on self-displacement

When you were a child, did you cuddle with a beloved stuffed animal before nightfall? Maybe you pressed it to the beating wish for human connection in your chest and recalled stories of Cinderella or maybe Ruslan and Ludmila or whichever love story happens to be passed on in your iteration of modern culture. Maybe when you grew up you met some approximation of this fairytale, adjusted the goggles through which you process reality, and settled down with Ruslan or Charming or Bill. Maybe you didn't. Maybe instead you got a lonely dog or cat reflective of the hungry need that has only increased in its beating from childhood chest to adulthood chest that craves and craves. You got a job as a social worker or a teacher. You got a job as a nurse. You help people. Or you don't, you just own a Sims colony in which virtual families live and die and fart and procreate and tell you that they love you.

The self is hunger. The self is hunger for hunger. The self is hunger for mutual hunger. And however your hunger happens to displace, form, mold itself, the drive is a constant need to eat people. We are the self-congratulatory vampires.


PS: This is why we love dogs and cats so much. They are our own hunger, down on all fours, they have submitted to hunger completely and honestly, always hungry for food and love which essentially becomes the same thing. Food-love, love-food, to eat to love to talk to drink to eat to love to talk to consume, consume me-you. Across the table, the table on which we consume each other. The wedding table the coffee table the dinner table, the consumption slab across which we displace food with love with food.