Glimpse

The man's eyes quivered, his face dull with realization. "You'll never stop, will you? If I ignore you, you'll continue. If I kill you, others will come. There's no escape."

I started started to smirk. It was rare when I had such a self-aware quarry. Usually they fought back pointlessly, refusing to accept their fate. Today would be easy, simple. Unexpected, but not unwelcome. "As long as you are who you are, as long as you know what you know, it will never stop. You can either can continue suffering, or end it all here."

But what I didn't expect was his reaction. His face, contorted with fear, slowly started to change. And he laughed. The most disturbing laugh of my life, as if he had realized his entire life was one giant joke, and this was the punchline. Not knowing how to react, having no training to react to madness such as this, I simply stared at him, this insane, maladjusted person.

As the laughter finished, he finally spoke these words. "I've run away all my life. Everything I've done, I've tried to hide. You killed everyone I knew; you killed my teacher, the one who taught me magic, and left me with nothing. So I took that nothing, and lived with it. I carved out a normal life, a boring, meaningless life, but a life. But you wouldn't stand for that. You wanted to oppress me. Crush my spirit. Make me your slave. Breaking me is merely the expected endpoint."

He looked up, and his eyes glistened, the spirit of life strong within him. "As long as I live, as long as there is breath within me, I shall make you and all your kinds very existence hell. I will fight you no matter the odds, the risks, or the danger. You try to break me because I know too much, a liability to your precious kingdom of dust. But that's all it is. A kingdom that shall go back to dust. And I...I shall be the executioner."

Future Interpretation

The blog post I wrote about Ozymandias highlights something that bothers me about contemporary literary analysis. That is, the fact that people, often professors or article writers, take something, analyze the fuck out of it, and come up with some absurd theories, and then claim it was the author's intent. Even if the author disagrees with them, they can still just claim he inserted it subconsciously. Now, I won't claim that I don't insert things subconsciously, like the idea that I secretly want someone to misanalyze me so I can become all indignant and bitchy; however, an outside observer who's never met me and only read my works is not the ideal person to judge just what I subconsciously project into my writing, and should not speak authoritatively on just what I mean by my writings.

The problem is, I can't decry all of them either, because occasionally people do come up with insightful analysis that reflect what the author meant to write. I'd hate to go, "Everyone who critiques my work sucks," because by sheer chance, there almost certainly will be someone who doesn't.

Thus, my statement as such, is this: if you take my work, and say that it was my intent for what I write to mean whatever you claim, then I think you are being an arrogant bastard who assumes too much about why I write, and I question whether you should be doing it. Your own opinion is fine. Taking your ideas and asserting they're mine, isn't.

This may anger some people. That's pretty cool; I should do that more often.

Pseudo-proof

Current theory about the universe assumes that it will eventually degrade into a matterless background with even protons having decayed into a native state, at the most basic state possible as defined by entropy, and thus remain that way for the rest of eternity. Current theory also state that time had a beginning, via the Big Bang. If the time the universe has matter is finite, and the time it does not is infinite, then it is infinitely more likely for it to be a matterless universe at any given time than one with matter. Yet I perceive a universe with matter.

Therefore, either the universe is an illusion, or current theory is wrong.

Ducks should be quiet.

Ok, so I'm in my room, right? I'm trying to go to bed, and then there's this duck and he's like, "I'm a duck." And I try to be polite, and say to the duck, "Be quiet, I'm trying to sleep." But ducks are nature's jerks. It immediately started quacking like a madman, preventing me from sleeping. And the thing is, if you kick a duck, that just makes more ducks. It's how they breed. And then you get two noisy ducks, and it just gets worse from there.

The only real solution is to tell the duck, clearly and resolutely, to shut up. And if it doesn't shut up, you will hire a french chef to cook it into a lightly browned delicious dish served with asparagus and alfredo.

You will tell the duck he will be delectable, a delicacy fit for kings, though perhaps not really good kings like Charlemagne, but a decent king, one that is somewhat respected by his people by being fair, even if he's not the best possible leader. I mean, he was born into the role, he didn't pick his life, and you can't really judge him on the fact that he wasn't the best choice. Monarchy doesn't make for those kind of decisions.

So, long story short, the duck still didn't shut up, and so I ate him.

A bit tough, though. Maybe if he hadn't have quacked so much he would have tasted better.