• One thing that I cannot abide, that makes me shake like some degenerate fool at a holy roller church, is harm done to or anything awful befalling children. I want to rage. Living through the reportage of the sick sons of bitches who raped children via Jeffrey Epstein and his whore Ghislane Maxwell nearly puts me over the edge. I want to kill. I think these sick fucks should be staked out on the ground and vivisected under the pretense of finding out what makes them what they are but also reduces them to the tiny pieces of trash they truly are.
I am not proud of these bloodthirsty fantasies, but being honest about them indicates how deeply such harm to children gets to me, I’m not entirely sure why. Something my parents taught me; they were very good people. Something about the innocence of children not yet contaminated by this world and still with imagination, hope, and wonder alive in them makes me want to scream when those are taken away unnaturally. My mother melted whenever she saw a baby; she had a very strong maternal instinct, so maybe I picked up on that. Then there was the child molester who lived at the end of our street out in semirural Liberty Township. This is when I was in junior high school. We—all of us kids who went to Liberty High School—would walk up to the end of the road and stand in a group at a spot on Shannon Road to b e picked up by the school bus, and he’d be there with us, a couple of years older than everyone else. We’d all ignore him, but he’d often break out into a story of something that had happened in which he was the hero. He’d saved someone’s life who’d been in a car accident. Things like that. I don’t recall any of us telling our parents about this young man because if we had, the police would have investigated him. We kept it among ourselves.
I just learned that the granddaughter of a friend of ours has been diagnosed with leukemia. Probably she will be okay; the odds are enormous that she will survive and thrive. That, at least, is the state of modern medicine, despite the morons who want to dismantle everything medical science has created in the past century and a half. But this young woman will nevertheless have to endure the ugly realities of chemotherapy and all the worry and fear that such a diagnosis entails, never mind what her parents and friends and loved ones must endure right alongside her.
Maybe it goes back to Iphigenia at Aulis. I don’t know. That scene of the young girl being burned alive in Game of Thrones had me upset for days. I have to look away from or turn the sound down on the TV when ads for St. Jude’s Hospital come on. Now, I worked with medical professionals; I edited a book on spinal bifida in children and many articles on juvenile orthopaedic injuries. Still, I get angry with anything that has to do with childhood suffering.
I know that the notion of childhood as its own separate stage in social development is modern, beginning, I think, with the Victorians. I know that earlier in history children were “little adults,” and many men, particularly, enjoyed the company of boys and still do. I know that Nature is not moral, and that so many people are not moral, either—are driven by desires wired into them at birth that in some ways makes them as much a victim as their true victims. But I can go only so far with such a sentiment because, whether they are responsible or not in that regard, they still do damage to children and so should be put down like sick animals, which is what they are.
I wish I had more compassion for the compassionless, but I am not there yet. I remember hearing a guy on All Things Considered years ago on the radio who was indeed a child molester and was under arrest and undergoing therapy. He asked to be prescribed the hormone drug that would chemically castrate him so that he would be relieved of his urges to be satisfied by harming children. At least he was sufficiently self-aware to want that.
• I have always been lonely.