15.4
Everything that ventured, ventured forth. The place may not be better — it would surely be ahead, harder not to act when there’s complete kibboshing. The way to justify inaction was to remain in dim awareness, actively. Statutes sprang into his mind for thoughts he could hold onto. The unmoored in need of mooring had been desperate for blocks that they could stand on. It made them dangerous without them. Women had a sense to watch out for them. Men though were drawn to them, insofar as they possessed exclusive trappings. The way they felt was understood. The choice to self-destruct was accurately rated.
The falls were coming frequently. The mates had gone unaided. All the ships were scuppered in the bay. The salty seas were winning, giving back their poison to the land. The fisheries had closed up shop. Metal was forbidden to touch food. Everything was straining mercury. It had been molded into teeth. It was the Pb in the Roman aqueducts. Everyone was growing dimmer. Sharp tools were for carrying precarity. Commands boiled down to “see, not see.” The people promised anything that matched with their clear greed — wealth or sex or what was in between. Of ladders there was one, and more of us were climbing on with every colon blink. People were festooned with driving need. They lacked flat surfaces on which to stack. Cargo pockets stuffed with antiseptic put a strain upon their hips.
Since folks danced like birds of paradise, paid observers paid attention to their cons. They drew conclusions to both keep folks in their place and open up their wallets. They had quite a backlog taking up their shelves, the mediocre, sullen dears. It was up to folks to give them profit. Should expenses grow too high and they’d be forced to close, for shame on us good sirs and dames, aye for shame on us. They’d be twisting in the cruelness of this system, trying not to starve. There could be the tanks of gas to cut out in a year. Hard beans, rice, and greens at every meal would keep the body nutritated. Water was for free in fountains at the mall, as was plastic cutlery, tissue paper, packet sauces, samples in the grocery. One had to find a studio apartment. It was to be furnished gradu’ly. There were sleeping bags and comforters on half-off days at armies of good will. Dollar stores had plates and clothes. Libraries were free. T-shirts neatly folded were a pillow. Sleeping on a carpet was like sleeping on the ground, uncomfortable at first, but soon enough one did it without thinking, much like sex. Stigmas in a food stamp were ignored. Hard truths were vital for one’s kids. Everything, eighty hours a week or more, had to go into one’s rent. There was generic DXM for when one was sick. Bar soap worked on hair, on clothes in public sinks. It was not ideal for dishes but it could work there too. Towels were in a hotel laundry. As Adams said, one’s towel could be one’s blanket. Winter coats indoors would feel like camping in the snow. Coats were got by charity, made padding on the floor. Condoms were for free in reproductive clinics. Pots and pans were next to nothing — one with sides for boiling and a flat one for a grill. Coupons were somehow still in use and should be hoarded. Whenever a store put an oft-used item on sale, folks combined it with a coupon and bought as many of it as they could afford. Bulk shopping was a medal on their chest. Toothbrushes were for free at dental offices. Toothpicks could be grabbed by the handsful and could stab away gum problems when there was no floss. A place to sit at home above the floor was nice — swing by colleges on move-out day, or check the sidewalks in nice neighborhoods when the trash goes out. Now one’s home, bare by most criteria, was stocked with free and low-cost necessities. If the leccy bill was an outrage, live like a farmer long ago. The handy but not vital, like microwaves and cars, could be gone without. The adventuresome and fatalistic could buy bicycles second-hand, or if the funds sufficed a scooter. Both sucked in rain and snow but beat nothing at all. If there was danger that one might go broke, put everything one had into apartment rent and stay there, it is the top priority. It was demoralizing but it could be done.
He had entered in that state of grand negation, the intangible at the root of every interaction. He had merged with entropy. His agency continued in the memories of others, and in the cellphone videos for sharing by fiat. Upon bit rot, which should outlast memory, the remaining agency caught up with him and joined him in negation. People went on making beauty. Nature added it all up by being, without agency. This upset the marketers who could not earn from it. Sunsets never knew that they were beautiful.
Human rage would dissipate in under thirty minutes. The minute counters salivated at their planning. Ferocious dunes decried air transportation. They wanted to lure a body in and blow away his footfalls. They wanted to become the killing floor, a table for their beaks, and then leave all the hair and bones that went uneaten. Planes and helicopters taunted them with their safe travel. The victim count had dwindled since the dromedaries had their prime. Sand dunes had imagined other ways of loving living things. They rubbed their victims in erosion. They helped to quell the stink. They covered up their leavings. They built up calves and quads. They quickly cooled at night. They loved animals so much that they wanted bits of them to travel with the creatures when they left. The bits did. They were found, cursed, and discarded. They blew into the ocean, they blew across the sea. They strangled crops on other continents. They made a new life in a sidewalk crack or hotel shower drain. After eons in the general same spot, life ground into a car mat was a celebration.
Life got so degraded any modicum of pleasure was an hour’s breathy coo. Everything’s so loud, say the no-longer-deaf after their operation. They break down, wracked with wrenching sobs on hearing an I love you from their partner. They were sobbing too in grief, for the passing of deaf culture. Bonds were formed through approbation of the other. A surgeon’s instrument would slice them up for good. The newly hearing knew the language and the slang. Their fellows saw them differently. They closed ranks on the newly other. The cast off, floundering in want of former comfort, exiled from their tribe for becoming different, were given music. Here was a place to hold your heart, they’re told, just like the rest of us. Though we have had hearing since we popped out on the planet, we barely used it, and almost never with a stranger, whom we were born suspicious of, so don’t count on our acceptance just because you can now close your eyes, fold your hands, and still know someone’s thoughts. Good for them a lifetime reading Braille had made them adept at touchscreens in this age — they could draw without a stylus and plug numbers in a spreadsheet in a flash. They sadly lost their tax deduction. Pride only went so far when the pocketbook’s impacted. They got to be annoyed by films where the bombs were loud and the dialogue was low. They had precisely what they wanted, but even music could not shield them from preciseness, and the future.
Childishly our hero asked in quite a sing-song voice if they could continue from a distance, as our heroine was intent on staying in NE. She blanched. She’d encountered male delusion many times in her young life, but it was now its depths were spotlit for her. It was unsettling. It made her want to move to a loony state that had more guns than people (any). It made her sympathize with standards, if only for a moment. It made her want a weapon she could hide upon her person, to whip out and defend herself when the next deluded male she met was crim’nally insane. She ain’t goin out like that, she would tell you what. It made her at least want a class in tasering. It made her want to chop her hair and get the needled skin art and face piercings that told the world don’t f with me.
15.5
The world was full of predators. The outside world, and inner. Chum’s unregulated — actually it’s everywhere, covering the streets. One would be nuts to free dive in such waters, so she went in a cage. Survival was a purpose that could not be fulfilled. One could not help but to adapt and that was how the personality would change. Primary sources were the best — folks had the view that they were pure. Corrupting acts took practice. Folks were taught to police and judge to put each other in their place. The fields were strewn with fossils. Folks made up stories for their size. They had to account for what they did not understand. Points of view were clothing, changed out with the day, getting meaner as they aged.
Rabelais was scatological. He proved the church was held in service by people’s lips, by bishop farts and falling down. Unholiness was funny then. Vikings came, so Malory stressed morality in that benighted age. The mirthful genius Abelard thumbed his nose at dour theocrats — they took his testes and felt better. The only thing they loved more than a human barbecue was their made up deity. Chivalry became women’s oppression. It was a plus-one made manifest, another fix with unintended consequence. The upper class had means to be less animal — they called themselves nobility. They set themselves apart in manner and in speech. Tribes cohered through keeping out. The rest was unabated.
When did the reticence turn into etiquette? Perhaps when one expressed their delusion enough and it caused a deep discomfort and embarrassment in the listener. The Pleiades incinerates before its meteors can meet us.
It was swell to go over the same problems every generation. There was bound to be some arms in need of twisting yet again. It seemed that would extend to each new pain that’s born. The clever ones were no more likely to go against their feelings than any opossum that subsisted on fast food. They beamed with pride at what they had decided for themselves. Flawed insights could be cuddled like a babe. They were acute in their defending.
To get across an unnamed concept, one must use new construction of familiar words, and where that failed, invent some new ones. There always would be coinage in this realm.
Folks generated persistence from their wants. At every obstacle, they promoted what power was within them. In building it up they found it satisfied them. Folks rested there in the umbrella of conflict. They snuggled up to their best practices — everything they did could not be otherwise perceived. There was a place inside, where a force of ill could not attack them. They would trade a kidney for their rest.
Other wills did not repent an unknown fantasy. Perhaps that was not availed. Their base response had been to introduce their own. But the party of the first had activated first. They were in a focus, unlikely to accommodate. There were terrible misnomers that neither one could grasp, nor use effectively. Their positions seemed unvaried. The cost had been inflated, now they were unwilling to employ the words that should dawn their comprehension. Making up one’s mind, even if subconscious, spread a new reality, while the objective one rolled on blind and limbless. It had an edge in highlight that did not touch the ground. Birds were watched because they’re floating. Gravity’s what sullies.
The feeling was of distance, which folks projected as paintings with tiny human figures in vast landscapes, when the feeling was all the more intense and poignant for the other party then in proxima, right there to be touched, but nonetheless the feeling was they were not there, that they were hollow, and the confusion was how they could be animate and speak when they were something twixt a robot and a ghost. This puzzlement did not get enough attention to be solved, cause also there had been the approaching planetoid burning off the air. It did not take without permission, it did not need to — it was their environ now.
Charisma was happiness despite uncertainty. Seven-eighths of fights were futile. They had not victory or loss; they effected no change, passing unremembered into nothing. La plupart de la beyond was the gravel road on which they parked their trailers. They left treats for one another de l’avenue, depending on the group they were born into’s current judgment of the other group.
The trawler pointed sifters at the creek bed. He was looking for the sparkle that once was in his eyes, but now was undiscovered in the sediment. How malicious were the fairy tales, which told of what could be without properly portraying just how short it was to last in practice. Folks were unprepared to heed the warnings of negation anyway. Ah but if they were, they’d be mining asteroids by now, instead of waiting to be hit by them.
15.6
Our heroine, in middle age, would wish she had been smarter in her 20s. But that was just in general. It applied not to our hero but to other men. She had a fondness for her youthful dating more than one guy in particular. Looking back she’d said the word a bunch but was certain that she’d never really loved until she met her husband. When the other person fit the rounded cut-out of her piece, that was the pre-climax of her life. Having children was the ‘max. She did not remember how any daters kissed, for example, but for a one night stand with a fella with a lot of followers. It had been a charged eleven minutes. She purred at him for bathing together afterward but he charismatically declined. In fact (texting without looking up) he had to run. A part of her told her to cling on for the sense of possibility. She’d talked to his assistant, who had some speakered plastic in his ear and played hot potato with two cellphones. She saw his manager in passing who looked at her below the waist without other recognition, and the manager’s assistant, who from the way she spoke to the digital star’s assistant, outranked her and let her know it. This one knew a one night stand could rise to number one right quick, to the star, and then if she was open to suggestion, to the public after. People would be interested in her. The fella’s girlfriend would get a lot of camera time and thus a lot of views. Finally they’d notice me, she’d swoon. If they had, if his dipping right away had not snipped off her hopes, she would not have liked the stress and rank hostility that came with being noticed, that everything she said would be criticized, even the most beatific, from her purest self, would not pass inspection, condemnation, satire, ridicule, and threat. She won, with opportunity and decent wealth, the game that hurt so many.
She learned to face it after college, that it was not her fate to have the world okay with her on any level, more than just the repetitions toward her cliques. She developed a ferocity, a readiness to shut down any argument that seemed it would disturb her. She took her titles, wife and mother, with a pride that went past humorless. If there was once a place she practiced indignation, it was toward any individual who diminished these zeniths of identity. She could be barbarous. When she finished with a telemarketer, they’d feel like they had been whipped. On the phone she was the dominant. She was crisp with medical employees whom she didn’t know, but was friendly with their pediatrics. A sound or tone that did not meet her expectation would be dressed down or disabled. In sports she might go off on referees — high school kids volunteering with the elementary. Contractors in her home were silent or made fools. She took the mannerisms of the powerful who’d let her in their circle.
Her husband, like all husbands, knew the worst of her accumulated wrath. He learned to spot her mountain-spikes in time-lapsed tectonics, and not to say a word. One of his roles was to suppress analysis. Well and so it fit and their worst selves were not enough to split their family. He lived in the present of his children.
Their childhood years were sacred — still are, larping from their memory. In late middle age their bodies were like rattle traps already. They’d rather make a point that’s proven wrong than feel they’ve passed through life correctly. Most of their acquaintances had their heels pressed into their family — as much as they were raising kids, they had to have them underneath to keep holding them (the parents) up. Indeed, it was immaterial if they had net sharing or net harm — their minds would write a ballad of their kind largesse, and play it on a loop. It would deign infractions as due to circumstance, and direct harm as accident, the fault of drugs and their own parenting. It wasn’t that one could not live with one’s own thought as to why one might drink beer, or snort something they shouldn’t — it was that one could not bear society in such a flawed and torpid world.