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It's not a contest, all right? Nobody should feel that they have to live up to some minimal standard of formative suffering that baptizes an individual. One degree of separation from me I know of a guy who fought as a child soldier in Afghanistan. He was in the motherfucking war between the ages of eight and eleven. Is that enough? I volunteer in counselling. I hear fucked-up shit on the lines all the time. I hear about the abuse, the small-mindedness of people, the petty obsessions, the really unhealthy and really, really petty obsessions, the people saddened for no reason at all, the people isolated by the crush of others and rent and food and governments, the spiritual crises that befall a creature stuck in time repeating the same shitty moves year in and year out, shouting at some imagined persecutions, or some real persecutions, cutting themselves so they can feel something. Have we had enough? Have we had enough beatings? Enough racism outside convenience stores? Enough dumpster-diving for liquior, not food? Enough hitting the junk to make the feelings stop? Have we had our fill of the dramatized despair in living, breathing suburban homes where people watch these stories on big plasma TVs so they can discuss something, anything? What about the children who use different TVs to blast their eyes with blinking lights so they can spend all day jumping up and down relentlessly? What about the old people dying the death of a thousand polite smiles and good intentions with their little Icons of the Saints on the wall (crooked, as things would have it). Have we really had enough? Has this been "broadening" enough for us? Have we shot ourselves up with the finest fictions so we can cry about the dying embers of pride, about the trepidations of a hundred Ishvars and Omprakashes? Are our personal histories not overloaded with it? With suicides and unrequiteds and indecesions and brutal cutting ironies and mountains of protection? What about diseases that come unbidden and light as the breeze? What about sick and dying animals? What about the brunt of the permafrosted mid-February landscape rushing in through every hole in your coat? Is there a pit in your stomach yet, or are there too many tracts of this exact spirit? Are there too many speakers like this? Too many characters cranking out the same dreadful tune on the same hand-me-down crank organ? I don't know. I won't even generalize that claim to you. But I say this with as much force and passion as I have ever been able to summon: I don't know.

Consider: "He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me, in those who harbour such thoughts hatred is not appeased. / He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me, in those who do not harbour such thoughts hatred is appeased."