So you're a fan of poor old Fritz? Well, so am I. The funny thing about Nietzsche was that for all of his purported stoicism, he still found a need to anesthetize himself. Now, he may not have sought refuge in the needle or the bottle but, as a man no woman loved, he found ways to dull the pain inevitable for those who aren't permitted to live as men were meant to. Fritz found fleeting solace in whores; tragic, isn't it, that the man whose debut was a meditation upon the birth of tragedy, the man who dreamed up grave Zarathustra and who celebrated the joys of sex had to pay women to touch him. Given that he was more or less impoverished, he probably had to forgo meals for the privilege of buying a fleeting bit of fantasy but, what of it? We spend so much of our time asleep, beholden to the world of dreams. What's a bit of pain in the belly, a little bit of starvation, if the compensation for your sacrifice is falling asleep with a smile on your face pretending that you're actually loved?
After I graduated university, I spent nine months working at a group home for the disabled. One of our patients? Consumers? I'm not sure of the politically correct term as I've been absent from the industry for so long. For the sake of simplicity, let's refer to him as a resident. Said resident, though older than I was, resembled an infant. You could pick him up and cradle him in your arms and there were plenty of nights I did so to keep him crying long enough for him to slip into whatever dreams Nature allowed him. Sadly, one day he grew very sick for reasons no physician could discern. He was dying and no one really knew why, so he was passed from the hospital from the hospice. There was no hope of healing him, so every remaining effort was dedicated to finding a way for him to die comfortably. I spent many nights at the hospital watching over him, waiting for him to pass from this life to wherever it is Nature's unfortunates go when She tires of them, and was shocked to learn he was no longer being fed in any way, shape or form. My poor little resident was being starved to death because, well, death was inevitable for him. Rather than being offered nutrients, which would have done not a bit of good, he was being fed a steady diet of opiates. Life had forsaken him, denied him the pleasures it offers to the well-formed and healthy, and so all the doctors could hope to do for him was reconcile him to Death in the gentlest way possible. I was told to read to my forsaken little charge from Harry Potter novels as he languished between whatever dusk lies between day and night and, to this day, probably my very worst crime was reading the Socratic dialogues to him instead. I have no doubt that, if there is a Hell, I'll find myself consigned to it for that alone. I suppose I can take some comfort in the vaguest possibility that when my resident and I sit beside each other down in Gehenna, I'll be afforded the opportunity to beg his forgiveness.
But that's neither here nor there. My little story was meant as an illustration, a nasty bit of life serving as a poor simulacrum of art. The incel drugs himself because, though supposedly alive in the most superficial sense, he took his first breath as one the Dead. Fritz had his whores, my resident had a steady morphine drip, and I have my bottle. We, though born as supposedly living things, have the joys of the living forever forbidden to us. So we learn whatever tricks we can to gradually secure the closest thing to serenity Nature affords Her abortions: the peace of the grave.
Obviously, it would have been better had we never been thrust screaming from the Eternal Mother's cunt. But even a Goddess is subject to errors and the ongoing project of both men and monsters is finding some way, any way, of atoning for Her mistakes.
