12.7
Our heroine had a light demeanor that would float her off the battlefield wherever it may be. But when her insides were upset, she went fetal. Her shins were often bruised from walking into furniture. She could be imprecise in her immediate surroundings. She could not handle well her drink but did not institute a cap-off rule. There were parties where she’d knock ’em back until she got the spins. Since this behavior was the youthful norm she got no talking to. No one tried to put a limit on her, which she was ready to anyhow reject. An ill-timed tragedy at this point such as a drone bomb dropped onto her parents would have sent those helpful liquids down the hatch til that became her purpose. She’d have children and put them through hell. She’d bounce from job to job, flouncing decorum, letting down her family. By middle age it would be clear how her lifespan would end. Her kids would have been taken away by the state after her arrest for addictive bleakness. One father wanted his but the other ducked this chance, so her youngest went to foster care, which made our heroine all the more determined to never spend a future minute sober. It would take the right judge, one neither profit-minded, narcissistic, nor biblical, getting her into the right program, with counselors who really got her, effective detox, and pharma-therapy that time-released quick-dry cement in each crevasse, and all the work she put into herself for years, and years in a half-way house, to feel the clear-eyed rush of straight existence and be reunited with her daughter.
History’s engine was the rod. It was fertile but conception happened someplace else. The admonition keeping on the sunny side neglected that it’s cooler in the shade. The shady side permits conserving water. It also offers privacy.
There’s a battery that’s leaking and corroded. All its sealing sources lack the agency for its repair. We cannot touch it for it burns chemically. But there is much with proper handling that may be scraped off and put into a painting. The rest must sit covered on unbreathable cement waiting yearly for specific town disposal. Crabby people will complain and throw it in the woods.
No one counts their rights so zealously as omnivores. The are quick to squawk. Special forms must be delivered. They just know how it should go. They have their strawmen in a line on casters, set to move, as they do their goalposts.
Good behavior’s seen as friendliness. Omnivores knew just how they would act. Self-promotion was their guile and their speaking tone’s a probe for some docility in others. Nights were fine for soothing agitation incurred in their plume-displaying revelatory days.
Something glinted in the grass. Our hero reached down and was nearly snake-bitten. That which he had been searching for was finally before him, but it was not alone — it came with something that would injure him. Waiting in turmoil, he contemplated driving back to California now, alone. He’d have to wait for circumstance to feel more distant before he could approach her for the resolution that had drove him here. His need to treat her as a medal meant the lines were all queued up.
Bakers flipped and flattened with their fists more than thousands of the guys who liked to fight. It seemed at times that not much was deserving. Being able to explain why something was bad was not the same as being encouraged not to speak at all.
The thoughts of youth were slippery, the elderly’s have thickened. The lonely ones were covered and they never saw the sun. This did not apply to fruit trees and vegetable seeds. Everything was shaking in the breeze, including the drip-dry carpets slung over the line. Fingers came forth closing on their throat. Then they understood. It was another surreptitious begin-gin. The indelicate shock of the navigator missed the vantage point. In moments the light foliage would distinguish him again. There no separation could occur.
Collecting such togetherness to turn it into money is a sub-ideal. The havigator’s up on deck with a sextant reading stars. His former arms were geological. They held onto the seabed for as long as they could. When they were responsible, they anchored continental drift. There was not much call for releasing the landmasses to pull apart, to crash in forming mountains.
There was nowhere left to go that someone had not been to. He appeared serene but only from the back. The crowns had been sent to the arcades and they were piled up in the dark there. They were prizes in a light-up game. No longer valued, they weren’t taken care of. They’d been shrink-wrapped and stacked in cathode TV boxes that weren’t very stiff. They’d been the storage for a lot of surplus over years from kick-balls to freeze-dried ravioli, so the corners were accordioned, the sides were creased and flimsy, upright but only for that which they leaned on. And it had a musty smell like basement air that’s gone uncirculated. Clear tape was browning on its open flaps. The tape was layered — it had been reopened and resealed a time or two. Strands of cardboard like crimped hair hung off it near its edges. A series of block capitals were printed on its side, with arrows showing which side of the obsolete dishwasher should be up. There was a paper label underneath the tape, but it had been printed on dot matrix, which had long before rubbed off. The crowns invisible were jeweled and intricate, heavier than one might think to look at. Rotating, their little spires moved an outstretched finger up and down, showing a conductor how their song should go. They’d have to be unwrapped to guide their playback but there was not so much applause for that. What had put kinks in the necks of worshipped royalty were now bypassed for other prizes in the grand arcade. What trusted soldiers guarded with their lives (under command) was now unattended in a catch-all storage space.
There’d always the person who’s attracted to the old stuff, but there had to be demand for a thing to be antique. Otherwise it was old junk. There were plenty of people who had the need to rescue the neglected, and expressed this need with junk, making it not junk, like people whom they missed. But these crowns invisible were hardly even that. They were worse than even chewed up gum because eccentrics can use that to sculpt. No one used these crowns, no more. They were not worn, were not displayed in watch casebacks. They were not embarrassed and there was no disgust. They hadn’t fallen out of favor — they had fallen out of memory. There weren’t even any budding intellectuals who strove for them ironically, and this is a group that wields irony with the knife skill of the sushi chef. The crowns were like dead commoners of seven generations back. They still appeared in records, if one should ever look. It was not a calm prognosis for the crowns but one that would strike fear, if there were anybody left who lived according to their will. Children’s dreams of kings and princesses were also left inside. They crawled among the crowns like insects. They bored into the pliant paper and they nested in its ridges. They pushed their pointy carapace into and underneath the rim. New fellows came and joined the priers all the way around. At once they raised the rim aloft in their circumference. Each of the thousand wore the crown. They also had trapped themselves unless they put it down.
12.8
Fortune felt the blows that they inflict on one another. It readjusted consequence. What our couple had fallen for had been each other — they were falling someplace else agora. All the spicy memes were ceasing their distractions. Couplings were out in front, and calling them to join. There seemed to be no way of direct hearing. Levelers were backing up, repetitive assault, not a one in time, devoid of benefit. Commercial planes were flying just above the trees being felled with chainsaw cranes a branch piece at a time. Dumptrucks hit the redline in first gear to ascend the mountain grade. Motorcycles without mufflers codified ear-drum piercing pain and want of attention in a cosplay pack (just wait til the Vatican issues bikes and guns to priests in their desperation to reverse declining membership). Prayers from shitty loud PAs sounded through the city many times a day in behavior modification obedience training. Poe’s sleeping boarder needed just the sliver of a lantern to uncover he’d attracted the insane.
Pollution brings its own cacophony. It forces adaptation in lieu of limiting itself. When the unknown threshold’s reached it breaks down birth machines. Data’s unavailable. Good luck, and off they went! The fracture was definitive.
A month before, parts of them were growing ivy in a ditch. Instinctively they hiked out indifferent as to their direction. The trail each way was tossed with crud, suggesting water flow though now it was quite dry. Our heroine slipped once and scraped her knee. Her palms were dented by the gravel. It was puzzling to feel the absence of that which she took for granted. Our hero was there too. The switchbacks wound them on their hillsides til they were facing one another with the valley in between. The claptrap was a stunting roar and though the sun was in her eyes she could make out our hero-sort was gesturing. But he was in shadow as the sun was rising right behind him. She could not tell what the heck that he wanted to say, even as the light considered every piece of her. To him she was summed in 4k psychedelia, deriving from a fungus that he took. The only movement of her arms was in balance with her stride. Her mouth was still and relaxedly open, not responding to his waving. Her chin was angled in ostentatious defiance. With her cheekbone-hiding sunglasses he was unsure if she were gazing at him, he could not be sure. Then the cardboard hills collapsed and flattened, his viewpoint was erased. Needing to put something right he picked up garbage from the trail. She turned on a hand-held radio. The farther she hiked the quieter the unmuffled engine noise became til she could hear the pop songs mastered up to zero. Other men were passing her on their way to the ditch. She kept her eyes away and felt a little bad for them. At the level of the road her car was waiting there. After stretching on the shoulder she got in and checked her phone. She had reception now. She texted to her group chat and answered the concerning calls after the first ring. She drove perpendicular to where his road out would take him.
Some intrigues made the world believe it had the right idea. His friends were the sort who thought that poverty was overrated. They penalized unasked-for birth conditions. Implicit in their barbs was an undervaluing. They put our hero-sort on edge. But where they disagreed was not a charnel house. He’d known them since their schooling and their friendship would persist. Even so there was an insecurity and need in staying with them in a clique — two real-time phenotypes of tribal aggregation. This instinct had been amplified by nurture. Different rearings varied as to what they’d amplify, in concert with what the fella was receptive to, with motivation and obeisance.
The mouthpieces for the world-destroyers ran. There was thunder in their footfalls. They picked a new guy and they hockey-slid right at him. He was hit from all directions simultaneously. They turned him into cream corn. They made him slimy and disgusting. Rarely would they operate, or cook. They were better standing to the side, observing, except when they would get together and attack a noob, someone driven to join in and not be on the outside anymore, not knowing what it all entailed until it happened, whereupon he’d know regret. Being pummeled at full speed could put him into traction, give him CTE. They ran a program that hurt most of their targets, not knowing that he longed for loss of memory, so it did not work on him.
Life may be removed from us without our rank insistence. It commenced in our cells. These engines of molecular attrition lose their cardboard tumescence. The walls of the cell loosen. As though a cannon was inside, the walls suddenly burst outward, ejecting the plasm and the ribosomes in a firehose stream. No longer functioning, the content of the cell is only goop. The cells around it give up their integrity. There is a dead zone in the body. Organs that relied on it struggle, causing pain. There is no mechanic at this tipping point. Then further cells go bursting in a Ziegfeld line. The goop flies out like kicking legs. Then friction rests them limp. They are denuded and descending. From overhead they rotate in delightful cadences as they eject their engines. The unoperating goop builds up like rising water. Nerves scream at lost connections. Now the body cannot eat. The brain remembers but the muscles cannot fathom how they ever closed the jaw. A sense of cold is setting in. The kidneys get backed up. More waste will be created by the bursting of the cells. The goop will not be routed but will go straight into decay. As the Busby bursting meets the breathing center, the wishes go unheeded. It will not circulate the oxygen. The brain is mere cholesterol. The sparks of electricity that spasmed the heart now fizzle in the cavity. The raging waves of thought will settle in the meditator’s goal, the chatter at an end. What’s left is only human on the outside, in appearance, no more want, no longer driven. Though it will take some hours before every cell has bursted, the body there has lost its commonality with the conscious race. All that’s left of personhood is the befitting last pollution, the befouling of soil and water with the chemicals of preservation, the final fuck you to the biosphere for dooming them to death.
12.9
The remnants go into the middle distance. They might be visited through barriers of dirt and brass. We the living are the witnesses to music and nature plays the songs that we are made to hear. There’s a terrible smallness that we seem to greet with cheer. It’s like a row of hundreds standing against millions of the indifferent and scared. It may take a little time or just a tiny bit but the row will be overrun. There’s tension in the turn-away, the return to our cars, the drive home or to a gathering, the final rip and rending. We want the world to function as it’s shown that it is able. We voice that which has changed us. They used to seat us by our color, now they do it by our fleece. All the rarities escape us. Our hand’s afraid of dropping anything we’ve gathered. We are beholden to the popular. Meantime the world is springing in our arms, repeatedly. We catch it, hold it, each comforts the other. At the beginning, the method must be to accelerate, going off the blocks as quickly as one can. To find some room and make mistakes is necessary so that we learn and grow. Dead seconds tick off soon enough. The habits are abysmal. New tech creates new choices, then the NASA program keeps its funding. All the intellects had emphasized it wrongly. Exploring is a tougher sell when eyes have lain on everything. Promise them new fun and they will follow. They’ll take any tram as long as they are moving.
We watch the Santa stories of our profit soon evaporate. Orchestras are sharpening their bows, ready to spill out and saw off heads in time. Blood goes when the cannon roars. So far everything is left. The right is formed from misuse and misunderstanding. All the grey areas are marketed against. What remains is certainly worth arguing about for 250 years. And some idealists cry for massive change within a lifetime. What a game, with rules in flux and gains removed by those who profit from the world’s destruction. The dead are ruling without consciousness, their decrees from ignorance outlive them.
When all that’s left is a lock-down pneumonia, we shall grind our ideas finer. They’ll resonate in other’s ears who’ve been deprived of company. Anything will sound exciting after that. This is when we ought to strike, when society is primed for new belief. We must focus on our eyes as we look in theirs and repeat to ourselves, kind eyes, kindly eyes. They will respond to this, even if they’re asps. Deep abiding kindness is the great weapon of change. It is the sidearm in eternal infantry.
To save humanity, endangered species, and the rainforest, make it law that every child will be financially secure. Achieve this with a millionaire wealth cap and the removal of corporate personhood. Then the worst neuroses will evaporate. Voluntary cooperation will become the norm, as we evolved to be. Subjugated groups will have the means to leave their resources alone for future generations. Unity increases without financial constraints. Divide and conquer fails when everyone is getting what they want. People will be satisfied to live the life that they intended rather than the one that circumstance demanded. Families will inflict less of their bad sides on one another. More kids will grow up scientifically literate, in good health, and optimistic. Those who want to accumulate up to the wealth cap will be allowed to do so. Most, the majority who only wants to live in peace, will work just enough to make that 70 grand a year where happiness is maxed on average. Others will do all right on a minimally livable wage with the basic roof and indoor plumbing. Unintended consequences: sports get more competitive, and the best looking, most charming, and most intelligent get more choices, along with the parasitic asps in terms of targets. It may be worth pursuing, a world where the only mental illnesses are biological.