You struck the gong and went to prison in Hong Kong. That’s wrong. Stay strong, Joshua Wong. Democracy will be along.
12.2
Sweat combines with everything including the demented. There are only just so many ways of getting through — extremes, the proven method. It would be swell to serve up learning with a cup of tea and home-made sweet, just the way we like, at the moment when it’s really needed. Then the susceptible to billionaire instructions would savor and appreciate. It would be relief for them to learn — our insides would get warm and our shoulders would relax. Instead it’s shouted as command. What’s startling will stick in memory.
We get what we’ve been longing for just to discover that it’s not so special after all. Then it’s back to lording our possessions over others. Mr. Goodtimes senses us and scoots his butt right over. He sweeps us up, the push-broom his momentum. Pushed along, our immigration to the spot he needs will not go easily.
Without one thing to take over directly from the next, our heroine was loosely worried. The broom was not upon her. Her path was in her hands. Sole responsibility was crippling. Not that she wanted to make plans. Winter in Nebraska seemed that it would never come.
The moon was moving imperceptibly farther away with every revolution. There’d come a day when the earth could grasp no more, and the moon will go off spinning into space. It will have the broom of momentum, if red Mars doesn’t block it, to burst into the asteroids and join the wall that separates gas giants. If it enters their gravity, it could be smashed by tidal forces, thereby adding to the fallen dominoes of planetary rings. Bodies of water down here will stop sloshing back and forth. Without the moon to pull them they will settle into stillness. Then their boundaries can be accurately measured. This will be a breakthrough in our knowledge and put a form of calculus to bed.
Boredom will increase without the moon around. All mental health will heal, embarrassing psychologists who find that all derived from lunacy. Comets will be greeted with parades and celebrations, every human looking up to welcome these Oort-faring returns. The day of the moon’s departure will be a solemn holiday, but not everyone will take it’s sojourn lightly. Acute loss will manifest resentfully in some. The moon wasn’t so great, they’ll say. We never found enough ice on it to matter. It’s use as a waystation was up within a couple missions to the belt — after that we had to ship all the supplies up there already. The belt was lacking precious metals anyway. These went too fast to set off a gold rush. Everyone tells stories of the moon. In truth the wealth was in the rocks in rare-earth elements. The moon was good for storage, with its lesser gravity. Great payloads mined from asteroids could be landed there and shuttled piecemeal via drones onto the space lift, the tensile string connecting us to footprints from the ’70s. Rockets lifted off with one-sixth of the effort. We made our launchpads like it, a drab grey, basking in unending day or else unending night. So we built near the longitude of shadow’s edge, to give our cosmonauts a chance to sleep in shade and labor in the sun. The highest point along this ring was most desirable. It went through many names between its owners and the solipsistic totalitarians that they constructed. Simplified Chinese employed where once old Latin was. Everything was logged onto the blockchain. We knew that Luna’s severance was coming for a while but could not be ready for absence it would leave within our psyche.
12.3
The starving body spasms with necessity. It wishes with all its might for respiration to conduit calories. Delousing powder covers every head. Taboo prevents it from becoming affectation. The ceremonial becomes a daily status. Reaming is a repetition. We do not need the explanation every time. What was once wanted is encumbrance today.
Folks are made to shoulder the results of other people’s failures. These may be skipped through at the discount store but are not so easily transported when the sources are a stakeholder. Those burdens go for entire adult lives. Contemporaries will get pissed, in both senses, when someone figures out a way to lay those burdens down. Their short term-focused monkey brains have monkey brain ideas — the cortex can’t run everything, regardless how fervently the starving ape might wish it. To become one who gives out burdens, who makes a billion dollars, discover which environmental change will add a 0.3% increase in atmospheric methyl alcohol, which will shorten our lives but make the short term shorter. So less suffering at least. The stakeholding burden-placers would rather we were sinews in lieu of conscious meat. They string reminders up on our roads. Let’s make the outside just the same as the inside. Let’s stand for our humanity, not how they have defined it.
There are limbs jutting out from under massive fallen trees — the limbs of people who were living in the way. We climb right over them. No one will guide the landscape through each of our expirings. Periodic instability is proof we’re still in flux. Cavernous outcroppings echo with our muffled cries. Food grows all around but it’s encased in shells. Armored plating comes from reptiles and the sea. The little hopes that keep the future generations going are sewed into the lining of our overcoats where they won’t be purloined. Snares and fifes are sounding. The reverence for other years are passing — what was paramount for certain groups is not so for the next. What’s insidious for us is the mistaken use of reason, for it can be deployed suboptimally. Detritus is landing on the beach. Cheer on bacteria that they might evolve to digest plastic and excrete a wonder drug.
Abandoned parties hunger for their chosen hero. One feels for every bro who had his thinking limited by corporate media. Their grandparents fought fascism in the ’40s, now their descendants vote for it. The mess will just be left until it’s covered by the sea. Then all the salt and minerals will make it something new.
12.4
Our hero understood as best he could his liberal arts degree, which taught him how different groups of people will experience the world. He didn’t think of himself as a white guy even though he was one. He thought of himself as an independent consciousness, just like everyone is. Growing up poor meant that he’d been shit on by white guys his whole upbringing too. So he didn’t like to be lumped in with them. At the same time it was true that he had freer movement, since he was unlikely to face systematic harassment, and he may have had more opportunity, as with specific ethnic names less likely to be invited for an interview, and so on. Being teased for being nerdy had gone out with middle school, but once he found out, from friends, that strangers could tell he was smart just by looking at him, he had to conclude the banal conflicts with white guys with cropped hair had some origin in school day power structures, stemming from the pituitary-laden’s insecurity and resentment for what they were not born with (anything exceptional). Their limited existences were not his fault, so it was not his problem, he clung to childishly.
For her there was no need, her gift for art as well as her appearance were the magnetic tracks to her success. And this was nigh regardless of her striving. Being a woman in this world is never easy, but there are degrees of suffering and hers was set to skate. Of course there was abrupt tragedy and such to lay her low. She was susceptible to medical emergencies, freak accidents, and natural disasters, not to mention drunks and guns, as well as her imperfect diet, urban pollution, and toxic beauty aids. Even the 1% did not get spared from this. Soon enough she’d join them.
Our hero could have used more focus on the platitudes above during his teenage years. Installation of a process to make a plan and follow through would have helped, done outside a military setting. As it was there were lessons he would learn through gruff experience. He’d never internalize them though, and anything apart from conscientious practice would send them dormant. He’d enjoy the loneliness til too much of it grew sour and then he’d rededicate himself to which plat was standing out.
She’d observed this struggle in him and saw how it played out of the course of their relationship. She saw her girlfriends who’d picked doers. They were better off than the ones who’d gone with the cop-minded, though perhaps they had less fun. These in turn were better off, but for the beatings, than those who’d chosen fellas in the arts, for whom they’d never have the same importance as did the abstract. Her girlfriends were equally likely to be cheated on no matter which type they were with. Our heroine also saw the downsides of her choices. To be sure she tried them all. Anger was a problem with the bad boys and stress was with the doers, but addiction stuck them at a like similar distribution. Athletes had the problems of both along with being narcissists at times as they’d been coddled and commanded all their lives. The doers had a deadness to them, as they flourished in a system that rewarded mediocrity. Others were injured by their goal-achieving on the way. This deadness affected one of her friends who could not adapt to the chill-burn at her fella’s core and went a little cuckoo in its wake. But the friends of hers who did well with guys like this were those who were on a fatalistic trip themselves, before the couples found in each other a reflection of themselves.
In accommodating one another, partners take the other’s traits for good and ill. In a way, she’d caused the difficulties she was facing with our hero by sharing her neuroses. That he wasn’t equipped to handle them was not her fault — she’d been able to swat the ones he’d sent her way. But to be the cause subconsciously of her own heartache was infuriating. This someone in her head did not give her support. And our hero had a flaw that she could not abide — he would abandon his integrity. When she disappeared, it happened with great sorrow.
12.5
Youth are dutifully risking the sustenance of the living backgrounds on their phones. No one knew the world was gonna stop while she was in Nebraska. Society would move in unforeseeable ways but travel would be restricted by totalitarians to the point that curfews would become the law. Our hero had no contacts in NE so if it didn’t work with her, he was in real trouble, the kind where survival mode kicks in and morality goes flying out the window. Someone who’d never slept without a pillow could have to get used to sleeping on concrete. Addictive levels of ingestion could smooth over this transition. But aware he needed help, he’d go where he could find it — he went to twelve step meetings like a hero in a book. Participants can smell b.s. without trying, so he knew he had to speak legit and to that end he took on the story of his step-dad as his own. The stress of the trip from California and the difficulty in uncorking the confrontation with her, which could wipe out all his hope, had left him looking rather haggard. When it was his turn to speak — at this meet he had to — he said he was in town working the program, here to ask his parents for forgiveness for the things he’d done, stealing from them, cursing them before their friends, leaving with the family dog and letting Shorty perish through neglect. He produced the one-month chip he kept in his vehicle’s change holder. It had been his step-dad’s and our hero wasn’t sure why he kept it when he didn’t want it in his home. Incongruous things are done when blocking something out.
Anyway the sugar snacks and instant coffee at the meet emboldened him, and he asked if anyone knew where he could park his car and sleep in it in safety, which is the way of asking without asking if someone would let him crash. He concluded by saying that he had a sponsor back in Californ, but could use a little face to face time afterwards if anyone was willing. These folks, who’d met their bottoms and found they went much deeper than they could have guessed, were trained in spotting users. But they were accepting the demands of what it took to remain sober, so one man in a firearm cap spoke up and asked if he had any siblings. Our hero said yes, he’d gone to them first, but (pause) they weren’t ready to accept his contrition, yet. The man who lacked control and so latched onto hand-held machines for taking lives said, “All right young man, I’ll yap with ya after, and I don’t care if you park in front of my place, just for tonight — no one will bug ya there.” His place would be a trailer on somebody’s rutted farm. Our hero’d get hot coffee and a stick or two of jerky, home-made, in the blue glow before dawn.
12.6
His future looked secure without her, as long as he kept not doing what the people whom he sought out did. By virtue of his clean record he’d gain menial employment. His coworkers would be on edge and would react poorly to things he said like, “I’m riding to the lake this weekend.” He didn’t yet understand that bike riding was a lost part of their past. They thought the world decided for them they could never have such things again. Rent, gas, and utilities left them not much else to feed and clothe their children, while oil changes got put off and bank fees threatened to bankrupt them. They were already in hock to the comp’ny store — when what they owed was more than they took in, so each completed work week ploughed them deeper. He’d say things like “when I go back to grad school” and they’d burst into a laugh — they’d said that themselves for years before. It was understood they never followed through. He was confused because he meant it for himself and knew that it would happen. He was not blustering. But this was the signpost of many future conversations with those who’d found acceptance in their toil, and looked down on anyone who didn’t.
There were two ways they would let him in their clique and both involved his becoming just like them. One was for life to lay him low, which for him it had, but they knew how much further it could go. Two, he could make the same decisions. He could stop wearing condoms cause it didn’t feel as good, have kids with different women, not raise them, and be buried under child support for decades, working two jobs and side hustles, paying full price for prescription drugs to heal his fun diseases. They could relate to that. The women couldn’t, but everybody else.
Some of the women he would work with would befriend him if he checked out their place of worship. They were sure he had a soul and that it needed saving. They always had a single girlfriend in mind when spreading their beneficence. Some of them might sleep with him. None pursued him openly of course — it was just a thing that crossed their minds. To bed them he would have to meet their wide and varied expectations, which for him meant roleplay, meant putting in the work. They were too tired and egotistical to offer anything in terms of guidance. If it happened, fine; if not, well they could do without. The line with some was to pursue them with persistence, but respect. Others had no intention of rewarding him but would let him hang around to do their errands and the like. Others could feel he saw them as too old for him, so they treated him with distance. There were only two of any gender whose marriages were such they would not cheat.
The restaurant he left employed a teeming stew of contradictory emotions. They could bubble up but not escape the cauldron’s rim. Almost all of them were stuck there, the last criterion to meet for his clique-admittance.
No city’s as lonely as one we know nobody in. If he stayed self-contained, there’d be someone bothered by it no matter where he went. It felt better nonetheless to be that way than latently reliant on some gift they might not (would not) give. A lot of them got mad when a nerd presumed to present them a map. They had not only no intent to look at it, they resented implications they were lost, that what he handed them might be beneficial in some way, because it meant they had been behaving suboptimally, not reacting in the best way that they could to circumstances they can’t change that each adult not a billionaire was forced by billionaires to live in, a mean truth that no one wants to face.
When he surprised her in NE, this caused her anger to flare up when he revealed his face. There was in his grand gesture of unrelenting love the unspoken assertion that she’d been suboptimal in fleeing. To herself, to the relationship, her parents, and the world. It burned her up. She could look out for herself. She was not an idiot. There’s a presumptive condescension to holding out a boom box like a weapon. There’s also an expression of the human heart though, and it’s pitiable, which is not attractive, those who miss it. Years after she’d ploughed a furrow through his chest he had forgotten the subconscious ways he’d driven her to do it. He had moved on to other love affairs, but the furrow was still there, and he had to go on accepting it, repeatedly, in other women’s arms.