0.0
No = I
0.1
To decide and be committed is to invite undercurrent words, one’s back and shoulders at the ready, to parrot-use their moves against them so they suffer. One’s reaction says a bit about what one believes in, to audiences whose watered down taste is the most authentic bit about them. Should I have what a thing alone will give me? Should I not mod it to get more? Polemics have theories, most theories are reappraisals. They are the phrases without love, the opposing implication is intended. Judgments borne on larynx winds will try instinctively. O they will try.
Others know the least that they can bear to lose, identity, they world-explore retaliation, til they’ve mapped within ten-thousandths the derivative. They have it at the ready for the strafing of an infinite coastline of possibility.
A portion of happiness is passive. Inducing happiness in an electorate induces passivity. Bottom line, it is a remarkable reprieve from the present lot of conflict. The thing that will settle it is someone with a business vision. They’ll be here in a minute, I am sure.
0.2
The first sapienic thought broke the pact of predator and prey. Nature had been nightmare flesh before then. It turned out the days and put them where the hunting rights refused. It brought to mind the dreadful question that they never ask. Others sense it and agree. Outside people is the place where dreadful questions don’t exist. Seek the man-victims should one ever need replenishing. They’re all descended from dictators because power-happy madmen got to reproduce the most. Consider a world of men quick on the up-take, into which comes a baby with a mutated gene, giving it a triple whammy of strength, charm, and willful ignorance. In adulthood that baby gains complete control, wipes out any progress, and puts the power-happy drive into dozens of the next generation, to spread factorily from there. We’re left today to cobble together group intelligence from collaborators, the servant class, survivors of the servant class, and new mutations since arisen. The cry goes out for convergent evolution.
The dictators salt the land, and they will try. Their will is a collective. Now to be born in sands that line fresh water. Peace is the only real repudiation. Look outside right now, every person on your street is choosing peace. There aren’t any mortars and grenades. That culture’s buying pickups, not digging ten-foot trenches in the parking lot. Unless you live in a place where it’s difficult to read this, there isn’t shooting in this moment in your street. Let’s say 95% of Palestinians and 90% of Israelis are currently choosing this peace. (A population pacified by oppression is not at peace.)
Others’ actions are a known throw. There aren’t any surprises. The dictator finances his opposition party. What is not presented are the details of his week. How much the demand intolerably returns. The people’s striving comes from hunger, from the daily need to eat, informing repetition. It flicks away time, unable to not. Their place affirms self-recognition. Somewhere else the dictator’s giving-in would have gone unnoticed, where the sediment of lovers has settled and congealed, unwilling to diffuse no matter how insistent memory will shake it. This known throw has its intended aim. Even so, the people went on. Only during the dictator’s senescence did the fails fall from his eyes. He slipped into that bank where such a businessman amounted. He sprang from broad neglect, had crumpled other people in a fatalist obedience to jets. This was the man who sniffed at deepest penury, who drove the Cossacks from their farms, accumulating bank, a mean amount. In repetition of his hunger he is common with us all.
0.3
Better distracted, but prepared all the same. The hope is there’s a macro, with laws apart from Newton and the quanta. Call in the groups! They’ll make anyone feel they’re part of something while simultaneously kneeling on their neck. They’ll quickly try one on and feel the same. They never in their group life have to spot the beggars, beggars will spot the group and leap into their laps. They more quickly try one on and feel the same. They eat the charring alleys. They contract the underfellow, bring tonight their woozing dimples like their face itself is breathing.
It is painful to predict, given the patterns of recorded history, that it would take an evolutionary leap to turn our species into forward-looking caretakers of our environment. The thing that triggers evolution is a massive change to the environment. One is coming.
Man thinks his runs are emeralds. Compensation possibilities bloom at the end of every perceived slight. But he’s busy at home submerging his own children in assertions without proof, in medieval arguments disproven by Bert Russell, scrubbing feeling from their backs, then into their musty sleeping room to irrigate their spouse in farm-toil of their fathers. More complex ideas than what could be held up on a placard seeped into their worship, buff and shined their automotive club, made their opinions able to cohere. The toughest thought of all was that their enemies were their own dictators. Indeed they were not enemies at all but maladapted people.
0.4
Exercising power floods endorphins in the brain. We can thank our power-happy ancestor for that. Our present path is strewn with doors behind which horrors lie. The call to unity has sounded through the ages. It’s usually ignored. Directed to another person, lies can benefit. Directed to the self, such lies will only damage. What they earn is less than what it costs to keep them. Something will rush in to fill the space, a doorway tragedy.
One does her lifelong good through background acts. The foreground could be pissy. Holding very tight to one unknowingly is lived, love sorrows in the mix. Countdowns demand thrust. Going up has open possibility. What’s charming lacks the smell of acquiescence, and the unexpected rears its stemless head. Rubberneckers crowd around the markable demeanor. Use him til he understands that he’ll get nothing from you. Then curse him and move on, for beauty alone matters.
In fact, women — life — freedom. Born free, with the capacity for critical thought, a possessor of inalienable rights, and an unassailable dignity. Them other consumers can go shop somewhere’s else, not that they got a choice. Men plant their troubles there.
0.5
Lobotomies for all would be much safer, and the last doctor could lobotomize herself. Wild plants and animals might shudder in relief, then grow quiet in the aftermath, after the teary shock surprised them by its vehemence. Then mankind will go on in contentment, watching shows about the insecure-aggressive, while insects swarm again.
There had been a torrent of departures from the senior living home. They missed the new videos, who can expel their gas the loudest, where PEDs are beans. And the next one, who can shit the most and, inversely, who can hold their piss the longest. Previous champs return wearing masks, probing new contestants for surgery scars that reveal enhancements, such as kidney siphoning or the implanted bladders of cetaceans. The announcer uses the word beautiful to describe the feces and calls the meeting between champion and challenger historic. The tracing and charting of the champ’s gut flora will benefit some private clinics. Sideline staff jobs become coveted and hard to get, creating new glass ceilings and power-tripping subcelebrities. Thanks to tribalism and the flavor of the day the twelfth best person for the job will get it. Nothing will be elevated. It will just be maintained. And there will always be a job for a maintainer.
Behind the signs that limit one’s behavior is the glue that won’t come off. Demolition makes it obsolete but even that cannot remove it. A thread of tensile gossamer peels off and wraps around our necks. Most of the time we cannot feel it. If only anything could remedy the eaten, could pull something from the downtrodden that they didn’t know they had, get it for a song and mark it up for sale.
Love is a splendid free surrender. Yeah, for six months, and then the two independent subconsciouses reassert themselves. One rudely discovers that the rules under which they had been living have been incinerated. And the person one fell in love with was the best version of the other, the secure shell around the other’s specific clawing need. They will prostrate themselves to global meridians til the knees wear through their trousers.
0.6
Space knows all about us. We buy it, fight it, sleep through it, and it’s not aware at all. We dig into it, build big heavy things atop it, and blow it up from time to time. One commercial flight pushes a lot of molecules around. That and the worldwide effect of cargo ships — space can feel it. Migrating herds and birds, all of space can feel it. But space is preoccupied with time. Space isn’t keeping us on purpose. We don’t occur to it. We occur to time. And maybe, if time were to think of us, it would not be pleased. We are expanding. We’re making more of us and more of what we use. We’re pushing this into the vacuum, out beyond the sphere that gives us life. Space can feel a supernova, but that has limits. We effectively do not.
Space and time are blissful in their regularity. They perform their defined roles until the end. They’re married past the heat death of the universe, past the day when the nuclear force stops holding molecules together, past the final fuzzy century when the last particle of radiation leaves what up til then had been the very last black hole. Only when the last electron has stopped spinning in the void, when it has nothing left to measure, and entropy assumes its dark dead throne as ruler of precisely nothing, does the marriage between space-time end. And in that final milli-millisecond before its purpose is no more, space transmits instantaneously all the experiences and every memory of every being there ever was over a trillion years to its spouse, time, and time becomes aware of everything and all we ever were. The shock alone of how intensely every adult slept is enough to snuff it. For a moment before ceasing, the ultimate particle spins in motion free, outside of time.
A change in thinking mixed the hours up, got turned around, and started running back the other way. An ancient gift unwanted was received. It was forced upon them. The people would have chopped it up if it were corporeal. They’d have covered themselves in a camouflaged tarp on a hill with good sight lines of their property. If only the ancient gift were capped at a pain level, then it would not always get worse, in ways the people can’t imagine, nor can they get a sense of. All those moments of gut-wrenching grief tallied, combined, condensed, and replayed with unexpurgated force, will be done so again because nobody’s perfect, least of all the power-happy. They make big metal symbols of this country, or of the people that we took this country from.
0.7
It is easier to make a toothpick sculpture on a slanted teflon wall than to graft optimism onto the depressed. Life pressure makes cracks form and they start ventilating excuses and complaints. Like all people they’re happy for exactly as long as they’re distracted.
March on science, anyway. How about ambulatory fruit and veg? Splice multi-cellular ganglia into a head of lettuce and watch as it delivers itself to your door. The new revolution in restauranteering will come not from Spain but from Sebastopol. Doug Adams’ apologetic farm animals are waiting, one leg hovering over the opening, ready to sausage-grind their hooves for gelatin. Fries will roll themselves in salt upon your plate. Chickens will evolve to sleep upside down like bats, so the blood drains out their open necks for cleaner thighs. Exploding garlic bulbs will cover their prank target in clove shrapnel. Think of all the good times we will have when vegetables are just like us.