Parenthood

Sooner or later you notice that there’s something you’re expected to do. Something that the conspiracy needs just as much as it needs to drain your slack, sap your creativity, steal your time, destroy your individuality and strangle your soul. Your parents want it, your friends are all doing it, it seems like suddenly everyone is doing it and if you don’t do it soon you’ll miss out. You’ll be left out. Never mind that you’ll lose out ether way.

Hardly anyone wants kids when they’re 14. Nearly everyone has ’em by the time they’re 40. For some, the mistake was obvious. Contraception is beyond the wit of many, and fallible for all, but either way — for almost everybody — it comes eventually. It may have taken serious mind control from the conspiracy, years of peer pressure, tears, biological urges, hypno-training and a constant bombardment of morals, fairy stories, teaching and advertimedia but they get you eventually. Or they instill a desperate misery if you can’t.

I mean wow. You thought you were too busy before, all the stuff you had to do, all those hours in a job. Now there’s an attention demanding, droolingly stupid, utterly hopeless, dependent new person in your life begging you to help them and once you’d married that, you had a bleedin’ baby!

The peer pressure was like a water cannon before you had another family on top of the two you were just escaping from. Only now you have to be the responsible ones.

“I turned out all right,” you figure — not noticing the horrible conspiracy mess around you, the waist deep, fetid, demoralizingly bland filth. “I turned out all right, so I’ll do what my parents did to me, only better.”

Oh god. You want to program your kid better than they programmed you! By now you don’t even want the little snivelling thing to have to be different. You’re so convinced of what is ‘right’ you’ll do anything to ensure that it fits into the conspiracy nightmare surrounding it.

Only the conspiracy is still sucking out all your slack, it’s still demanding work, it’s still demanding those early mornings and late nights. In fact, now it has another way to get you up even earlier. You know all the kid really needs is your slack, but you’re so utterly drained, with so much media to catch up on, so much to do, you haven’t got the slack to give. But you do have a telly! She can watch that. And it’ll only be a few years before the whole school nightmare gets it’s fresh intake of warm slack-filled bodies to drain and mould.

I don’t need to recount the programming you inflict on this potential new mastermind. You went through it yourself, and you’re programmed to hand it right on down, generation to generation. Just turn back the pages for a refresher of the litany of offenses against slack, individuality, memetic-diversity and personality you went through, and pass on — digested and normalized — to your co-conspiring offspring.

What parenthood does to you is just as profound as the childhood you’re inflicting on your prodigy. Yet more hormonal assaults, tying you chemically and emotionally to this kid — so much you would sacrifice anything to make sure it’s safe. Die trying. Even though the best thing for children isn’t always total safety. Certainly not when they’re totally safe locked up in the conspiracy’s tight grasp.

You stamp on each other’s freedom, you ban people saying rude words in front of ’em, you stand up for normal people, doing normal things, and get an adrenaline boost of fear every time something different happens that might frighten the children.

Meanwhile you give them false fear. Fear of monsters that don’t exist, fear of Santa’s bad-list, fear of people, fear of rejection, fear of anything but bland, ordinary, normal, conspiracy gunk-think.

The responsibility would be disheartening if it didn’t feel so right. You can’t risk your life anymore, you can’t even risk your poverty, you’re suddenly not just playing the conspiracy game for yourself. They can get at you ithrough your kids. Act too weird, they’ll take them away. Act too recklessly, you may doom them to a parentless life, an even more literal conspiracy upbringing, poverty, crime and misery.

Well, it’s true. Parentless kids have less chance of living a normal life. They’ll suffer, even. But, you know, they’re just doing what the conspiracy expects of people like them. What you expect of people like them. Your own expectation dooms them, your own caution doom them, your own conspiracy dumbass cretin thought-mash dooms them. To grow up like you. Simply everyone expects it!

So for twenty years, they make your life hell. You’re even more busy, even more slackless, even more tired and you’re just barely sleepwalking through life, completely blind to the shadows of conspiracy influence all around you. You do your best for ’em, and then, just as you’re starting to get used to them, they fuck off and you miss them horribly. The only thing you have left to hang your CON-consciousness off is your job. Without that conspiracy straightjacket, you’d collapse from lack of slack. Your own back not strong enough to hold your weight without their support anymore.

So what do they do?

They make you retire.

On To Chapter Eleven