Editor’s note\\\ This is the first of a bunch of advice columns I’ve written for Vox Critica in the character of Torgeir The Black Metal Extremist. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I’ve enjoyed writing them. -TBL
The world can be a tricky place to manage and we all need a little help from time to time. But, all too often, the advice giver is just as messed up as the givee, what with all their pretensions about what’s right and what’s wrong and all the hang ups that come with giving advice for a living.
Today we introduce a new Vox Critica advice columnist: Torgeir, the Black Metal Extremist. We think you’ll find his particular brand of austerity is not out of place amongst the many advice columnists who flitter about the interwebs. Greet him warmly, for surely there are consequences who stand in defiance of his decree.
As always, the questions are real.
Question:
My girlfriend of six months has worn the same bra every day now for two weeks. I really wonder: Is this a normal thing for most women or a psychological issue? I feel it is a matter of hygiene, abnormal behavior, and also really gross.
If something so insignificant as whether or not she regularly changes her underwear bothers you, I suggest you stop analyzing her and start thinking about exactly what is wrong with you. Let me ask you some questions. What is normal? What is hygiene? If your vile lifemate has not changed her filthy undergarments for two weeks, what does it matter to you? Who are you to impose your fascist standards of cleanliness on her? What do you find, and I quote, “gross” about this? Are you some paragon of virtue who has never worn the same socks two days in a row? Who are you to judge this woman? When did you first recognize that you were a vile worm?
Do you look down on me, Torgeir, when you learn that I once wore the same leather armor for months without removing it or cleansing it of blood?
Many years ago, in the grim light of a winter’s dawn, as smoke rose from the embers of a recently burnt church, I raised my knife to the sky and plunged it into the chest of a man I had formed my first band with, a man who brazenly accused me of not truly being committed to the cause of purging this country of Christianity. When I felt his heart pumping blood all over my hands and I saw the light dim in his eyes, I knew that I was the victor. From his floating rib I fashioned a necklace as a grisly totem of my triumph. And what was the point? Nothing. There is no point. We are meat and when I took his life I changed nothing. His wasted existence is just another moment in time so vast and incomprehensible that our pathetic, weak, human brains can never possibly understand it. We are led by nature to believe that we have meaning and purpose, but this is a cold, dead world that will consume you and then forget you even existed.
To put this into words your feeble mind can comprehend, if you do not like that she does not change her bra for two weeks, liberate yourself of her. Stop being such a weak-willed worm and do what you must. In the end nothing matters at all. Do you think future humans will look back and care in the slightest that she did not change her bra? No one will ever even know she existed, just a stain on humanity’s poisoned genetic lineage. Soon she will be in the ground feeding worms and you will be dust.
Stab yourself.
Soundtrack: Emperor’s “Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk”
