Watch out Mom and Dad America. I am the future. I'm no different than your kids. I grew up in a middle class home. I did well in school. I've never committed a crime or gotten into a fist fight. I watch TV and eat McDonalds and had a crush on Drew Barrymore while growing up. I even wanted to be an Astronaut as a kid.

I live a secret life, though. Hidden away from everyone I know, the dark recesses of my mind are on display for anyone to see.

No one knows what I do on my own time when I'm in the dark typing away like mad in front of my computer. No one but you. I'm just a virtual personality, and outside of your computer screen I don't even exist. When I go out I blend in just like everyone else, and no one would know that millions of people subscribe to my views and my own brand of Internet dementia on a daily basis. I'm an invisible celebrity who is made up of electrons and silicon.

Just like you I live in a never ending stream of suburbs, strip malls and anonymous faces. I rarely talk to my neighbours and don't care who they are as long as they don't make themselves apparent. Soccer moms driving their SUVs to Starbucks while talking on their cell phones are as familiar a sight to me as an airplane flying overhead or a neon sign. They're so commonplace that they're invisible.

If there were charts and graphs that detailed how normal people were, I'm sure I'd be somewhere in the middle. I'm average, just like you. I'm not good looking, but not ugly. I'm not short, but not tall. I'm not dumb, but not too smart. I'm not special, and neither are you. Mediocrity is the future. We're bred to be average. Everyone gets to be a part-time king as long as you buy in to the modern lifestyle. There's no use in fighting the way things are; it's been this way forever and always will be. As unique as you may think you are, there will always be someone else who can do whatever you can do but better. It's an ego thing that makes you think you're different.

For those of you that think Earth is special and unique, you need to wake up and take a look up at the sky some time. More planets up there than there is sand on the beach. More possibilities and civilizations than we can imagine. For those of you that think there is a god who has a special plan for each one of us, well, keep sending in all your money to 1-800-JESUS. Hell, send me all your money and I'll tell you that I love you, created you in my image, and think you're special. And have a great ass.

Face it, humanity is about as impressive as a stripper with fake tits.

You are born. You are ignorant to the evils of the world. You are educated into believing a set of fundamentals, though it's more like being brainwashed into the status quo. You're told what is right and what is wrong, taught not to question authority and to shut up and follow orders. We're raised to live our lives within a set of boundaries. You're told you live in a free society, but you can't do things that society considers immoral. You go to school, you get a job, you get married. You mix your genes with someone else's and reproduce. You die. Repeat and rinse. The same cycle has been going on since time immemorial, and we've just refined the process from generation to generation until we've become so fucking blinded to any other way of living and thinking that any form of true creativity is rare. Good ideas are scarce.

They say we are sentient beings aware of our own existence, but last time I was in a mall and looked around I honestly wondered if some of these people knew they were even alive.

Walking past the people of all shapes and colours, I could see speech bubbles over their heads with one of a few possible things on their minds. Sex, food, sleep, pissing and shitting, and the acquiring of material possessions. We just want to feel good, right now.

I want to feel good. Right now.

Forever.

Fuck, sometimes I even wonder if I'm really alive and not some AI lab experiment by some pot smoking MIT students in the year 3075. Some kind of sentient practical joke. More often than not I feel like I'm living in some dysfunctional rerun of a really low budget reality show filled with every cliche in the book.

The only reason I haven't committed suicide is because I'm lazy and squeamish. Suicide is a big hassle. Suicide is a really selfish thing to do. I'd much rather just let time kill me slowly like it does to everyone else, though I dread getting old and watching my body rot in front of my eyes. I hate seeing my own blood. In fact, I hate seeing anyone's blood. Or any kind of bodily fluid that isn't my own, for that matter. I'm the kind of guy who flushes public toilets with his feet.

I have some undying hope in the back of my head that one day I'll be happier than I am now and that life will somehow become like some fabulous after school special on TV, where everything is sanitary and perfect. Maybe it's a pipedream, but it keeps me going. I think that everyone wants to better themselves and have a healthier, happier, more productive life. Maybe it's just human nature to never be satisfied and want more.

When I was a kid I believed in god and thought that the bible was infallible. The religious teachers scared the shit out of me, telling me that if I didn't believe in this or that, I'd feel my body rotting for all eternity after I died. I also believed in Santa Claus and thought my parents were cool. I also believed that my teachers knew everything and were always right. Then my mind started to get infected with the truth. I started to question things and logic entered the picture. Information is really like a virus with no cure. It just spreads and changes form, evolving and infecting new minds.

I guess I started to become disillusioned with religion when I saw that there were so many groups of people, each with their own book and god and ideas, that it just seemed stupid that one could be more right than another. They all thought they were right, and each group better than the next. If you took away their book and god and stripped them down you'd see that they were all exactly the same and believed in the same thing in one way or another. One day I just realized that religion is just a form of mind control and a crutch for the ignorant, naive and old to fall back on so they can pretend that their life isn't as meaningless as it really is. A lovely crutch to make yourself feel better that your life isn't ending, but just beginning.

Tough shit.

Maggot meat.

Why is it so hard to believe that our lives are meaningless? Why can't we embrace the lack of purpose? I know I can't.

With the invention of the transistor, religion has been slowly replaced with technology. I guess most people don't want to admit it and have a fondness for the past. The golden days. The past is always better than the present it seems. Instead of being a slave to an artificial god we created in our image, we're now slaves to silicon which is slowly turning into our new god. What really makes me laugh is how most people don't realize what boring and meaningless existences they lead. And that really bothers me. Why? Because I'm fucking jealous of them. I want to wake up every morning with stars in my eyes, filled with awe and wonder at the amazing things out there to do and see.

Instead I'm just another caged animal with a Prozac induced smile on my face.

A friend once mentioned to me that he'd started to notice that all of our lives revolved around boxes (or cages, depending on how you look at it). We're born in a box (the delivery room), educated in a box (the classroom) and buried in a box (the coffin). We spend all our time staring at boxes; TVs, computer screens, microwaves, movie theater screens. We live in a big box, drive around in a fast box, and eat food from various colored boxes.

Boxes, boxes, boxes! I'm fucking sick of boxes!

At night we lie down on a box and fuck on a box (if we're lucky enough to have someone else in our lives). Yeah, someone who we think we know but probably really don't as well as we think. You wake up and go to work in a tiny box and stare at a box all day, then come home and watch a box all night (while being told what to think), then retire to your bed, which is a medium sized box in a big box that's inside of an even bigger box.

Soon we'll never leave our boxes.

Hell, I hardly leave my box as it is. It's warm, with perfect climate control. The lighting is ambient. It smells half decent. I am surrounded by amusements like a computer, television, guitar, books, aquarium... the list goes on and on. What do I need to survive here? The basics: food, water, and a place to bathe and shit in. Now, I'm not talking about my spiritual survival. Even though I may be agnostic, I still believe we all have a form of spirit, chi, karma, whatever you want to call it. If your spirit isn't fulfilled, well... then you end up typing up crazy thoughts on your personal shock-porn website at 5:00AM to perfect strangers.

Eventually our entire society will become an evolved version of me (and so many other virtual shut-ins). We'll just sit in front of our computers (which will probably just be implanted into our fucking brains) building invisible walls and barriers from others so we never meet them, while convincing ourselves that we're hip and trendy and modern.

We'll eventually pray to Sony and Microsoft for the cool toys they allow us to buy, and god will be "officially" dead. We'll have everything delivered to us by bots, every wish and fantasy fulfilled by plugging ourselves in to a world of our own creation. Everything will become orderly, sanitary and boring. Any wish we could have could be fulfilled, and soon we just won't even bother because everything will have become mundane.

Eventually we'll look back on today as we now look back on life without electricity. Empty, cold, unfulfilling, and primitive.

So once again I raise my glass to you, Mom and Dad America, and thanks for a comfortable, mediocre, bland future. A hi-tech pseudo-utopia where your wish is no more than one click away, and the more ignorant you are the better off you are.

Bombs away.