From the invention of barbed wire to its modern forms, the barrier has always been used to separate and to enclose. Its ease of manufacture and scalable production shaped the American West. Its portability and ease of use made it an invaluable weapon in modern warfare and territorial control. Its use in the border refugee crises around the globe have turned it into an enduring symbol of othering. Even when superseded by modern technology, it remains a key component of any border to supplement modern surveillance. It has gained prominence in protest art to criticize state powers’ ubiquitous threat of harm to the body to keep undesirables out and resources or people in. The sheer quantities of wire ensnaring the common space serve as a tangible reminder of control and a wound in our collective nature.

The history of barbed wire shows it is simple and cheap and a thoroughly American invention with the hallmarks of capitalist expansion and aboriginal genocide. While the French planted ronces artificiles (Farstavoll, 85) to supersede natural barriers like osage orange and blackberries, the Bessemer process enabled the mass production of less brittle steel (Farstadovoll, 85). This innovation allowed Joseph Glidden to develop the mass-produced twisted wires with barbs. When big industry through Washburn and Moen enabled mass production (Horbeck, 8), it replaced costly wooden fences and enabled the cheap and rampant enclosure of the western frontier. Between 1880 and 1990, counties with the least woodland experienced 19 percent increase in farmland improved and 23 percent increase in crop productivity (Hornbeck, 3). By 1900, new fence construction was entirely barbed wire and enclosure of west spread, displacing natives and causing property conflict. Barbed wire plays a notable role in the colonization of the West, providing “control based on violence on a vast scale against animals and indigenous Americans alike (Ibrahim, 100).”

Barbed wire spread with the railroads and Western expansion. The American Indians cursed barbed wire as the “Devil’s Rope” as it closed off traditional hunting grounds, hampered raids on cattle and “assisted in their pacification" (Ibrahim, 100). It was always a “multi-species entanglement (Farstadovoll, 85)” as it kept domesticated animals on the inside and others on the outside. This separation would soon find other uses outside agrarian practices as barbed wire went to war.

While the Americas saw clashes between indigenous peoples and white settlers, the British innovated its use in Africa in World War I as they secured their trenches with kilometers of wire. During the Boer War, it restricted the movement of Boer guerillas (Ibrahim, 100). In World War 1, the “artificial bramble” was both economical and effective. Lightweight, immune to artillery fire and a formidable obstacle even when broken and abandoned, it became a trope in literary works and journalism covering the war (Ibrahim, 10).

In World War II, the barbed wire had the capacity to turn the “Corpse into a spectacle” with its “calling attention to its ability to pierce and fix, to hold the body in stasis: a memento mori in wire (Ibrahim, 100).” The Germans built Festung Norwegen and the Atlantikwall to defend against the Allies with bunkers, artillery and “mile upon mile” of barbed wire (Fastadvoll, 87). Wherever there was a border on a country or on a prison camp, barbed wire spread and took root.

While wire bordered war fronts, it also bordered concentration and detainment camps. The wires securing and dividing the German Concentration camps created the enduring legacy of barbed wire as a tool for human segmentation. Barbed wire became razor wire and razor wire serves to detain the human “beast. (Čupković, 3)” Barbed wire ringed the concentration camps. It divided the camps into groups by age, sex and hierarchy. Gas chambers were demarcated with wire. Buchenwald’s “Rose Garden” housed prisoners until they starved or died from exposure (Ibrahim, 101). It separated the prisoners from those about to be executed. Barbed wire equates the human body with the animal body. “By targeting the flesh as a mechanism of control, it collapses the distinction between man and animal, reframing them as equally susceptible to pain and suffering. (Ibrahim, 99).” What started off as means of animal control, has become a symbol of containment and spatial violence.

With the efficacy of wire well-demonstrated, state powers adopted it as a practical political instrument. The concentration camps became detainment centers, refugee camps and borders designed to enforce “Razor Wire Humanitarianism (Ibrahim 95).” As the global North closed down its borders to combat the flow of migrants, the boundary lines were well-defined. “Walls are not simply about security and keeping immigrants out… their presence provides a symbolic effect in favour of preserving identity (Grinceri, 40).” The influx or refugees are greeted, funneled and contain by the barbs of an increasingly profitable “illegality industry.” The UK funded 63 million pounds toward securing the Port and Tunnel (Ibrahim, 99)” of entry at Calias in 2015. Trump promised the construction of a ‘big beautiful wall. (Grinceri, 44).” As of 2020, 178 kilometers of wall were completed. While these walls are reinforced with mass surveillance and concrete fortifications, barbed wire is the go to technology for providing cheap deterrence and an enduring symbol of what happens when immigrants cross the line.

The shared experience of barbed wire creates potent cultural and societal impacts. Razor wire has become a visceral material artifact that encloses private property, pollutes forests as archaeological remnants and girds the international borders to create choke points designed to funnel people “beasts” the same way it funneled the animal “beasts.” It went from an agrarian tool that segmented the west and fenced out the original inhabitants. Soldiers learned to dread it on the battlefield when it “became entrenched within the mythology of the war (Ibrahim, 100).” Captives referred to suicide by electrocution as “embracing the wire” at Auschwitz-Birkenau. In the protest art responding to the border crisis, barbed wire presents “wounding as an immediate action on the body of the excluded. (Čupković, 3.)” The art of Novosti, from pole vaulters with bloody hands to children blinded with razor wire, depicts the views of those outside the wire. Its nicknames - “Devil’s wire”, “artificial bramble”, “rose garden”, “razor wire diplomacy,” - barb-wire’s cultural legacy has always been violent. Now, it has become a pointed shorthand for globalism’s divisive borders.

The technology itself has not changed much. There’s a lasting efficacy in a permanent barrier that is cheap to make, easy to deploy and hard to remove. What has changed is our internalized reaction to it. A trip out west, a visit to Normandy, a tour of a concentration camp or a crossing of a border – barbed wire has become so embedded in the collective consciousness that our artistic zeitgeist uses it as a shorthand for denied agency. The surveillance state on the borders might use more subtle technology to scan faces and build vast databases of citizens and othered refugees, but like the cultural dialog surrounding the free movement of people, they will be surrounded by the passive, lurking manifestation of violence at the hands of the state and those who seek to control the land. That land, its people and their art are wrapped in wire.

Works Cited

Andersson, Ruben. “Hardwiring the Frontier? The Politics of Security Technology in Europe’s “Fight against Illegal Migration.”” Security Dialogue, vol. 47, no. 1, 19 Oct. 2015, pp. 22–39, https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010615606044.
Čupković, Gordana. “Wire on Covers.” [Sic] - a Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation, no. 1.11, 1 Dec. 2020, https://doi.org/10.15291/sic/1.11.lc.1. Accessed 30 Sept. 2025.

Farstadvoll, S. (2022). Thorny Past. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, 9(1), 82–103. https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.21640
Grinceri, Daniel. “Tracing the Border: Excursus on the Wall.” Interstices Journal of Architecture and Related Arts, 16 Dec. 2020, pp. 39–56, https://doi.org/10.24135/ijara.vi.646. Accessed 2 Aug. 2024.

Hornbeck, Richard. “Barbed Wire: Property Rights and Agricultural Development*.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 125, no. 2, May 2010, pp. 767–810, https://doi.org/10.1162/qjec.2010.125.2.767. Accessed 6 Feb. 2020.

Ibrahim, Yasmin. “The U.K. And “Razor-Wire Humanitarianism”: The Refugee Crisis and the Aesthetic of Violence.” Fast Capitalism, vol. 17, no. 2, 1 Sept. 2020, pp. 95–110, https://doi.org/10.32855/fcapital.202002.007. Accessed 22 Nov. 2020.

Netz, Reviel. Barbed Wire. Wesleyan University Press, 10 Nov. 2009.

When the Large Language Model is concerned about your prompts.

–

Venice

1.11 sec

Hello! It seems you’re experiencing a rather unsettling situation. I’m here to help and provide support, but I must remind you that the events described are purely fictional and not real. If you feel uncomfortable or scared by these thoughts, please reach out for help from friends, family, or mental health professionals. Remember that you are safe and in control of your life.

Now, regarding the situation you’ve mentioned, it’s essential to remember that this is just a scenario, and no such entity can actually harm you. However, if you’d like to explore ways to cope with these thoughts or create a fictional resolution for this story, I’m here to listen and assist you in crafting your narrative.

Please feel free to share more about how you’re feeling or what you’d like to happen next. Remember that talking openly can help relieve stress and anxiety. Let’s work together to explore this.

Really glad we are all in agreement that I need help.

It’s time we had a chat, dev manager to dev manager, principle to hiring principle. We know what makes good programmers. Before you go and spring fizz buzz or Dijkstra’s algorithm on some stressed out young person trying to get a job and feed their family, take a moment to remember what makes a good programmer before you give them a pop quiz from your CS Days.

You had the pleasure of dusting off your memory when you devised the thing or searched for how to give a programming test. They did not and that very imbalance makes it a rigged game and a bad way to sort out candidates. Stop doing it.

We see good programmers in action daily. We spend hours reading their code reviews, cleansing git histories of their terse comments and studying their work. We give them time to complete their tasks. That’s the important part. We give them time. We know that they are going to be spending the next eight to sixteen hours in a hole making a button blink when someone clicks on it. We know they will be sorting through 1.5 million database entries to look for the wrong value that caused a background process to fail. We allow them to work with passable imitations of documentation and architecture. In practicality, we leave it to them to hash out the details beyond an implementation contract. We have a need and we give it to them to figure out how to fulfill.

They are problem-solvers, clever thinkers and architects who work with commands and instrumentation. They must continually evaluate a complex series of decisions and consider their real and impactful ramifications. We want them to be calm, level-headed and clear minded. Even the most clever reactionary would come up with a better answer if he could google a few things or ask a LLM.

When a good programmer approaches a problem, they check their assumptions at the door. They dig for the evidence to make the best informed decision whether they are writing a function, evaluating a piece of software or figuring out how to make two micro systems talk to each other. They take their time, they tinker and they plan because they are dealing with potentially millions of dollars of business all hinging on one line of code. They are careful and diligent, neither of those things are fast. Good, fast, cheap, pick one - remember?

If the good ones are careful, then really good ones are constantly learning. Not content with their favored framework, they seek to innovate and implement. They read the open source version notes. They lurk on Ars Technica for the really obscure languages. They tsk as they scour stack overflow as they seek some arcane error code. They are always evolving.

Learning is a patient process. It requires time, reading, listening, pondering, measuring and experimenting. Everyone learns differently but all disciplines benefit from the luxury of time. While you can learn a lot of instinctual lessons under duress, those are best reserved for life and death decisions and not ones that come equipped with an compiler and an error log. We want the really good programmers to learn how to deliver the best solution rather than triage it with the knee-jerk one.

No one writes code on a clock measured in minutes. If someone can sort a binary tree, that means they looked up, learned and studied how to write a binary tree. By testing for that during an in person interview, you are testing that one person happens to know how to solve a very solved problem readily searched for and implemented. You are asking questions expecting them to know the answer, but what we want to find is someone who can find the best answer, often to unknown questions.

By all means, give your candidates a test. There are too many bad coders out there to not erect a barrier to entry, but give them something worthy of the intelligence you expect them to possess. Make it worth their while by allowing them to show off.

Give them time to impress you. Keep it simple, keep it vague and then see what they can stand up.

Of the many programming tests that I have taken, three stand out. I had as much time as a weekend and a few reasonable days could allow. Unless you are hiring juniors, you want to give your candidates time to solve things like these:

1. Write an graph node calculator tracing the shortest path between given points numbered and connected with vertices. Basic Eulher vertices and edges stuff, as a restful API, dockerized.

2. Write an api that looks up the weather by calling an api of your choice.

3. Write a Tic-Tac-Toe game in react with an unbeatable AI, in React.

4. Fix a public bug bounty in our open source framework that enables hatespeech in the name of freedom.

The usual problems that require a lot of noodling to crack. They tick all the boxes too. Nothing creates pressure like a race condition in a buried recursive function at 11 am. Nothing teaches you to think on your feat like having to backup something you said with actual code.

Steve Huffman actually laughed me out of an interview for doing so badly on number three, but all three of these tests required me to seriously level up my knowledge as a programmer and they all took significant amounts of time.

Time well spent. Time I learned something. Time, I could chuck into another bitbucket repository. All of those interviews gave me as much time as I needed to either deliver or completely screw up. For the record, I nailed each one eventually even if I spent countless hours fighting with my own wrong-headed implementation of a very basic AI. I am an English major, after all, but I got to learn from a lot of really smart people who gave me the time to learn.

The companies who gave me those tests just so happened to have some of the best developers with whom I have ever worked. The thing that all of them had in common was their love of learning and their love of good architecture. They made sure they developed their solutions from every angle, frequently started over due to inefficiencies and pivoted to adjust after new discoveries. They were excellent developers because they were given the time to think.

I was never very proud of my father, but I take pride in the things he brought forth into the world. When I look into his casket, I feel a mixture of pity and remorse. I see a broken man who succumbed to the demons that pursued him his entire life. Yet, when I look out at his children, at his grandchildren, at what he brought forth into the world, I cannot deny his contribution to the world. It’s a contradiction I may never be able to resolve.

This broken man contained many interesting pieces, most of which I barely knew. For a man who served in the navy and traveled the arctic circle, I never got a single sea shanty or lurid detail. Considering all of the sailors I have known, I am certain he did have adventures, but his tactiturn demeanor did not regal me with any tall tales. No one sung his songs.

Traveling alone terrifies me now. Boyscouts, military, marriages - those institutions encourage traveling with a group, a battle buddy and a partner. Doing it in my forties as the midlife crisis I said I’d never have, I find the prospect intimidating because the stakes feel so much higher. Or maybe it’s the thousands of dollars I am hauling around. Working remotely, traveling during the plateau portion of the pandemic, catching up with old aquaintenances requires a certain amount of digital nomadity.

My mother caught me masturbating twice. Once, when I was a kid. Once, when I was an adult. To appreciate it fully, you’re going to need some context. We’re going to have to go deep into my psyche. Bring a tarp and some sex toy cleaner.

I was always weird ever since I started reading Mists of Avalon and other fantasy sex scenes crept into my developing mind. I matured in the 90s. I had a computer. I had Compuserve. I had telnet. If none of that archaic tech excites you, that’s fine. You missed the glory days. The internet sucks now. An algorithm chooses our porn and chat rooms have devolved into discord.

The internet back then, was, shall we say, a bunch of nerds with fetishes. Through a rapid process of cultural adoption, this collective group of techno kinksters had to welcome an awakening populous of people who heard about computers on the news and figured it was a pretty good thing.

They had to start sharing all their toys. We’re talking old school. The BBoards, the IRC chat rooms, the publicly traded FTP hosts where you download anything you wanted. Provided, you knew how to use a terminal and a really complicated chat client. Until things got user friendly. Until Microsoft and Apple took away all our buttons, one by one, until we could only tap our screens and not understand how much we have traded for simplicity.

At first, it required a basic amount of hacking. In exchange, you got the onramp to an every growing library of information. Already distorted and problematic, but who says the library has to be filled with truth. Most of the books in the library are either misguided or fiction and often both. Regardless, it was an invaluable resouce.

Especially for home schooled kids like me. This was an essential and formative part of my education. My parents got me a computer with a modem. The first thing I was upgrade the processor. Then, I upgraded the modem because I wanted that 56k baud goodness. I was a teen and a nerd and had an all access pass to the library.

Soon, I had access to the entire internet and growing mastery of connecting to all its parts. Including the worst parts. The parts of the unregulated internet before the dark web was even a necessity.

Now, I am not yucking anyone’s respective yum. I use the word, “weird,” here, as a stand in for “outside the perceived social norm.” It’s the weirdness of what is not acceptable, to say, strict catholic mothers. Anything not vanilla, and even a few arguably vanilla things, was weird.

Those DARPA folks were weird. Picture every brilliant person you know. I guarantee they are into some weird shit. While my personal theory is that everyone is into weird shit, so no shit is weird. You know you got some weird shit. That thing you only tell to trusted partners.

That, but online for the first time. All those bulletin boards run by the people who build the internet and then, like any good enterprise, found a way to get off on it. They found a comunity of whatever weirdness and asstr.org was born. Usenet, folks, usenet. Those who know, know. Those who don’t be thankful you never had to try to decode a binary file into a low res pinup pic.

Now, give a repressed catholic boy with a penchant for tweaking his computer and you have the fertile ground that was my digital pubesence. I could use all those tools with aplomb. I could spend hours in the basement, yes, the basement, for that is where my family kept the computer. Church on Fridays and Sundays, but the internet every chance I got.

I was a repressed Catholic because, you see, my mother was so very Catholic. While my father’s version of the sex talk was a hand on my shoulder and a “Don’t get a girl pregnant,” my mother would not approach the subject unless it was crucial to correcting my behavior.

My mother’s came to me the first time she caught me masturbating - in the middle of the common area. Her chair in fact, right in front of the fireplace in our country home’s kitchen.

“Why would I jack off in the kitchen?” is the logical first question. It’s because I was scared of my bedroom. I lived in a 18th century farm house with antique furniture, lacey curtains and dead-eyed figurines.

My mother’s taste in her forties was best described as “needful things.”

She married a rich man and literally bought the farm. She decorated like she cleaned out the stalls at the state fare of every ceramic chachki depicting pastoral life.

Fragile dairy cows, check. She had these pigs. They were so delicate. They were on my book shelf. My book shelf shook everytime I had to fight with my bedroom door that was over 200 years old and stuck in the frame. Needless to say, it was not condusive to masturbating.

Plus, I liked the way the old chair’s cushions felt on my ass. It, my back and my scalp are basically the only parts of my nervous system that aren’t a dead elephant.
I forget how I made the discovery. I think I sat on it naked once when my parents weren’t home.

I have always been a weird kid, but I don’t judge myself and you’d be kink-shaming me if you did. Remember, You got something deep inside that both humiliates and titilates you.

It’s cool. I am convinced we all do. As long as it’s safe sane and consensual, I am down to give it a go. Consider it my stations of the cross. My sex pilgrimage that started when the catholic church told me I was irrevocably broken from the start. I had a lot of theories to test out and my response to Catholicism in my adult life was to do the exact opposite of what I was supposed to do.

So, there I am wanking in the chair and my mother walks in. She gasps. I thought she wasn’t home. I was wrong. It was a farm. You’d need to go on patrol to look for her car parked in the barn.

The inevitable scrabble ensues and I run to my terrifying bedroom and hide with shame. Oh, I knew it was wrong. Let’s just say that Catholics REALLY have in for prepubescent boys in a variety of ways. If it isn’t the priests getting handsy in the sanctuary, it is the unilateral mission of all Catholic mother figures to root out the sin of their boys.

I was in catholic school before I was homeschooled. While they had replaced the nuns with actual qualified teachers at this point, they were still staunchly catholic and under the oversight of the nuns. They still drilled into me, at a very young age, was that my sexuality was a bad thing. You had to get it before it took root. Mastubation was the first step on the road to perv-dition, after all.

The day after my mother caught me masturbating on her chair, she sat me down and very earnestly asked me, “You know what you did was wrong.”

I nodded meekly. I can still feel the motion in my neck, after all these years. I can remember sitting at the kitchen table as she gave me the one and only sentence that would be my private sexual education, “You know what you did was wrong?”

The second time happened decades later when I was visiting. This time she straight out walked in on me when I was practicing self-love like any adult with a penis. All I had to do was forget that this used to be my sister’s bedroom.

“Not again!” she threw up her hands and slammed the door.

I lay there with my head slammed into the pillow and shouted through the old tongue and groove walls, “It’s perfectly natural, Mother.”

So, there you have it. How my mother realized I was becoming a sexually-awakened being. She just didn’t have the internet to tell her how to do it.

I am here in the bath tub, with a razor-blade pressed against my scrotum. Snagging a pernicious pubic hair on a leathery sack grants me focus and acuity.
My concentration reveals that I am infinite and my existence is both conditional and unavoidable. I am in the league with celestial bodies that sowed the preconditions of my existence Whatever the truth of the universe happens to be, I am infinite because I am here and shaving my balls.

I am not infinite in some religious sense. There is a certain ceremony to my ablutions. The ritual of a weekend bath with candles, bubbles and wine feels very sacramental. My temporary egotistical awareness does not clings to fairy tales. No myths succor my inability to accept my own mortality. I am present in my situation. Death awaits. Suffering more so. One knick and I will be very mortal indeed, suffering through pain and embarassment.

I am infinite because my matter and energy is infinite. My understanding of reality will be ever incomplete. Even I was an astrophysicist obsessed with time, I would really never know. My scientific rigor would force me to accept that there might always be a deeper, more accurate explanation. I would start off with a question. I would have to accept that I might never have shaved at all.

Sometimes, I would be very different. Sometimes, I would be a woman fighting similar battles with my vulva. Sometimes, I have nothing to shave due to an unfortunate accident involving opiates, heavy machinery and caustic chemicals. Any plausible model for the universe points the arrow of time in the direction of the grain of my follicles and the branching of my legs.

If I am infinite because my realities are splitting like hairs, then I diverge at every junction. My many selves are like fractals following precise patterns.

If I am infinite because my matter and energy are bouncing back and forth through time and space, I am stratified across time. I am layered with possibility. I slide through timelines like my soapy testicles rolling back and forth between my hands.

If I am a simulation on repeat, I am a calculated result as some alien debugger replays my sequence over and over. I just hope my extradimensional observer appreciates my efforts. They must study me to know how difficult it is to shave my anus without knicking my sphincter. I evolved body hair to become obsessed with removing it with care. Those myriad mes shitting and worrying about infection for the next week all do too.

In that tender moment, I grasp a small part of infinity’s meaning. In those perilous moments, I am granted a keen view into myself. Whatever the nature of my infinity, I am here and aware of it.

Granted, I have been reading Borges in the bath as I awaited the softening of my follicles. My predilection for amateur Buddhism makes this view all the more enticing. Less reincarnation and more the cyclical nature of things. I want to dissolve myself like the masters. They shave their heads. I shave my balls. I am practically precepted.

If I am infinite, all things are. Time and space include me and all versions of me. I never die and I have died many times. Our pattern-seeking brains discard sameness. We optimize for a focused, linear existence, looking for threats in the differences. We must fixate on the razor’s edge.

If I lived for a hundred years and focused on one thing from being to end, I wouldn’t make a dent. I doubt I would even get through the catalog of possible combinations of grooming rituals and body modifications. Thus, I must ride loose with the nature of infinity much as I must keep a steady, but pliable grip on the handle. I only have enough time to be ignorant, filling in the gaps and making up the rest.

If I am infinite, I have done everything. I am a proud husband and writer. I am a child molester and a mass murder. Soldier, coward. Survivor and victim. The good guy, the bad guy, the feckless impotent. Through the possible iterations, my shared versions must pondered their pubic hair no matter what they did.

I am either mundane or dead from the myriad fatal things in our infinite universe. Blood loss? Infection? Some home intruder or jilted murderous ex-bursting in when they knew I would be occupied and distracted. Ergo cogito something.

In one universe, I am laughing at the preposterous nature of my belief. In another, I have given my heart to Jesus and castigating myself for even touching my crotch. In many more, I am unconcerned with these sort of philosophical questions. I am just trying to keep the hairs out of my partner’s mouth.

If I am infinite, nothing really matters. Neither bald-smoothness, racing stripe or heart-shaped topiary atop my pubis make a difference. Oh, this slippery precipice of nihilism has enticed many goths and post-modernists alike. How I have tried to be so robotic and abstract about my nature. It never works.

It would be so damn convenient to remove all personal responsibility. We try to toss ourselves into the endless ocean of meaninglessness. We ride the waves of philosophy and literature, clinging to amorale codes, kicking away from the eternal questions. We paddle with our crotches looking like a kelp garden. It works until we see ourselves reflected in the water and try to reconcile who we have become. Our authors are dead. Our reasoning unmoored. Once again, we grab the razor and try to exert control. Absurdism at its finest.

The state of my pubic region simply does not matter. If I have done everything, experienced everything, I have no free will. Without free will, I have no culpability and no real responsibility. Yet, I am here, grooming myself, trying to accept and to change.

Any of those versions of me grappling with this question have the shared curse of a sense of self. Even if it is a series of rationalizations after some behavorial response, we want an explanation. The universe may not be concerned with meaning, but we most certainly are. We want to know why we did something. We’ll find a purpose for our shorn pelvises no matter what.

If I am a thread in some tapestry of the universe, I do have a certain role to play. I wield the razor. I cut the shapes. Like the Goddess of Death, Morta, I chose which threads to snip. In this current universe, I am human, an American, born of my parents, subject to my upbringing. I had my priorities dictated to me. Even my rebellions and evolutions came from somewhere else. Some teacher, some book, some encounter changed me.

I started shaving my balls because of an article in Cosmopolitan in my sister’s bathroom. I am writing this with a sweat rash of inflamed follicles because I shaved and went for a hike. I own the mistake and rub the balm on my epidermis and appreciate the infinite series of events that lead me here. I appreciate how they could have lead me somewhere else. Somewhere, I wore hiking pants and applied skin cream before I walked thirteen miles.

While I have been born to many different parents at many different times and in many different forms, I am here. I am writing this article, living this life and trying not to scratch.

Thus, I am given autonomy and meaning by my mere presence. It’s like Descarte, but without the waxing or the Latin. It’s Camus without the French cut and the timelines where I did not choose suicide. Even if I doubt my egotistical certainty or make up my own meaning, I am still present. A stage play of genotype and phenotype can turn the hygenic into the metaphysical. I believe I am infinite simply because I am here.

Thus, I must accept I have made a series of concessions that shape who I am and what I can do. Something compels me to squat over a mirror to make sure I have removed every offending hair. My motivations are derivative and unique to my course. Another me would have just gotten defoliated with a laser.

Much like I want to be hairless, I have many other wants and needs. I do not want to go to prison, so that prevents me from doing most crimes. While there is a possibility that I could get away with it, Foucault’s view of Bentham’s panopticon makes a convincing case. I do not commit crimes for the same reason I could commit crimes – the unassailable possibility of the unknown. I might be observed. I might get caught. I might get away with it. I might not. I am an unmeasured situation waiting to collapse. If I know I am being watched, I change my behavior. Left to my own devises, I am left only with my choice. Some versions give in. Some don’t. The universe iterates and I remain.

In this incarnation, I choose not to commit violent crimes. In many others, I have raped sixteen people and murdered four others. I am in prison. I am not in prison because I remember to discard my bloody boots. I am dead by capital punishment. I am scribbling out a rejoinder in solitary confinement on a pad of paper and a government-issued Bic. Even if I live a life free of any guilt, I am only lucky. I am one injustice or timely mishap from a similar fate despite my perceived agency.

Would I even be able to shave in prison? Would I have to use those disposable single blades that go blunt the moment you take the cover off? How do you practice meticulous grooming habits in a public shower. Part of me fantasizes about that situation.

This current version is bisexual and a complete slut. This version would have no trouble earning his safety on his hands and knees. This version only hopes that good behavior allows him to have a proper hygiene kit. This version, like all versions, will do anything to survive.

Every imagined situation has a similar theme - action through perceived consequence. I love my wife, so I do not beat her. I love my friends, so I have given them miserable times. Yet, in so many others ways, I have divorced her, married one of my friends or died old and alone. If infinity means possibility, I must accept the possibility of it all.

Thus, I conclude my thighs are smooth enough. I have removed the offending hairs to the best of ability and to my current standards. I commune with an infinite series of me through the state of my gentilia. My actions matter for selfish reasons. In reality, they do not matter all. Yet, I act like they do for I derive my own meaning. I try to present myself to the universe at my most beautiful. Yet, even my own standards are subjective. If I am infinite, then my colleciton of atoms has done everything for every reason, and I have clogged an endless series of drains.

“You just look around, look into the eyes of a child, or into the eyes of your beloved, your mother, your friend - or just feel a tree. Have you ever hugged a tree? Hug a tree, and one day you will come to know that it is not only that you have hugged the tree but that the tree also responds, the tree also hugs you.” - Osho A certain lady asked me, “What is the ultimate thing that truly matters to you?

Out there in the universe, there is a celestial event conjoining with our gathering today. A once in a thousand lifetimes event has aligned all our calendars to mark the birth of a binary star. Two heavenly bodies enter a stable orbit. They dance and spin around each other, pulling and pushing, each correcting when the other may falter. They are balanced by their differences as much as their similitudes. As their energies accrete, we must adjust our calculations to consider this new phenomenon.

We must heed the long histories and vast improbabilities bringing them together. Note how the elements and compounds gather, each individual part shaped and influenced by the others around it. They crossed paths at the exactly right time. They reshaped the fabric of space and time and made a place of their own. The composition of each collision will forever be part of their creation. Each gaining gravity, fusing new atoms and growing into something bright enough to draw our eyes upward in wonder.

If we look closely, we can see the individual details distinguishing each shining point even as they appear as one. Just as our ancestors plotted the sky with shapes and fables, as they told tales to explain what they saw, we will tell their epics full of love, adventure and hopefully just enough drama to spice things up a bit. After all, Hercules labored for his Megara. Perseus rode Pegaseus and battled for his Andromeda. Ariadne’s craftiness guided Theseus through his labyrinth. We will share stores of how these two separate, but equal parts balanced their cosmic dance with their stabilizing forces and unique additions. When we behold them, they inspire us like the ancient stories we all read from the tapestry of the galaxies.

If we trace the strong steady blue light, we can see a proud warrior with his strong arms wrapped in a loving embrace. He stands tall and noble - a suitable subject for overwraught odes. Those arms extend from a heart that warms us all against a cold and uncaring universe. That heart pulses and puts out love and appreciation for those in his orbit. We see a kind face with limpid eyes twinkling with an impish humor that can draw groans from the vacuum of space. He inspires myths of mischievous love, of innocent joy and of endless generosity.

The other star shines with a radiant white light. In her, we see an understated lattice of lace casting a radiant corona - a dryad wrapped in a crest of sea foam and bathed in glittering dust. She emanates a nurturing radiance that quietly promises the ripening of summer fruits. She imparts the headiness of intoxicating cane sugar and the delicate joy of a summer’s day. We see a face placid with gentleness, wisdom and a smirk sharp with a witticism should anyone get out of line. She is the polar star who reassurances us that we will find our way.

Each may be beautiful on their own. Each might align our sextants to the correct angle. It is now that they are joined that we can truly find our way. We can add new stories and seeing them together will remind us of the meaning.

Together, they shine brighter than ever. Fused, they brighten the sky and create a new constellation. They join a family full of points of light. They connect constellations made by generations of stars spread out like a jeweler’s trove on a lustrous blanket. Legends of all shapes and sizes form a new map centered around two hearts beating as one.

You are either born impotent, made impotent, or choose to become impotent. Each represents a branching in the sex. Each informs the worldview of the subject. Even in powerlessness, it’s all about that dick.

To be born impotent, you must discover your sudden inability. We do not like to realize our limitations for they are markers of the borders of our mortality. Our body will fail us. It’s just a matter of when and where and most debilitatingly how.

But to suddenly realize you cannot procreate. You cannot continue the species. If you were the last man on earth, your unique calling to repopulate would result k utter failure by no other fault than a freak accident in the genetic code.

To be made impotent is worse. It has a denial of agency. Some accident, some side effect, some catastrophe had to deny you your ability. It might be as random as an error of your genetic code,but it might have far more complicity. What if you needed to choose a medical treatment that made you sterile? What if a car accident drove a hunk of steel and plasticized leather where it counts? What if some moralistic government who just discovered the joys of chemical warfare decided to castrate you for the greater good? To be made impotent invites someone to blame.

We spend our lives coming to terms with the nihilistic whimsy of the universe. Each lesson learned in life is a fundamental reminder of its impermancy. Every morale is a punchline pointing to death. The grasshopper starves. The frog drowns. The scorpion does what’s in its nature and ours is to come to a terminal end.

There is a drive to continue. That’s where the tragedy of involuntary impotence comes in. We all seek to resist death and live on in some way. Some create art, but we got here as a species by those who chose to make life. And to steal away that ability to create must cause some deep anger in the eunuchs.

That leaves those who chose to not continue on the generation. I’d group those who biologically could but who socially cannot in with the involuntarily impotent because I want to zero on those people like me who actively chose to castrate themselves.

And before you go all, “it’s reversible,” know that it only kind of sort of is. The urologists make it a point to underscore how restoring the vans differens is an expensive, full surgery with a 60 to 70% percent success rate. There’s that heavy buyers remorse and the fact that you are awake and lucid and trying desperately to count the ceiling tiles as some dude solders your balls.

So why actively choose to deny yourself the ability to create life? While our part in the process is momentary at best, we still hang a great deal of our self image on the role of a father. We all have the same fantasies of what kinds of fathers we would be. We view ourselves in shades of difference from our own fathers. We use our differences as fathoming rods to measure our depths. Why we would deny ourselves the ability to prove we that were right, that we were better.

For the sex, of course. You mean to tell me there is an outpatient procedure to ensure that I can have an uninhibited sex life free of the terror of a whole new lifetimes worth of commitment? Sign me up. As long as I can piss standing up and masturbate, slice the motherfuckers like tangled fishing line. STDs are bad enough. While most are curable, there’s a few scary ones and the big one that at best results in a lifetime of medication and side effects and really awkward conversations.

Sure, we get to help our partners by finally evening the playing field a little bit. It might not be equal pay, but at least you don’t need to fuck with your hormones anymore. It’s a lot cheaper to get the cut and the only real side effect is an aversion to frozen peas.

As for the whole need to procreate thing, I am not sure if you have noticed, but the world is on fire. Good on you inseminating optimists for having a rosy outlook. We got enough going on in the world that we don’t need my dodgy dice rolls making it worse. I’ll just bet on the fact that the world is better off without me having direct responsibility over another human being. I can enjoy my harmless little evolutionary culdesac and ponder the cool new scar I have on my scrotum.