There was a time.

A time, high and far off, away from this time.

A time that never was and still is.

A time when They ruled.

You’d walk down the street, and They would walk around you. They had faces, most of them, but no names. The were anonymous, They were the legion. And They ran the world.

You’d flip on the television, go to the news. “They killed Osama.” “They opened another bank on Tuesday.” “They planted another car bomb.” They’d say all these things, but They’d rarely show you Their faces, and never tell you who They were. Not a name. Maybe a face, but not a name. You didn’t know who They were. No one did.

They wrote the newspapers. They packed your canned foods. They made your medicine. They conducted your mail. They ran all the trains, managed all the restaurants, and staffed all the cargo ships. They were the government, They were the admins, They erected roads, train tracks, phone lines and buildings. Some had faces; not one had a name. You didn’t know why. And you couldn’t seem to bring yourself to care enough.

They worked in your company, They ran corporate headquaters. They made calls, They made cuts, They made mergers, They turned profits. They signed your paycheck in a mass of squiggles and transferred you money from Their nameless Swiss bank account. They were some of the people round the office you didn’t hear about much, They came and went and occasionally were fired and left a huge empty office for someone to be promoted into. They weren’t there as much as they were.

And They weren’t important. They were also the fat American family that you heard was becoming a national standard. They were those businessmen who ate lunch at one restaurant every day for all those years and never bothered to learn the waitress’s name. They were the ones who made under ten thousand dollars annually, were the ones who were evicted from all those empty apartments with the windows boarded up. They were the ones who went off to war with no home to come back to. The ones who dropped out of university to live their lives but could never earn a penny. They were all around. And some had faces, but none had names. And you just wouldn’t know why.

They were your neighbors too. They were the man who came out every morning in his bathrobe to get his newspaper, not once so much as muttering “hello.” The  disabled lady who lived down the street, who you saw being dropped off by a short white bus every so often. They were the people on the bus who helped her inside, and never wore nametags. They were the people around the block whose barbecue you always smelled but never heard even the slightest chatter. They are all the people who came to call on the old woman across the street, but never seemed to do more than come and go with not a single greeting or farewell. Sometimes you wondered if They had ever really been there.

At the movies, they filled the seats in the back and sometimes laughed in the background as if there was someone to take notice. At the theater, they were those lucky bastards with the box seats, high up and not particularly close to anyone. At pot lucks, they brought most of the food and ate it just before you got there. They were all those faces at rallies who never did anything more than hold signs. You saw Them once and never again. You wouldn’t need to see Them.

They had no names. Of this you were sure. There was a reason nobody told you Their names. There was a reason why They didn’t wear nametags, why Their names were never announced on the news, why They never introduced themselves with a polite “Hi, my name is.” They would tell you nothing because They had nothing to tell. They were not a name. They were just a face in the background.

You never knew, but they were less than a face. They were a place filler, someone to be who someone else wasn’t. Someone to be what no one else could; someone to be what nobody else would. They were there to make you realize how good you had it, and how much you didn’t have. They made the world seem so big; They made you seem so small. You saw them everywhere, and you followed their influences. They filled the void you left, and created a void for you to experience. And They made you feel their emptiness.

But most of all, They made you feel special. They made you feel their emptiness and lonliness, forced example that you wouldn’t want to follow down your throat. They game you something to work towards, and They gave you something to work to keep away from. The ones with out friends made you cherish what friends you had. The ones with friends showed you how. By being someone to avoid They guided you on your path, And They loved you. Each and every nameless face loved you, because you were what They worked for, why They tolerated all the bitterness and sorrows. But you’d still be uneased by them, because They weren’t totally there, and you weren’t sure why.

My world though. My world has no “Them.” All the anonymous have names, ones you can research in the blink of an eye. Every person I meet on the street could be one who’s name I say for the rest of my life. I know all of the people who live on my block. I say hello to my co-workers and occasionally chat with my boss. My friends know everyone who I don’t. Some of them are executives who sit in box seats at theaters. Some are drunkards who get evicted from their apartments. People who work in stores all wear nametags. The news is a flood of names. The entire world, the huge, immense world, with billions of names in it, is right in front of me at the push of a button.

And as miserable as I might be from eating at the same restaurant every day and never saying hello to the waitress, I grow strong on my own in my world where anyone can happen.

I am so glad to live in my time.

My not-so-far-off time.

Because my time is free.

And I

Am not you. 

We are effectively screwing the human genome.

Now, I’m not saying that I don’t have respect for human life or anything, just keep that in mind through this article. But our new advancements as a race has now all but stopped the process of evolution.

Point 1: What’s Supposed to Happen

The Darwinian process of evolution is supposed to proceed something like as follows:

1. Mutations occur naturally during the process of meiosis or early on in mitotic cell division of a newly formed zygote. The newly formed genes cause new traits to appear in the organism or the offspring created with the cells. These traits are either beneficial, and cause something that may advance the species, or they are harmful, and they cause a disorder within the organism. Mutations are also often harmless.

2. The process of natural selection begins. With the factors of climate and terrain of the area in which the organism lives, along with the factor of predation, natural elimination occurs. Organisms with genetic disorder die either through being unable to withstand the conditions in which it lives, by being an easier target for predators, or by being a worse hunter. Organisms whose mutations are beneficial usually have a better chance of survival due to any of the following:

• Superior camouflage
• Better adapted to environmental conditions
• Able to better escape predators (ex. faster)
• Able to better pursue or capture prey (ex. abnormal appendages, stealth)
• Able to survive in a different type of nearby environment

3. The process continues, and from it new types of species are formed, and particularly ineffective species become extinct. THIS IS NOT ALWAYS HOW IT WORKS. Species may occasionally be killed off or reduced in numbers by a natural disaster, which includes disease and bad weather, or climate change.

Point 2: Medicine

There are abnormally large quantities of genetic disorders, STD’s, and other inherited problems present in today’s world. There’s a reason for that, and it’s called medicine.

Like I mentioned before, I am in no way against the preservation of human life, but it is a fact that many of the inherited disorders around today exist because we so well keep people alive, and allow them to have sex. Hell, I’m not for the deprivation of that either, but I mean really. Many of the disorders that people are born with these days can be fixed through either medication or surgery, and these people would otherwise die.

The disorders don’t affect personality or looks, and even then you never know the kind of sexual partner some look for. As a result, these disorders get passed on to the next generation, which wouldn’t have happened had nature solved the problem with its common cure: Death. We are defying nature.

We complain so much about AIDS and STD rates in all sorts of places. Herpes is Herpes, it does what it will, but HIV could have been killed off like many other diseases if only it had appeared in africa a thousand years earlier. Anyone who got it would die. Anyone who managed to get through it would likely have their offspring killed by it shortly after birth. Mind you, this is strictly expository and much less opinionative, but these are common and they shouldn’t be.

Point 3: Predation Elimination

One of the most common disorders in the world right now is impaired vision. People are born with abnormalities in the cornea, which result in myopia, hyperopia, and astigmatisms. These people have impaired vision, which is corrected by modern day technology through glasses.

HOWEVER. Back before humans were the dominant race, one who could not properly see would either be taken out during hunting or in an accident. They would have died, and the gene would not have been passed on. We’ve all heard the joke “ever seen a rabbit wearing glasses?” There’s a reason you don’t. It’s because the ones that would need them are the easiest to eat.

Another common disorder: asthma. It occurs quite frequently in people today. We have issues with breathing, and medicine can solve them. But back in the day, an asthmatic would have easily been picked off by predators when they tried to run and found themselves short of breath. Asthma would be discontinued.

As humans we have now asserted ourselves so high in the food chain that animals can rarely ever compete. The only things that regularly kill us now are ourselves. We kill each other, and we don’t kill based on ease. In fact, we do just the opposite. We feel bad about preying on the weak, and as a result, the STRONGER die. We lose the best of our genome to murder with few of these men ever reproducing prior to their death.

We are decaying as a people because we let disorder slide and kill most of the perfect. So what are we gonna do?

So here’s the final verdict. Nobody cares about quality in posts anymore. Of the people who’re here now, very few ever did. As a result, FML, eff tumblr, I’m looking elsewhere for a blog site.

Am I the only one who doesn’t periodically give their blog a makeover?

If there’s one thing I’ve always found magical, it’s a fire. Preferably a crackling campfire of medium size in a clearing in the wilderness. A fire has simple pleasures. It gives you light, and a place to sit around and talk, and best of all it provides warmth. But if you look long enough, there’s always more than that.

Sometimes if it’s a quiet night, and I feel particularly in the mood, I’ll just sit in a mostly dark room and watch a candle burn. There’s a certain otherworldliness that comes with a fire. A small flame on a candle can be oddly hypnotizing. I can sit and watch the flame for hours and think of nothing in particular. And it just sways back and forth, not really doing anything in particular either. Fires like that represent a carefree mind. Minding its own business and not doing anything in particular. And sometimes it just intensifies what you’re already thinking of. It can build up happiness, bring out sorrow, or simply keep a calm. A small, flickering flame that know’s what you’re going through, and knows that’s okay.

But my favorite kind of fire is the one I mentioned before. A nice sized fire, burning in the center of a clearing, where you can sit just close enough to feel its warmth, but far enough to appreciate it without smoke in your eyes. With this kind of fire, it does what it’s smaller does, but in a stronger, more intense way. A good fire almost kindles the emotion within you to come out. A good fire can spontaneously start songs or stories, and the fire begins to dance. It can make people think deeply inside themselves and cry, and the fire listens quietly and comforts them. Or it can simply start small talk or just a deep quiet, and the fire just fills the silence.

In quiets like these, I like to think about the fire itself. I listen to its crackling and watch how its flame flicker’s. I’ll look up and see the embers floating up above the fire into the sky and going out. I watch as they glow and then one by one go out. It gets me thinking philosophically. I think that ashes to ashes sounds like a really bleak phrase, until you put fire in between. I see fire as the flame kindled in all life, and it’s interesting to think about people being brought forth from the ashes of the fire, and to at the end of their life return to those ashes again. The force of life never stops.

We all come from the goddess

And to her we shall return

Like a drop of rain

Flowing to the ocean

Teen suicide. It’s an unbearable thing, and it’s present in every high school. Attempts to kill yourself because you don’t want to live. But for anyone thinking that, let me ask an important question: WHY?

Why not? What’s been going on in your life lately? The homework been keeping you up? Yes it can be depressing but it’s not a reason to go die. Friends dumping issues on you? Ask them not to. They’ll understand if you can’t deal with your problems and theirs.

Even in the case of bullying, just ask yourself: Is everyone really against me? Isn’t it really just a few people? Do I maybe have something to do with my abuse? A lot of times people will attack you just because they’re defending themselves. Maybe you’re a giant douchewad and that’s the problem.

And what if you’re not? Take comfort in your friends, stay away from people who don’t like you. If you have no choice to be near those people or not? Ignore them. Accept what they’re saying or simply don’t reply. You’re parents may have told you this, and you may have thought it pure crap. But believe me, people do get bored of annoying those who don’t give any response. And if it’s in school, they’d much rather find something else to do than bug an unresponsive subject.

But really, the most important thing is realizing that school just sucks. What you live for is the time after school, when you’re living your own life. And no matter what’s going on, you just have to deal with it.

But also, remember that, hey, it’s HIGH SCHOOL. There’s always great stuff happening, and even if you’re not a part of that, at least take comfort in friends. It’s not worth offing yourself.