Windows is a bad name for a product. Looking at a window either means you’re indoors bored or you’re outdoors pervin’.  Oh yeah, and they break.

Windows are too much like people.  They get dirty.  They get fat under high humidity and lack of exercise.  Windows need clothes.  What else in the house besides you needs to wear a frilly skirt all the time?

Windows need blinds and curtains and screens and tinting and locks and alarms and brave-but-doomed men to scrub them 200 feet in the air.

And glass isn’t even a reliable solid–pure science tells us it’s just a lazy-ass liquid that hasn’t gotten around to spilling yet.

How much human blood has been shed over glass?  (None by me–I think with my feet, thank you.  But other people.  Oafs.)

And don’t forget Kristallnacht.  Those were windows.

Instructive riddle:  What’s the opposite of “safety glass?”

Glass.

Windows are for prisoners. And un-adopted puppies.  For annoying insects that want to invade at night.

Successful executives turn their backs on windows in order to do their best desk-work.  By contrast, I was only a B+ student because of windows.

Boats won’t even call their windows windows, that’s how bad a name windows has.

The happiest people on earth in the pre-modern era–the Eskimo, Navajo, Plains Indians, Arab Bedouins, and Siberians–all lived without windows.  Now they’re miserable.

The Anasazi had windows and disappeared.  Because they knew.

Scientific instruments (microscopes, telescopes, etc.) only use windows that are round and curved and distorted–i.e., useful only to the extent that they do not function like a normal “good” window.  Give a scientist a rectangular plane of perfectly flat glass and he’ll say “What they fuck am I going to do with this?”

Windows kill birds.  They make us look fat.  They’re the weakest part of the bathysphere. They look creepy on old abandoned houses.  They look even creepier on some old un-abandoned houses!

Worst of all, having big ones supposedly prevents you from throwing those helpful stones your neighbors need to improve their lives or just leave.

The greatest looking-out-the-window thought was never recorded, but if it had been, it probably wouldn’t have been much better than “I bet it’s also raining on the houses of the unjust… Man, I wish they’d move out!”

People think they like windows. They don’t. They just hate walls more.  And that’s why windows wear clothes.

Alan Brech 2012