Now Or Never

Do you feel the ground moving? Rolling, sinking perhaps? You’ve sensed it for quite some time now. This is not a recent phenomenon. The only new sensation you are concerned about is the water. The gurgling sound you maybe never perceived before. The smell of water, the added squishiness to the earth. Is this a new development? Or perhaps you’ve brought it into being by worrying about it. I guess the sight of water would prove that this isn’t just a perception, but it’s always just sensed, the distant gurgling sound, the squishy earth, not quite mud. It’s always too dark to tell for sure.

You stop thinking about the water for a second, and the other potential threats. For you’ve always sensed it as a danger, not as a blessing. Water, more than anything can be one’s greatest gift or worst nightmare, depending on many factors like quantity and limits or boundaries. But you now find yourself thinking about things that used to be here but now you notice they are gone. Things you had once fought for, things considered important, part of the commonwealth, the fabric of what you held true and righteous, they’ve all dried up and blown away like rabbit turds on a blustery day.

If the things you cherished and fought for have dried up and scattered, Why not welcome the water, to re-seed the gardens, bring life back to the commons? Why fear the gurgling sound? Isn’t that a good thing? For some reason, you fear it. There’s too much. It’s not going to replenish, it’s going to keep coming and rot away the whole hillside. Who dug up all the trees anyway?

Yes, you’re sure of it. It’s already been happening, kind of, as an idea, but now you’re convinced. The gurgling is going to build into a churning and the earth will be carried away. But maybe that’s OK, because you stopped caring. Everything you were fighting for turned out to be all for naught. Now the entire world was in the hands of mafiosos and idiots, and you didn’t think there was anything that could be done. You fought against apartheid and you got Jacob Zuma. You fought against US intervention in Central America and you got murder, rape, incest and garbage. You thought Chavez was the Second Coming and you get people languishing in prison or starving in the streets. You got hyped up by Obama, the Arab Spring, the iPhone, BLM, twitter, POC and GLBT liberation, You even still believed in the United Nations, you silly thing. You had hope. But the boys on the street thought liberation meant they didn’t have to wear a belt anymore and could let their butt cheeks out to breathe. Nobody notices though because everyone is staring at their hand held devices, a phone zombie army being programmed until it’s finally time to kill, kill, kill.

You don’t think so? They had you all dumping ice water on your head for a summer. Then they had you puckering your lips and putting them in a shot glass til they got stuck. Those were just test runs for the real thing that’s coming now. Murder, rape and beatings broadcast live in real time directly to your device like a crowd-sourced vomitron. It’s all so revolting and repugnant, or at least it would be if you weren’t so beyond it now.

You ask yourself, what’s there left to do? What’s next? Do I just retreat into the forest and learn how to eat acorns and make paper airplanes out of knotweed for entertainment? Make a straw bed and fall asleep counting the shooting stars? That doesn’t sound so bad. What to do? There are other options. One could join the other side, be on a winning team…embrace primitivism, misogyny and white supremacy. Or one could learn to embrace the absurdity and surreality of life. If reality itself becomes sur-real, then what does surreality look like? That is a question worth exploring.