darkness before the dawn

There used to be an amusement park ride called the Mad Mouse. There were bright colored two person mouse cars, someone belted in front and someone belted in back, on a roller coaster-style track, high up, sliding waaay down, the whole experience at breakneck speed. The Apocalypse kind of reminds me of this ride. We paid with our lives and we can't get off once it's started. This ride will jerk you around, take you to the top and dump you on a downhill race to the bottom only to careen sideways into a detour where the track abruptly ends, you back up and then you're gone again, faster, higher, twirling into a downward spiral, slamming into another detour, yanking back suddenly to the main track and so forth. It made a lot of people sick and sometimes pretty angry. I didn't really care for it either and went once to see what all the shouting was about and again, to confirm it was as bad as I remembered.

We are in a little lull right now, while one Apocalyptic disaster unfolds planet wide another is brewing, poised to shrink Fukushima as we exhaust ourselves racing ahead of simultaneous eruptions, i.e.; the crises of corruptions gone wrong, miscalculated, underestimated, excused, weakly justified, but lucrative and layered with complex levels of extreme profit. I am shell shocked, not about anything you would assume, but about the stunning, spectacular, overwhelming stupidity and lack of foresight which has created a world of in your face greeeeeeeeed. The hypocrisy knows no bounds and Iran has a lot of oil.

Who in their right mind celebrates the 150 year anniversary of the Civil War for example? Oh, yes, let's make a parade, bring on the fireworks, let's tear down the drapes and make velvet frocks with corsets laced tightly by our beaten, whipped, raped and Stockholm syndromed human possessions and then let's drink the fruited wines they made us and lie in rows upon the railroad tracks of ancient Terminus, now a gentrified shopping mall turned tourist attraction. A century and a half after the ugly facts, we come to find the same Wetikos hangin' round, still, working the same old stories of hate and paranoia. Its all too much for the love people, I can't imagine how the rest of you are handling the latest developments. I can barely open the plastic box anymore. To visit news sites or hear the pundits screeching in the background between grotesque, high pressure come-ons must be what it is to be insane, all of it mashed together as one long monotonous vision of obsequious fakery. Who do they think they're fooling? The burger set? Maybe as that set gorges its way to the recruitment hooks and perhaps a short half-life is a better life than the life of victims, children, elders, ordinary shack dwellers who never knew the land upon which the dust twists daily is Terminus all over again. At some point, lies backfire bringing on karma, Bring it on. The wait for love people is agonizing because we feel it coming, in spite of the decrees and altruistic covers designed to keep us in rags so our pockets have irreparable holes through which every penny dribbles out as if the single copper cent lying in our tracks is a sign around our necks "Take it, take it all, and take me too." Whenever I check in with the little box, its amazing to see everyone at it still. I ask why? What are you looking for that you don't already know? Perhaps you are looking for something you don't know, something impossible and suddenly, sigh, there it is. Hmmm.

How many nuke plants exist on Planet Earth? And is each a foil for Earth shattering weaponry too? Or just some of them? Like the allies. How would we know? We would not. Especially when every headline is about prostitutes' skeletons and sports doping or Charlie Sheen or heh, the movements taking place on the campaign trail. Or the budget deficit. That's a favorite, hunh. That'll keep all those nosy armchair economists glued to their screens, keep their noses out of things that really matter cuz we down here in Loveville don't have any economy left at all. When the Wetiko plan finally comes into full bloom, we'll go first because our entire lives have been gradually stripmined to make room for the gargantuan wallets of Monopoly (tm) money. Don't look now, but the little people everywhere, the love people, the love people in-training, the good and the innocent have either lost everything held dear to them or they are in the process of having it forced away through torture, radiation, disease, through lack of awareness, empty pockets and various interesting schemes in which the person victimized is not a consideration, never was and never will be.

Frankly, I confess to holding out some exceptionally small sliver of faint desire that there would be some vague turnaround of humanity by now, as in a general collective-unconscious looking for the bright side, oh, how foolish of me. In fact, what has been our collective life since the awakening of the Bu-ad godzilla is now our zeitgeist-in-full, rounded out, obtuse and obese. This is the way it is. Today and evermore until no more. And being that it is this way, what, I ask you, is there to look forward to? Ah, yes, at last, the plantation overseers are back in the saddle whipping the steed faster this time aided by monster technology and mushroom clouds. Dare you let on your anguish unless you want to see the new evaporation tool microwave your entire existence into instant ash and minuscule sprays of blood and mucus running in rivulets down that velvet dress.

Every single time the Wetikos turn on their campaign shows, I've always thought, hey, its too soon. You might have noticed its never too soon. Decades before the actual festivals begin, the presidential hologramed hopefuls are plotting four, eight, twelve years ahead. In between the vast, colorful ,nauseating, corporate-funded, chain-linked urban takeovers, we get to see our falling rock stars show themselves to never have been worthy of all that adulation. Is big business to be adulated? Must they leave us too early like Stevie Ray and Bob Marley in order to get out from under the giant Earthmover's dirt dripping claws? Leaving us to stand alone in shock and awe cherishing their memory, we point still to their example, how is that different than martyrdom? Surely there are secrets there too, better we do not know. We have too much already bringing us down and deeper. Why has no one come forward to state unequivocally we are in the thick of the energy wars, which are different than the turf wars of old in that those wars ended, why hide the motivation now, everyone knows what's up. Ten days ago I bought cheap gas for $4.09 pg. If that isn't a dead giveaway, I don't know what is. Who knew so many multitudes of so-called humans are pigs. Lipsticked. Armed to the teeth. Sporting comb overs resembling wet, used mops upside down over their skulls, perhaps that is a Wetiko thing to the tune of here today, gone tomorrow. Dancing with the stars, falling off the stage, who will Lady Gaga sue? What do you think Bristol pays in property taxes? Out of who's pocket? Do these ahem, people have underground bunkers equipped for twenty four thousand-years worth of privileged living? Listen, if you don't, you'd better think about what you're doing.

Often I ask myself who is driving this ship and what happened to them that they grew up with SFbrains, why would they parade and preen before media portraying themselves in possession of expert opinion, a deluxe opinion, the opinion of better, more skillful, superior, more worthy persons? That somehow they were finely crafted human Bentleys of excellence with extra-prescient perception where everyone apart from them is unworthy, evil, atheistic, witches and warlocks, to be feared and eliminated, out of sight, out of mind? Are they all abused children acting out, finally in position to "get their's"? That they were so ill-treated in youth ruined any possibility for the existence of compassion or clarity of values? No, it isn't that. I've known personally too many people with horrible back stories and lingering scars of abuse and found them to put truth to the idea suffering creates enlightenment, so deeply feeling, so deeply understanding of the plight of others for abuse to be a core reason. More likely it is obsessive power corrupting, creating laws by the minute overriding other laws created by competing powers, all of it designed to enrich and self-sustain while creating even more control, always selectively blind to the consequences because once tainted it turns to permanent stain out of all proportion to the original act - like Ponzi schemes, like serial killing. There can be no turnaround from here, its gone too far. It is illogical to trust planting a garden and going small and local as a means of fending off nuclear winter lying not too far in the future. Its not us driving this ship my friends, unfortunately the Captain rammed the iceberg out of choice and should the ship right itself, who is to say the first mate won't attempt to complete the effort? When you see these Wetikos making their Wetiko claims inspiring hatred, prejudice and egging on the Gods of war, you see a frightened little freak worried they will run out of gas in the dark on an unlit overpass crumbling into a swift moving river, wide and deep.