this is what happens when you become to your life what a janitor is to the building he cleans:
you become a somali pirate who boards a french naval flagship thinking it will be full of easy plunder, only to realize, too late, that your life is forfeit and the premises upon which you based the conclusion “I must become a somali pirate” were all false. your argument for piracy is invalid, irrelevant, its conclusion false, you are dead and nobody will ever know who you are.
you become a robot. no, you become a person watching a robot, convinced that it is you. maybe your robot has a robot wife, and you watch them having clunky robot sex and are not wholly satisfied. maybe you recognize that it isn’t really you, merely a robot, and maybe you are bothered by this, but ultimately still accept it, if not as reality, then as the more comfortable option. because if you reject it, you are even less than a man watching robot sex: you begin your search for another person burdened by your past life of watching robot sex. which is unacceptable.
you become a half-vampire who can’t rest during the day because the sun still hurts and can’t rest at night because, frankly, you are a half-vampire. your vampire friends know you are only half a vampire and are very sensitive to your feeling uncomfortable when they invite you to parties: they always have tomato juice on ice. your human friends are mildly curious about your being a vampire, having vampire brethren, etc., but they don’t want to bother you with the imposition of their asking about these other vampires, since they don’t know them. nor do they feel it’s their place to ask you what it’s like to be half a vampire, feeling that it would belie an inner prejudice: if they wanted to know, why not ask a full vampire? do they think your being half human makes you any more able to answer a question and be understood than a full vampire? does it? you will never know, because you’re only half a vampire.
you become the captain of a ship which just hit an iceberg. do you do the chivalrous thing and go down with it? do you question the logic which informs this chivalry? that would mean there would be one less captain out there. think of all the knowledge you could share with captains-in-training. you could be the example. “don’t fuck up, or you’ll hit an iceberg.” the north star of the captain’s moral compass. but to do so you’d have to get off the ship, which breaks both tradition and chivalry. and don’t they teach that to captains-in-training, too? which is more important? maybe you stay on the ship trying to figure it out, and by the time you’ve decided to get off, your ship has already sunk.
you become tree-man. your body is covered with tree-like tumors. TLC flies a film crew to your remote island in the west indies. they make a documentary out of your condition. it is in very good taste, and you don’t feel exploited. however, when you go to get the tree-like tumors removed, you realize that when they are gone, you will become a regular person, of whose life TLC wouldn’t bother to make a documentary. before you’ve decided if anything done specifically for or against fame is, by necessity, exploitative, you’ve already gotten the surgery, and nobody remembers your name anymore.
these are horrible things: these are modern, necessary things.
