Because the opposite of fascism isn’t anarchy, it’s theater. When the world is fucked, you go to the theater, you go to the shine, and when the bad men come, all there is left to do is sing them down. You didn’t get it, I didn’t think you understood, you can’t sing a dirge to the reaper, he’s already heard them all. You gotta slaughter him with joy and a beat like the best of all possible shags,…

“Dying happens to everyone, even stars. Even the stuff between stars. But if you believe in yourself and achieve your goals, you can die so hard that no one will ever forget you, and that’s almost as good as not dying at all.”

Justice takes so long that by the time you get it, it’s gone off and smells like an old corpse. Forget about justice. Just knock back a big, stiff drink and move to a new town with fewer pronks living in it.

So they could feel a little more human by osmosis…Pain becomes playful, playful becomes pretty, pretty becomes pleasure, pleasure becomes profit, profit becomes safety, another day not working at Mr. Five Star, another day further from invisibility.

“We have always believed that one of the hallmarks of sentience is the ability to look down upon others.”

“Damn…I thought you were the other one. I hate carbons. You all look the same.”

But most people can only be so anxious and so terrified and so sleepless and so cowed and awed before the yawning abyss of the future for so long. Eventually, the body simply can’t sustain it. Eventually, some work has to get done. Eventually, adrenal glands need a bit of a break.

… everybody was terribly distracted by the seemingly unending, white-hot, existential, logistical, mostly mundane troubles of their own day-to-day lives.

“As far as quality housemates to be found on Planet Earth, it goes: dolphins, elephants, orangutans, octopi, then every single spider, then Joan of Arc, the Dalai Lama, Mr. Rogers, Freddie Mercury, my nan, all the scorpions, German measles, a dented recycling bin, and then maybe some of the rest of us. It’s grim.”

He hated this place. What was the point of a world without debilitating bitterness and despair? How could you even tell you were alive? How could you possibly write a decent pop song if you weren’t a sad sack of tissues or at least fundamentally angry at the world most of the time?