Our relationship with reality seems strained.

Babies are destructive, but there’s a strategy to it.

If you think back, way back, to the day you were born, I imagine that your first thoughts upon feeling the cold breeze on your damp thighs were the same as my first thoughts.

You probably looked around, realized there was a draft, that gravity was unpleasant, and that there were cretins as far as you could see. You could only see three feet that day, which is why you had hope for the first week of your life. And you probably noticed that the only two things you actually wanted to do — eat and sleep — had stopped being the main event, and had become the crispy bits at the top of the soggy mushroom noodle casserole of life, luring you into waking every day to maintain the illusion that maybe this time it will be okay.

Which is why most of us cry when we’re born.

It’s the ones who don’t cry that you have to watch out for, because their first thought upon seeing the soggy casserole of life is… “Well, if I smash all of this stuff, I can probably fix some of it later. I can at least fix this draft. Honestly, guys. Ever heard of curtains?”

That is the main arrogance of human kind. Some of us realize at an early age that the cure to all the problems that we perceive in our world consists in the relationship between a hammer and a roll of duct tape. The rest of us cotton on eventually, and forever thereafter live our lives in a perpetual cycle of saying to reality, “Change for my pleasure,” watching as reality ignores us, and then applying a brute force solution to make things do what we want.

It is a sentiment that is most aggressively present in the motivation behind the technical solutions to that problem of applied physics which is often phrased, “I don’t like where I am. Can we do something about this? The light’s wrong. The heat’s wrong. The view is wrong. Nothing nearby makes me happy. Do something to fix this, please.”

We don’t usually say please. I just added that because otherwise it’s all too depressing.

We do this with all our technology.

We said, “Hey, this nighttime thing isn’t working for me.” Then we reacted violently with strobing lights.

We said, “What are you trying to do with these calm and irregular sounds, reality? Who do you think we’re kidding here? We all know that’s just to hide the snuffling of the bears.” And we shoved sub-woofers under trees and into caves and created things that sound like a broken vacuum cleaner chewing on razor blades and called it music.

Then reality tried to react by having weather, and we hit the “fuck you” button on our dash boards and kept the weather at a breezy medium. Then, as an additional “fuck off” to reality, we added pine fresh scent back in.

If that experience sounds familiar it’s because most of us have had it before, every time we ride around in a car. We flash our brights and fog lamps — there MAY be something on the road to scare off, not that we’ll be able to see it through the fug that we generate by sweating in our extra layers of fat and clothing. We switch on our dubstep, because what’s the point of simply getting somewhere? We must also have a club experience on the way.

It doesn’t matter whether we’re driving through a lake or a fireball, we will get there refreshed.

I always wonder, what’s the huge hurry to get places? It doesn’t matter when you get there. It’ll be the same thing no matter how long it takes.

We used to be more patient. We used to use naturally occurring forces to get us places. We knew that it would take us a while to get to the other end, and we took that into consideration when we made our plans.

Which isn’t to say that I think we ought to get rid of technology that genuinely helps us accomplish things. If I have a violent case of the hiccups and I’ve just been stabbed, the last thing I want to hear is that the ambulance is delayed because the wind isn’t favorable.

On the other hand, if I’m planning a trip to Ireland, and they tell me that it’ll take a week because the zeppelins can’t move much faster than the clouds, I would be okay with that.

People behave as if there’s a fine line between automating our lives to the point that we don’t need to show up and that collective delusion we call “convenience.”

But we all know, deep in our souls, even if we never admit it, that you will still need to stand in line for four hours at both ends of an hour long flight to get to a town that’s every bit as “brought to you by Wal-Mart” as wherever you just left.

Because that is true power. You can tell by the vacant expressions of people standing in line that they are feeling the rush.

It’s no wonder the other species avoid us.

I say all this, but it doesn’t matter. We can all console ourselves that we have become very small gods, capable of controlling every little detail in our very small universes.

Welcome to the future. We have matching jackets.

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