RAT Lurking online

[MMA <Diogenes_@compuserve.com>]

Sometimes, Allison, when I am feeling lonely and the enormity of my sad and
meaningless existence presses hard upon me, I go out into the night and sit
in a dark room and watch other people say and do things.  I am usually
bored to tears but I keep doing it over and over.  I know I am a bad man,
that I should step into the light where the other people are saying and
doing the things that are boring me to tears but instead, I lurk in the
dark with the ten or fifteen other people like me who have also paid money
for this experience. For you see, bad as I am, I know that the people who
are boring me up there in the light are another degree of bad and the idea
of this room full of bad people, some talking, some only watching, all
partaking of this shared grubby sense of their own inconsequential badness,
is the source of one of life's piquant pleasures.  Lately I have introduced
my daughter, a shining creature, to this world of consensual badness.  She
stands radiant in the light, for now uncontaminated by the badness, but
she's so beautiful that she's gotta die some day.

Voyeuristically yours

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