A story of one soul during two lives

Occupying a rather more modest nook next door is the Society to Restore Natural Selection, which is a new one to me. Girlish curiosity overcoming my haste, I skim a handbill:

ALERT!
Homo Sapiens has evolved right out of Evolution!Whereas genetic engineering has produced virtually every variety of plant and animal we associate with and exploit, we practice a bizarre, reverse g.e. process on our own population, by nullifying congenital flaws.

In nature, asthmatics and myopics die before breeding, unable to outrun predators or find food. Now they are called nerds and become high-priced desk jockeys, breeding with genetically pure office help.

Saving the weak and sick is destroying our bloodline! And ensuring a future of weaklings!

The practice of corrective medicine MUST BE STOPPED!

We are promoting the proliferation of nearsightedness, diabetes, heart-valve defects, etc. by taking the sting out of the deficiencies, artificially compensating for nature’s screening process, allowing the afflicted to breed (with my wife!) and thereby ensuring that a future generation of humans will someday be born, all with a predisposition to lens distortion and pancreatic malfunction and so forth.

Eventually, every baby will be born and immediately whisked away to surgery to correct universal birth defects. It will be a nightmare world of modified cyborgs, needing constant care, from birth to death.

LET THE UNFIT DIE!

Fertility research must be immediately halted. It is an abomination, with a world census of over eight billion gluttonous bipeds.

LET THE STERILE ADOPT!

The only way to save our species is to line up all the doctors and pharmacists and biological researchers and greasy, four-eyed advertising reps, up against the wall.

Once we have them all there (the Great Wall of China will need to be used), we should calmly and rationally explain the scientific aims of our organization.

Then we must blind them and cut off their nuts.

Though some of this nihilistic rant strikes a guilty cord, I was a man too recently to have any sympathy for anyone advocating the systematic castration of any class, and I know from experience that the ill don’t care whose air they’re monopolizing, the unfit don’t care about passing on their lazy, irresponsible code. And while the numbers of toilet-flushing entities are dangerously out of control, I somehow suspect that this Nazi-like strategy of unilaterally pulling the plug to purify our species would be, if taken seriously, a greater menace than overpopulation itself.

Perhaps the best approach to the problem would be to promote these ideas widely, let the membership balloon, and execute everyone who joins as an agitator for genocide. I wonder why Crazy Bear tolerates them, and remember: he lets everybody have their say, so long as the bottom line is red. That surely explains the Rush Limbaugh Museum on the second floor.

One night while tripping on Orange Sunshine Acid with him, I had waxed hateful about the constabulary. “No, no,” Crazy Bear said, rising from his bean bag to retrieve a well-worn copy of Be Here Now, by “Baba Ram Dass,” who is one of the other guys that got fired from Harvard with Tim Leary. The two men were like John and Peter as far as he was concerned, and the hippie regarded strange book, with its fine ink illustrations and cryptic mantras filling its brown pages, something akin to Gospel.

“Here,” he said, finding his page and thrusting it at me. “Be Here.”

A naked man is pictured, enveloped in a swirl of Yin-Yang symbols. To one side is the accouterments of law enforcement: uniform, jackboots, gunbelt. On the other is a standard head outfit: frilly shirt, tight slacks, beads, leather. The text reads, ouroborically, “Cops create hippies create cops…”

“Never hate your enemy, for he is you. We all wander a hall of mirrors, disgusted at some twisted reflections, admiring of flattering ones, never realizing, the whole time, that there really is only One of us…”

Jesus, who according to Crazy Bear, was the premier hippie, exemplified this attitude. “The only ones you can help, the only lives you can really change, are people you are inclined to dislike. That’s why he went hanging out with fishermen, when he obviously preferred the company of hookers.” I reflect on this as I notice the United Sex Workers of America, local #69.

Then the NORML offices, with the predictable whiff of patchoulie and pot flowing from the gang of retro dreadheads camped out in front; I skirt quickly past something called the Sacred Heart Aztec Sacrifice Temple, whose doorway is ominously clear of any traffic, though the odor of roasting meat is thick from inside. Yuk. Meat is so gross.

Then it gets sort of weird on the Row.

~ )))0((( ~