immolate kierkegaard said "sweep me up" [two men walking on an Austin TX street, one speaking, the other listening silently] "A self_destructive man feels completely alienated, utterly alone. He's an outsider to the human community. He thinks to himself: 'I must be insane.' What he fails to realize is that society has, just as he does, a vested interest in considerable_losses_and_catastrophes. These wars, famines, floods and quakes meet well_defined_needs. Man wants chaos...in fact he's gotta have it. Depression, strife, riots, murder, all this dread. [speaker fills cannister of gasoline] We're irresistably drawn to that almost orgiastic state created out of death and destruction. It's in all of us, we revel in it. Sure, the media tries to put a sad face on these things, painting them up as great human tragedies...But we all know the function of the media has never been to eliminate the evils of the world, no. Their job is to persuade us to accept those evils and get used to living with them. The powers that be want us to be passive observers...hey, you got a match?...[listener hands speaker a book_of_matches as both continue walking]...And they haven't given us any_other_options outside of the occasional, purely symbolic participatory act of voting. You want the puppet on the right or the puppet on the left? [listener disappears from scene, speaker sits cross-legged on streetcorner by a building] I feel that the time has come to project my own inadequacies and dissatisfactions into the sociopolitical and scientific schemes...let my own lack_of_a_voice be heard." [speaker douses himself with gasoline as oblivious passers_by walk_on, lights match and incinerates himself] excerpted from "Waking_Life" 020707 what's it to you? who go blather from