Target Restroom; Barboursville, WV

As I was exiting the restroom in Target I noticed a child of 10 or 11 in one of the stalls urinating indiscriminately on the seat, the floor, the walls and even himself a bit. I waited for him to finish so as to observe this absurd, anarchic abandon and when he turned around I was able to get a look into his face. I was struck by the wickedness I found. I was flooded with recollections of holocausts and mass graves; dull, banal evil for the sake of being evil and I was horrified by the wanton and lustful destruction I discovered in his face. I wondered if I should strangle this child or if he might have some obscure, cleansing destiny that was hidden from me (after all, I often feel ripe for extermination and even long for it but you can't force the hands of fate. Deliberating on all this, I decided that the best course of action was to take him to the paper towel dispenser and make him clean up after himself. He resisted at first, wrinkling his hideous little brow and snarling at me but I was firm and insistent so he eventually complied and cleaned his mess with an attitude that was an admixture of surliness and hurt defiance.

Consideration of this incident brings me to an apropos discussion of the terms sterile and fecund and the true meaning of each. To be fecund doesn't just mean that one can produce a child. You can be barren, diseased and ugly internally and be physically able to birth a child, a child whose insides will be full of ash (much like their parents.) I would consider such a human being sterile: incapable of bearing and fostering the pain of love, emotionally crippled phantoms drifting from comfort to comfort, pleasure to pleasure, heart to heart; sleepwalking through a life of meaninglessness trying to outrun themselves, their tiny pain and their fatal need for comprehension; stunted, aborted human habitats who are mutilated and mutilate as they pass through this world. Can we expect a sire such as this to produce anything other than a child whose heart is full of atrocities?