It’s summer in Tucson again, and the rot has set in. The City is turning baby-shit brown with dust, just another layer of filth that is slowly but surely fossilizing us all. There’s no escaping it...This is, after all, Tucson; the City where dreams come to die.
But don’t you worry about me. I am so raged-filled & stressed out that the lassitude cannot touch me. My heels itch and my fists spontaneously ball up every time I slow down, and my lungs have become accustomed to not having enough air to breathe.
Even Knuckles says I’m an ornery bastard these days, but what of it? The constant drag of my profession - the daily horror of being Doktor Howl - has turned my nerves to glass and my skin to pure iron. If I exhaled hard enough, I could be used as a vacuum tube in one of those old radios.
But what Knuckles doesn’t understand is that this is the perfect condition to be in, for doing SCIENCE to people. He’ll learn, though, he’ll learn. He has the potential for being the best Igor any Scientist ever had, even if he hasn’t got a club foot and a hunchback. He refuses to lisp, but it’s not like I’m paying him, right?
That’s right, Knuckles, you just fetch me the raw material, and I’ll do the rest. If it looks like I’m about to go all Chainsaw Billy, well that’s just the coffee and/or bourbon talking. Coffee and bourbon fuel SCIENCE, and don’t let anyone tell you different. I am, after all, a Doktor, and these are grim days.
I don’t think I need to once again go over the litany of problems from the past, present, and future that plague us...Nor do I have anything but mocking laughter for the people who demanded a police state, and are now angry & scared about it. Learn to love the backscatter pervert machines at the airports, peasants. Learn to love the casual beatings dished out for dancing in public, “demonstrating” at the Jefferson Memorial, and just having the wrong skin color in the wrong state. YOU fucking howled for this shit, YOU made this bed, now YOU lie in it. I spit on you all.
Oh, yes...You have flung yourselves back into the past, back into the days of kings (even if you call them “elected leaders”, the practical difference is nil), back into the days of the “Captains of Industry” (sometimes called “robber barons”), you have lowered your pants and shat all over every man & woman that slaved and died over the last century to give you a better life, and now you’re getting what you deserve. Muhaha!
And you’ve brought yourself a bit of the future too, haven’t you? Mighty strange weather this year...The same patterns that have given us such a nice mild spring have locked you all in a frozen hell turned sodden and storm-wracked. SCIENCE warned you, but you preferred to listen to tame prostitutes with degrees - funded by big industry - who told you that everything was just fine. SCIENCE warned you that species diversification is necessary, but that we’re losing species at an alarming rate, but you chose to listen to appeal to ridicule arguments by paid whores on AM radio. YOU made this hell, now YOU freeze in it.
Worst of all, you have allowed yourselves to be taught that SCIENCE cannot be trusted, that you have to “think with your gut” (as one comedian once said, from the White House podium), that centuries of study can be replaced by wink from some bimbo from Alaska.
Time’s broken, and you bastards broke it. I’m just going to spend the next few years documenting the results...Not that there’ll be anyone to read it, necessarily, but because SCIENCE demands it. It also demands the hilarity, the laugh-until-your-guts-bleed fun that I have planned over the next few months.
It’s just my little way of helping you enjoy all the things you pleaded for, demanded, and then finally received.
I hope you choke on it.
Okay for now.
