Civilizations that thrive on excess--like, say, ours--are
inherently self-destructive.  That sentence probably didn't blow
your mind.  But what differentiates the time we live in from any
other is the type of awareness we have regarding our demise.  True,
there's been some fucker standing on the corner shouting "The end
is nigh!" since man learned the missionary position (see Quest for
Fire if you don't know what I'm talking about) and thus became
sentient.  I'm not talking any biblical end-of-the-world shit,
because that presupposes somebody or thing will do the offing for
us.  I'm talking about how it's the end of the world as we know it
and I'm doing it and I feel fine.  We all know the excitement of
participating in the destruction of something infinitely huger than
ourselves.  We are David to our own Goliath.  This is more than a
projection of our own mortality on the rest of the world, it is a
built-in desire that only the greatest men and women are able to
sublimate: the desire to rip yourself apart and shred up everything
that's around you.

The only way to self-destruct is slowly. The culturally acceptable pathways to self-immolation are always the slowest ones. The chemical things, legal and illegal, natural and unnatural, that get packaged up and sold to us as pleasure-inducing, these things are all poisons. It's not my intention to get moralistic about this because I have known the myriad pleasures of slow self- destruction all my life. It is a great part of the thrill of getting off on chemicals.

I think too much about offing myself, almost every morning I lie in bed and imagine my body being annihilated all at once. I hear the skin rip, see the red blood and the white fat and the brown guts as I elaborately draw and quarter myself. But then I get up and take a long hot shower, and I'm OK again. Where does all this self-hatred come from? It's the flipside of total immersion in instant gratification.

. . . . .