he alone, who owns the youth, gains the future...

The abortion people were on campus today. No, I don’t mean the “FREE ABORTIONS HERE” people, I mean those bible-reading, life-loving, anti-abortion people. The ones with the fifty-foot billboards of graphic pictures of aborted fetuses (fetus? feti?), that tell you what a genocidal nazi you are if you do anything but adoption or parenting. They throw huge pictures of tiny bloody hands next to a dime or a dissected breast infected with cancer caused by multiple abortions (is that even true? Can abortions cause breast cancer? That seems strange, but I’m too lazy to fact check…) in the hopes of shocking us into signing their petition make abortion illegal. 


Twenty feet away from the gigantic bloody innards-of-infants pictures lies the pro-choice table, packed with illustrations and articles. Their pitch is the whole “this is what is going to happen if we make abortions illegal.” And they go on about “illegal” abortions (scraping out the baby with a coat hanger, douching with turpentine, tripping down stairs, etc.) They’re advertising, “if you make abortion illegal, people will still have abortions. They’ll just be at-home, un-safe and the women will most likely die, so keep those abortions legal, folks!

GRAPHIC IMAGES AHEAD, PEOPLE!!

Ya know, this kinda stuff...

         For the record, I’ve thought a lot about what I would do should I get pregnant tomorrow (it’s something I think about a lot actually. What with all the sex I’m having, it seems pretty likely) (<- That was sarcasm. It doesn’t translate as well in writing). Most likely I would not have the baby. Granted if I slept with James Franco tomorrow and got pregnant it would be an entirely different story. Or Mark Zuckerberg. I could have Mark Zuckerberg’s baby and he’d probably pay me a few mill a year in child support. That dude is fuckin LOADED. He’s worth, like, 16 billion dollars! You know how much one share of Facebook is? 240 million dollars! That guy is the youngest billionaire in history. Have you seen The Social Network? OMG, IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE SOCIAL NETWORK PLEASE STOP READING MY BLOG AND MOVE QUICKLY TO THE NEAREST THEATER.

"Hmmmm......"

My point is, I’m not against abortion.

         But I didn’t blog tonight to talk about abortion. No, I started to think about those pictures of the feti. The ones that I’ve seen every year for four years now in the plaza of this glorious campus. And in four years I have yet to meet anyone that’s horribly disgusted with them. I think the student body in general is relatively annoyed by the pro-life advocators right to block our path to the Student Center, but everyone looks at the images with some interest. No one avoids them entirely. It has a certain shock factor for about 20 seconds and then when you start reading their propaganda that accompanies the photos, you just think “pfffffttttt” and carry on your merry way.

         It got me thinking that the world has become so desensitized. Nothing phases us. Not death, not blood, not rape or pillage, plunder or sack (sack being male genitals as well as the plundering of a place by an army or mob, usually involving, destruction, slaughter, etc.) Movies and television have exposed us to all the gore and glory of the globe. We are a generation that feasts on horror films and internet porn. We are bombarded with images of war, starvation, death and devastation. We are fed new stories and Dateline episodes of kidnap and annihilation. If you really look for it (and you shan’t have to look far, lads) we have the goriest, disturbing and revolting facts of life at our convenient disposal. Go to Google images for me (if you would be so kind) and type in “dead bodies.” Now go on YouTube and search slaughterhouse (no, no, not the hip hop group, go watch a video of an ACTUAL slaughterhouse!) (although I have to say, watching a video of the group Slaughterhouse is equally as disturbing).

         You see what I mean, though? Maybe certain people flinch at the mention of castration or turn their heads away during bloody movie scenes. Maybe we still get grossed out at the mention of a Strawberry Scooter Crunch (congregates, please refer to urbandictionary for further explanation) but we, as a collective society, are not as troubled by the woes of the world as we should be.

Now don’t go pointing fingers, I am just as bad as the rest of you. In fact, I was always kind of proud of the fact that it took a great deal to disturb me. I can watch the blood and the gore and the sex and pillaging and not blink an eye. This isn’t saying that I’m some sort of heartless monster. I’ve had my moments of utter horror. I was sickened by the description of meat-packing industries when I had to read Fast Food Nation for a high school class (read that shit, man, you’ll never want to go to McD’s ever again). My stomach twists when I see the National Geographic images of starving and diseased African kids with flies on their faces. I’ll never forget the 8^th grade field trip- going to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C. and seeing all the hundreds of pairs of shoes from the little Jewish kids who were burned alive in concentration camps. Chilling.

Jew Shoes

It’s not like I don’t care about the terrible things that happen in the world. It’s just that I have no line drawn. No limit to what I will expose myself to. However aggravated I am by world hunger, child prostitution and clergymen raping little boys, nothing in the media shocks me anymore. I have become desensitized past the point of astonishment. It’s like the twelve-year-old boy who spends all his free time watching porn. By the time that kid is twenty, he can see a video of Asian dwarf amputees violating each other with a wine bottle and shrug.

(I, uh, had a picture I was going to put here, but….you just.. yeah, you just don’t wanna see it.....)

But last night, as I was reading a novel, I found my line. I found out that I could in fact be shocked by something. That maybe I wasn’t as desensitized as I wanted to believe.

I read something so staggering that I burst into tears. Reading each word in bewilderment. Choking on my sobs with every sentence. Absolutely appalled and staggered. I finished the chapter and buried my head in my hands and tried to shake the image from my head. I cried myself to sleep and spiraled into a hellish nightmare.

And what novel could ever have this effect on me other than one written by Mr. Palahniuk. (That’s right folks, this blog is really about Chuck Palahniuk. And you thought I was going to wax philosophical about societies gory media consumption and argue abortion or something. You should know me better than that…)

Heeeeeeere's Chuckie!!

Scruff Chuck

Arrogant Chuck

Aspiring Actor Chuck

Old English Chuck

High School Teacher Chuck

Hipster Chuck

Now, this is the seventh novel of Mr. P’s that I’ve read, so I am no stranger to the graphic details of his twisted mind. Charles is violent, sexual, thrilling, sinister, cynical, sarcastic and brilliant. All the things I love in a man. Uh, I mean, book…..

So a week ago I finished Tell All and moved on to the next unread Palahniuk novel on my shelf. And Chuckie did not disappoint. Wal-Mart bathroom guy-on-guy rape scene within the first 17 pages! Detailed accounts of fecal, semen, sweat, dry friction, ripped skin, bruises and blood. From Mr. Palahniuk I would expect nothing less. I know it’s not exactly normal to say that I enjoy reading about bathroom rape, so I won’t say it. But to some degree, all the nauseous and perverse things in the world are what interest me most. I love the disconnected, the abused, the bitter. I am intrigued by anything morally unacceptable. All the perverted and warped stuff. The misshapen things. I eat it up like a fucking rat. Horde all the grotesque and contaminated images in my mind and let them fester there, further desensitizing my brain.

But Charles went too far for my taste in chapter five. In which he describes an instructor in a testing laboratory, taking a white mouse out of a cage and placing him in a stainless steel sink. He describes the mouse scampering up the side of the sink to escape and sliding back down. He describes the shaking fear in the mouse, how his ears fold back and his tail curls up and a single drop of urine makes its way down the drain. The instructor turns on the tap, the water gushes out scolding hot and the mouse starts to scamper and squeal in terror. The instructor turns on the garbage disposal and the mouse slips and falls down the drain. Ground down by the metal teeth. 

In the campus plaza, the abortion people have a “free speech” poster in which you can go up and write your opinions in sharpie. The pro-life people love it. It’s their chance to voice their opinion without having to actually speak to the bible-carrying pro-lifers. It’s a bit of an inside joke, but I wrote on this “free speech” board JESUS SHOULD HAVE BEEN ABORTED. Which is ironically hilarious as A.) I do not believe in God, Jesus or any affiliates and B.) If something so impossible as a virginal conception were to happen to you, why the hell would you get an abortion?

So right after I write this, I’m walking past the library and I notice rustling in the bushes. And as I’m walking (briskly) down the path, a squirrel shoots out from the bushes and gets trapped right under my foot.

Yes.

I stepped on a squirrel.

I was walking fast and he ran out so fast that I didn’t even notice him until he was under my foot, wriggling his way trying to escape and squealing bloody murder. Then I started screaming and jumped off the little bastard as fast as I could. He scampers around my feet and back into the bush and I stand there, suddenly aware that the people around me are staring with open mouths. Looking at me like “did that girl just step on a squirrel??” Yes. Yes, I just stepped on the squirrel.

SAY WHAT?

Okay, so I’m not a religious person, but I do believe in fate. And karma. And also unicorns. And I really believe that the cosmic forces were behind me stepping on the squirrel. Allah or Buddha or whoever saw me walk up to the abortion people, stare at the giant bloody feti, shake my head casually, make a witty remark about the J-man and walk away. And they thought, “well if a billboard of a murdered baby won’t shock her, maybe this will!”

What disturbed me most was the way the squirrel screamed. I have a Chihuahua and once when I was ten, I gave her a bath and was blow-drying her on the kitchen counter. She got scared of the dryer and slipped off the counter and fell to the floor. And she yelped, it had scared her so much. And the squirrels yelp today reminded me of my baby dog’s yelp when I dropped her as a puppy. Or that time I accidentally shut her head in the refrigerator.

she loves me....

she loves me not...

she loves me...

she loves me not...

she loves me!

But the squirrel today also made me think about the white mouse in the Palahniuk book. And that’s something I didn’t want to be reminded of. I can handle killing babies, but animal cruelty is something I will never be able to tolerate. So I guess I do have limits. I can still be shocked by the world. I’m not as brave and desensitized as I thought I was.

Congratulations, Charles, you sick motherfucker, you have drawn me a line. And crossed it.