Look, images:

I am deeply conflicted about the massive amount of strangers that surround me every day. Like all unknown things, these people represent possible sources of pain in a myriad shapes and forms. At the same time, I know that some of these people might actually be kind of okay.

I practice social cleanliness like a goddamn zen master. There is a staggering threshold of admittance. I mean, any one of these people could be a fucking cyborg ninja assassin – working diligently to befriend me so it can harvest my brain and use it to fuel angry little cyborg children – there’s just no way of knowing.

When I was younger I devised a scale that i placed people in – it ranged from lizard-people to mannequins, neither of which qualified as desirable company. The scale operated on the axiom that all people where assholes and aimed to catalog them by the type of asshole they where. The people I eventually ended up consorting with were the ones i couldn’t place in the scale. This, of course, ruined my model by disproving it’s most basic tenet.

Today I would classify this as the artifact of a limited young mind. You can’t judge people based on a linear model. Clearly there is more to people; you also have your high elven hobos, your smug-bots, and your couture wendigos. There’s a complex and interconnected taxonomy of assholes out there.

It’s like that guy that went to the rain-forest to catalog all the bugs. He shook a tree and discovered sixty-or-so new species, then he moved to the next tree and found sixty new species. It doesn’t stop, it just goes on.

But there are good people out there – many of them even – it’s just hard to spot them in the sea of vegan zombies and flannel-golems.

- SF