and lo, it came to pass that on each Wednesday there occurred Austin Office Hours @ Cosmic Saltillo after 6:30pm, and thou didst arrive and look for the ducks, and thou didst meet thy mutuals from twitter dot com, and it was good

animals are liable to get hurt by electricity. monkeys grabbing power lines and moths flying into bug zappers and rats sneaking into transformers to gnaw at the colorful wires. they had no good reason to be afraid. getting zapped is an “unknown unknown” for them, a threat they don't know they don't know. kind of cosmic horror for a beast who isn’t able to study and understand the forces of nature. what unknown unknowns are hiding just out of sight for human beings? still electricity, surely, if we’re talking about a feral child who was never *told* what electricity is and what might happen to them if they’re zapped. but that’s not you, is it? you’re educated, you learned things in school. you read books. shoot, maybe a hundred years ago you would’ve been in danger of being slowly and agonizingly killed by the radium you licked off your brush painting watch dials but today we understand the primal forces at play in the universe and even children in villages without running water understand Nuclear is scary. they saw tom cruise fight Nuclear in a movie once, even if it's the only movie they ever saw. no, for a child of modern humanity the unknown unknown they’re most likely to be destroyed by is Other People. you’ll hear a new word on the playground and earn a spanking by innocently repeating it at home. you’ll find yourself bleeding in the bathroom at school and beg the other girls to call 911 while they laugh at you for not knowing. you’ll write one wrong word on your resume and receive precisely zero callbacks, plus a few blacklists to boot. you could’ve seen fire, you know to look for fire and can feel the pain of it burning your skin long before it's too late to pull away. shit, you could’ve heard the electricity buzzing off the wire. but you couldn’t have known about Other People you ever seen Chinatown? you ever seen Network? you ever seen No Country for Old Men? you ever see a friend say something at a party that’s going to make them persona non grata to half of their scene if it makes it back to the right ears? you ever see a really earnest nerd who wants to do the right thing stumble into the objectively most important thing ever look we can prove it mathematically? I want desperately to look away but there’s nowhere else to look, if you're going to participate in society you're going to be acted upon by these forces. you ever seen Eyes Wide Shut?