The Post Office, and Yours Truly, of course, are all victims of a school of architectural design and interior-space planning which views human beings (or anything reasonably approximating them) as cattle.
Cattle, I don't suppose I need to mention, may think they're having a pretty good life... up until they are all herded into line.
I don't suppose I should need to mention that every time I get into a line that puts people in arm's reach in front of me, and leaves people behind me also in arm's reach, I feel a bit like that cow in the video that saw the one in front of it get the stunner.
Doubtless most people would just call me "paranoid" and wouldn't bother to question whether it was just me being a Freak and oddball weirdo, or whether I might perhaps have had some experiences in the past that have so traumatized me that total discomfort in comparable situations is inevitable. Well, get a load of this, and ask yourself after you've seen it, just how comfortable you are standing around like cattle in a chute, hemmed in by rails or counters to the sides, and with people pushing in from behind:
I keep expecting to be standing in line at my Monthly Ritual Humiliation and have the villain of this flick get up behind me while I'm standing at the counter dealing with the cheerful clerk, with my money on the counter and this guy caerfully sliding across the counter with his bottled air and stunner right behind me. So, like the cattle in the chutes, I pretend that I cannot hear what I hear nor smell what I smell, nor do I allow myself to wonder if perhaps this one time the cattle chute doesn't lead to the feeding pens, but perhaps to another place entirely.
Then again, I have to go get money orders to pay my bills, and like the cattle, go whither the prod leadeth.
This being the month leading up to Hallowe'en, that celebration of how thin is the veil that separates the living from the dead, I figure that if I can add anything to the generic creepiness, I might as well.
It's not hard for me to do: for me, every day is Hallowe'en, or might as well be. Scary monsters everywhere, dontcha know.
There's no question that I probably didn't do myself any favors, having always had a tendency to understand that to err on the side of caution is still to err (and that therefor even more caution is advisable, in all things), when I developed a taste for Modern Horror Fiction.
Of course I went through the phase of watching old scary movies -- not these stupid modern adrenaline-jerkers, but rather the really creepy old ones -- and reading various horror classics. I became quite fond of not merely the creepiness of Saki's short stories, but also of the elegance of their structure and style.
And of course, who could manage to grow up in the US without having seen a dozen film adaptations of the classic novel Dracula?
The novel, oddly enough, mostly struck me as a book about the superstituous fanaticism of Van Helsing; Dracula himself didn't scare me much if all you needed to keep him away was some running water and maybe a crucifix. But some people -- the majority of the readers who were scared half to death by reading this -- were less interested in dealing with a problem, and were more interested in freaking out over the existence of the problem... fictional though the problem might be.
Dracula didn't much scare me, but Van Helsing and his friends did.
Why? Simply because they were focusing on the wrong issues, in my humble opinion. By concentrating on him being an undead fiend from hell and a close confidant of the powers of darkness, etc., they almost totally overlooked the real danger of the Count, which wasn't that he had a rather thoughtless technique of returning repeatedly to the same victim until they died and themselves became vampires. The real problem was that if this went on, he'd make several vampires, they would make several vampires each, each of those would make several vampires, and before you know it, there's nothing left except for vampires, and presumably they all starve to death.
By concentrating on superstition and the generally unstated theological implications, they almost completely failed to do the math. That as they were superstitious and delusion, that they would also fail to examine the logic, that goes without saying.
A friend of mine once told me that they'd actually had an assignment in their 7th-grade math class on the subject of Geometric Progressions, which used the Dracula legend as a problem.
They were given the postulates that one bite from a vampire causes the victim to turn into a vampire, who would then bite one person a night for the rest of time. (Evidently it was considered too complex for 7th-grades to factor in attrition rates of vampires tracked and killed by hunters.)
Really, if you fold in a lot of assumptions -- easily done by not asking many questions nor thinking about much of anything -- it doesn't take long to do the math, and the math says that it doesn't take long before you run out of people.
That people are rather complex and tend to notice things and adapt their behavior doesn't factor into this simple 7th-grade math problem.
But if you bother to actually think about how people would react to such a thing, assuming that it's even possible, you can come up with some pretty good science-fiction and/or horror stories:
But having come up with some good stories, please don't forget to do the math.
And having done the math about the vampires, don't forget to do the math about the humans, too.
And now for some fiction:
When you are as awesome a player as I am, it's only natural that you are going to have more than one girlfriend.
And when you're as much of a hustler as I am, you can probably afford it.
It takes real talent, and a job that allows you to travel, to not just be a two-timer, but to be a 12-timer. You've heard those stories about the old sailors that had a wife and children in every port? Well, that would be me, but I have at least two girlfriends in every major city with an international airport. And as I get paid quite well and travel all of the time, and as I like to party and I'm single and good looking, I'm not just a two-timer, I'm a transnational two-timer in at least 20 cities.
Well, I just didn't count on my good luck so far, getting suddenly translated into getting the "you are gonna be a daddy" call from 12 different women all in one week...
The funny thing is, this is fiction only in the use of first-person narrative.
This sort of thing actually happens:
[ ... ]
"He's got child support obligations across the country, and he's got zero income," attorney Randall M. Kessler told Judge Clarence Seeliger. [Former NFL star Travis] Henry also has other expenses. He was arrested last month in an alleged cocaine deal, and was released after posting a $400,000 bond.
Seeliger set the child support payments last year, when Henry was working as a running back. The judge also ordered Henry to establish a $250,000 trust fund by last spring. The judge's order noted that Henry had squandered money, spending $100,000 for a car and $146,000 for jewelry, and said the fund was required as backup should Henry fail to make payments [...]
So, is Travis Henry the irresponsible Count Dracula of normal human reproduction? Will his children and their descendants take over the world?
Not at all, not within the normal context of normal humanity any time up until about the year 1960, which the Birth Control Pill was first widely available. Until the 1980s, for example, the average female in Mexico gave live birth to above 8 children. My paternal grandmother had something like 12 live births, though not all survived.
Yet do the math: if one man has 12 kids, and each of them has 12 kids, and each of those has 12 kids, that would be as third generation of 1728 offspring, plus the 144 in the second generation, plus the 12 in the first generation... 1884 people. 15 years is a "standard generation". Consider them all as having been in the position of all being male, turning 15 and becoming remarkable sleep-arounds, and this becomes 1884 people spread over 45 years, with 1728 of them about to turn 15 (all male, for the sake of the argument and a simple math problem) and that starts to look like a bit over 20,000 new mouths to feed along with the nearly 2000 ones that have been eating three square meals a day.
Now, for extra bonus points, calculate how much food they eat, and then calculate how much oil it takes to plant, fertilize, harvest, ship, store, and deliver that food.
The really sad thing is this: at the time my friend was getting her "vampire problem" in her math class in the DC public school system in 7th grade, in that same year, the average age of first birth in the District was 10th-grade, about the time kids start to become capable of doing the "extra bonus points" research and calculation on their own with minimal guidance.
That was 1983, when 56 percent of all births in the District of Columbia were to unwed children.
And at 15 years per generation, that 3rd generation -- as in the problem given above -- is just now coming of reproductive age.
And given that there are 6 billions of people on the planet, with another billion added every 12 years, for extra bonus points and math credit, calculate how much oil will be needed to plant, fertilize, harvest, transport, store, deliver, and prepare all of the food that will be needed by the year 2050.
I think you've got more important things to worry about than bloodsuckers.
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