please note that the following page is in progress! part of a series of eassays on literacy

drawers / drake / why not be a vegan?

In the oneshot Drawers in front of the station Ero-guro mangaka Kago Shintaro imagines a world which is compartamentalized, where everything one can imagine is quite litterally, placed into a series of square drawers and smaller and denser form factors. Playing on the japanese trend of square molds for the growing of fruits [cite], the husband informs the wife "I heard that they are renting out molds for newborn babies now." Shintaro places a married couple into a small square appartment, covered floor to ceiling in shelves and drawers, where nothing is visible, and everything has a place. "If you and I were already square, we could sleep in smaller beds. Why didnt we start to mold ourselves earlier?" Instead of leaving the house through the door, he enters a large drawer and appears outside from another drawer. A strike begins at the drawer manufacturing factory over the design of the square boxes - the workers blaming the designer for their shoddy planning. The wife undergoes a sudden psychiatric episode, in which she finds the overly square construction of the world terrible. Instead of consulting with her lover, she places her eye in a drawer within her own head, sealing away her ability to see the "edges" of the world itself. Overjoyed after fixing her issue, she places herself in a drawer and begins the masturbate. perhaps inspired by this episode, the wife reaches into her own navel, taking out her vagina and placing it in the husbands lunch as a prank - it is by opening the body like a drawer is removed from a dresser that the couple begins to have sex over a long distance. Eventually the wife begins to suspect adultery, and places her eye within the extruded drawer of her vagina, using it to spy on an affair from far away. She eventually confronts her husband, deciding to pull out his brain and his memories of the other woman out for good, before pulling out her own brain to remove its "hatred".

In the world of Drawers, people seek a perfect seperation of all things into their respective places, a world which the wife is at odds with. Their home is so porportioned such that it looks as if completely uninhabited, the division between objects is made at such an atomized level that there is no existance outside of the grain, the struggle between order and disorder forces the wife to modify her own body to confrom, after her self mutilation, she is suddenly able to place herself in the world - signified by her decision to masterbate after placing herself in a drawer. The husband switches from a comadeering and dominant domestic persona, to a completely different personality to go to work, using the drawer as ritualistic transformation. It reminds one of a show like Severance with the perfect removal of personal identity in subservience of working society. This trend, towards the perfect seperation of goods from association, is an undercurrent within first world society that plays a pivotal role in the continued construction of the relation between first and third world nations- something that underlies a huge part of consumption within american society.

Why Not be A Vegan?

Originally I was going to title this essay "Im sorry for being a vegan about this", a sentiment i held for a pretty long time - this sort of embarrasment over the conduct of more vocal vegan activist movements, while still conceding the moral correctness of their position. And then I thought about it a little more: actually what is wrong with being a vegan about it? I really shouldnt feel bad for being something that is correct even if I am being annoying. It is impossibly clear to anyone with sight: the way that meat is produced within industrial farming practices is undeniably cruel, while also being enviromentally unsustainable and (for most people) somewhat damaging to their health. [https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/food-types/meat-nutrition/]. The fact is, us are humans unique in our exceptional desire and ability to modify the enviroments arround us to our tastes. If you arent living in a rural setting, you are most likely living a life that is entirely constructed - even our greenspaces are incredibly managed, the prey animals in our ecosystems controlled by an incredibly advanced "hunting season" social program. Us humans are no longer dying of conditions that defined the lifespans of 99.99% of our time on earth. Take a look through the wikipedia page for life expectancy through human history []- cancer is one of the leading causes of death and it can take several years to grow from dormant to threatening - that several years of dormancy being something that earlier humans usually could not afford. Our enviroments are so managed by human intervention, that it just seems right for us to take another look at the slaughter of animals in the same eye: at this point we can supplement our diets with proteins that avoid the amorality (and other issues) of the animal industry. The queston now is really : "why not be a vegan". Everyone knows eating animal proteins are damaging in several ways, the onus of the argument is flipped from the historic need of animal protein to the argument to continue eating animals.

What i am getting at, is that veganism has perfect captured the willful congnizant seperation of comodity from production. The only way to continue eating meat in the first world is through the mass delusion by the population. The dream that meat materializes from air because we cant see it, we cant see it cause we close our eyes. This seperation exists at the heart of all consumption - we are constantly, constantly trying to drawer away items into their perfect places, until we achieve that perfect seperation : everything in its own place.

On my car ride back to school today, the radio started Which One by Drake and Central Cee, a song which for inextricable reasons drake adopts this fake jamaican accent. is he perhaps, hoping to launder his voice into a new persona, one unburdened by the history of being called a pedophile at the superbowl? This isnt the first time the torronto born rapper has pretended to be jamaican - one can hardly forget the nightmarish crooning of parody song "wagwan deliahlah" which he featured on shortly after the beef with kendrick was unceremoniously killed off. He's even brough out this voice in the company of central cee before: several years ago with their on the radar freestyle, I really lost alot of respect for central cee seeing him not balk at the weirdness of it all. Drake is just so perfect for america: we had a whole year of knowing exactly what he is, and hes still on the radio racefaking. at this point you have to ask: what is the argument for enjoying drake?

In the perfect future every city will be Dubai, every phone the Iphone, every factory with its suicide net like the wrap arround porches in the french quarter of new orleans.

I have only just realized that I have been living all these years in a place where for four thousand years they have been eating human flesh. My brother had just taken over the charge of the house when our sister died, and he may well have used her flesh in our rice and dishes, making us eat it unwittingly. It is possible that I ate several pieces of my sister's flesh unwittingly, and now it is my turn, . . . How can a man like myself, after four thousand years of man-caring history—even though I knew nothing about it at first—ever hope to face real men? Perhaps there are still children who have not eaten men? Save the children. . . .

Bonus tangent : the image for this segment is a model of Ville Radieuse, by French utopianist Le Corbusier. Utopianism is sort of the perfect encaptulation of the constructed enviroment: spurred on by the winds of modernism of the 20s and the simultaneous yearning for structure (which led to the exploration of byzantine styles within the art deco movement in the architecture world, and facism in the political world) created this perfect storm where it was possible for an architect to plan an entire city, and even possible for an architect to have their planned city built. Gaze upon the Lamasu outside of Citadel Outlets[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citadel_Outlets], a vengeful arbirter of law forced to gaurd the new temple, ones entirely made from moneylenders and merchants. Check out https://radiowest.kuer.org/curiosities/2016-12-22/american-utopianism and https://sites.utexas.edu/internationalplanning/case-studies/modernist-architecture-and-the-failures-of-place-making-in-brasilia/