I'm going to be somewhat lazy about this. The whole introduction thing isn't really my deal, and if I tried to do one in a more conventional way, I'd end up sounding like I'm running through a speech for introducing myself at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. So rather than go that route, I'm going to repost something that I've written before now for a different site. To keep it so I'm only being somewhat lazy, I'll add a little to the original as I go along. Hopefully by the end, it will have given you some idea about me. Here goes nothing.

I'll confess right here and now that I'm clinically depressed, misanthropic and I have social anxiety. For the most part, I have only two people in my life, and one of them is more screwed up mentally than I am. When you are this way, you have to ultimately accept that people do not see things the way you do. I'm still learning to accept this, along with the fact that being a depressive by nature doesn't enamor you to many people because, well, depressives are depressing, and who wants to be depressed. As the band Ministry said, 'The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste.'

Don't get me wrong. Just because I'm a misanthrope, it doesn't mean that I don't speak to people in the street or see anything decent about them. That would be rude and disrespectful, and only serve to make me more like the people that make me feel this way, rather than the human I'm trying to be. I'm not exactly Rorschach from 'The Watchmen', nor am I some sort of Travis Bickle. I do consider myself approachable, and a pretty decent person. My misanthropy stems from not just what we are as a species, but what we seemingly refuse to become; more enlightened and unified.

Allow me to quote something for you. It's from a film called Brittania Hospital, though the film is not how I happened upon it. That was a track called 'Forever' by Orbital.

"Friends! Fellow Members of the Human Race! We are gathered here for a purpose. Let us look together at Mankind. What do we see? We see Mastery. What wonders Mankind can perform. He can cross the oceans and continents today, as easily as our grandfathers crossed the street. Tomorrow he will as easily cross the vast territories of space. He can make deserts FERTILE and plant cabbages on the Moon. And what does man CHOOSE? Alone among the creatures of this world, the Human Race CHOOSES to ANNIHILATE itself. Since the last world conflict ended, there has not been one day in which Human Beings have not been SLAUGHTERING or wounding one another, in 200 and 30 different wars. And man BREEDS as recklessly as he lays waste. By the end of the century, the population of the world will have TRIPLED. 2/3rds of our plant species will have been DESTROYED. 55% of the Animal Kingdom. and 70% of our mineral resources. Out of every hundred Human Beings now living, 80 will DIE without ever KNOWING what it FEELS like to be fully nourished... While a tiny minority INDULGE themselves in ABSURD and EXTRAVAGANT luxuries. A motion picture entertainer of North America will receive as much money in a MONTH as would feed a starving South American tribe for a hundred YEARS! We WASTE! We DESTROY! AND, we cling like SAVAGES to our SUPERSTITIONS. We give POWER to LEADERS of State and Church as prejudiced and small-minded as ourselves, who SQUANDER our resources on instruments of destruction... While Millions continue to SUFFER and go hungry, condemned FOREVER to lives of IGNORANCE and DEPRIVATION."

There's more; but I think the point is made. And the sad thing is, it isn't wrong. Not with regard to certain subjects, anyway. But as it goes, it's a view I can wholeheartedly agree with, because it's how I view our species. I do understand that there are many good people out there in the world, doing everything they can to live a good and decent life. Yet somehow, I can't get beyond feeling that this is not the way we are supposed to be.

Consider that the dinosaurs lived on this planet for about 178 million years, I think. Their existence was incredibly simple, and were it not for something wiping them out, they'd still be the ruling creature. Our evolution would never have come to pass. We, on the other hand live needlessly complicated lives. In my opinion, life is as complicated as you make it. Pretty much every other species on the planet lives by the need for food, drink and shelter. They're not perfect, and they are sometimes cruel in their treatment of one another. But not on the scale that we are. We're presently murdering each other over oil, when we know full well that it's a limited resource. Yet we seem happier to kill each other over it, rather than invest that huge military budget into finding alternatives to oil. Which to me would make sense, given that oil helps to run the military as much as anything else. No oil = no military.

I'm not a fan of politics. Admittedly, I've never made any great attempt to understand politics. I'm not, however, so naive I can't recognise that we have, to date, created not one political system that works to bring about equality. They seem great on paper, but never truly account for the fact that they're going to be used to govern people. Even Communism didn't seem bad on paper. I'm willing to bet though that during the days of the U.S.S.R., when the poor were queuing for their potatoes and a bag of chicken feet and beaks, there were more than a few wondering where the rest of the bloody chicken was. In recent times, due to the ineptitude of our governments and financial systems, many countries are still recovering from a world economic crisis. Some countries are still teetering on the brink of financial ruin. Poverty continues to increase, and so will crime. Rich people don't commit burglary, or any other of the myriad of crimes that poor people do. Rich people commit crimes like living in a house that has more rooms than they could possibly need. The majority of us do the best we can to get by, but never really get ahead. All we can do is dream about living a life that will never be afforded to us. It's seems to me that many people take drugs in an attempt to escape the reality of their existence. I don't blame them. Especially those that can never hope to do anything but bust their ass day-in day-out doing some crappy mind numbing, soul destroying job that will only help them to live hand to mouth. Rather than trying to address the root causes of why people take drugs and commit crime, we allow our governments to throw money at the problem in the form of a war on drugs, or a war on crime; solutions which are destined to fail.

For over two decades now, we've been caught up in the 'need' to save the planet. I'm completely on the fence when it comes to the whole global warming thing. There doesn't seem to be any irrefutable answer as to whether it's happening or not. One group of scientists says that the Polar Bears are dying out or something along those lines. Then another group of scientists will turn around and say that the Polar Bears are hunky dory and there's more of the buggers than ever. Even if global warming/climate change is happening, there seems to be no way for us to determine if man has in any way influenced it. I'm not against the idea of recycling or energy efficicency though. More than anything, that's because I'm a cheapass, and I don't have a lot of money to live off. So if using energy efficient light bulbs, computer parts and all the the other stuff helps me to have more money in my pocket, then I'm all for it. But as far as I'm concerned, it's little more than folly and arrogance on our part to think that we will kill the planet. The Earth has survived all manner of things in the last 4 billion years, and all we are likely to do is make it uninhabitable for ourselves. The planet can afford a few thousand or so years (or more) to regenerate things to how they were, and then have the whole process of creating life upon its surface start again. A new dominant lifeform will arise. At best, something that exists in a symbiotic relationship with its environment (like many of the tribes that we have eradicated). At worst, something that screws up and wipes itself out.

I could go on. But to summarise, in my opinion the human race needs to get itself in order, and realise that we're not going to evolve physically anymore -unless you count technological augmentation/enhancement to be a part of our evolution- but we have a long way to go regarding our so called intelligence. Unless we strive to push ourselves forward and become the species that we know we can be, nothing is going to change, and it's doubtful that we'll even exist the 178 million years that a bunch of oversized lizards did.