that the boy knows the universality of pain, so that he knows that even those simple creatures who don't have brains, per se, just a small bundle of nerves where the "head" is, not enough to feel anything like true distress and certainly not enough to love or dream but only enough to know physical pain and respond to it. It's how they check for brain death junior. You maybe might take some buckshot to the brain yourself one day junior. In fact I imagine you probably will because I am a patriot. And when you do the doctors will stick needles under your fingernails to see if you moan or flinch and if you don't that generally means that you're not going to wake up. Merry Christmas boy. Now get back in the shower and wash yourself properly, with soap, before I have to get in there and show you how to do it myself.