15.0
The braids had done unraveled. No interstate beautician was around.
The cycle of a cell includes a bursting. The RNA’s ejected from its space. When that starts the universal clock, we say the bang was big. Soundless, it was easy to ignore but for its incredible expansion. The mitochon-dry found another fate, to grab onto some sugar, then to be ingested by another cell.
At some point we must acknowledge that Aristophanes will go when we do. He gave a purpose to the system, retaliation on the arts, that continued for as long as the system did. The system finishing was the completion of his Grecian point. If intelligence from other worlds should ever find us, one hopes they’ll spread what wisdom we could muster. Perhaps they will be genetically able to put wisdom into practice, unlike us. One hopes intelligence can tolerate a mess. Or perhaps we will fare well in comparison to other life. Perhaps mistakes are common and pollution happens every time. One hopes the eons of good swimming that’s to come will give us lots of time to think. Perhaps we will evolve to long-term planning. Or perhaps the whales and dolphins will claim it all as theirs, the superocean, and relegate us to the bits of arid land. None could blame them if they do. Our workmanship is easily concluded. We have been forgetful and indelicate, toward our love and habitat.
Our hero got to witness her pre-flowering. When things took off for her, she left him. At least, at a tangent, she worked for the people, in the form of propping up the system that exploited most of them. He didn’t do enough. She explored her potential to be all things to those in power, presentation wants. He explored his misery — really took a sonar to its depths, named every bleachèd coral on its topographic map. Beneath, its tectonics were jittery — new crevasses formed. Sulfur wafted from his navel. Pattern-recognizing, the alpine valley waited for his self-destruction. He’d only have to choose that once — the chain reaction would ensure he’d get his heart’s desire — even greater misery, culminating in a common, painful end.
Apropos of balances, the summer set had found a play-thing in him. He was as delighted to have their attention as disappointed in their hostility. He was in a nation whose ideals, written into law, had been weakened for centuries by the agencies of capital and worship. Its intelligence divisions were criminal. They broke the Fourth Amendment, got away with it. They learned from the immoral innovation of their enemies, then employed it. They dropped on command. They crawled, they stuck their asses in the air, whatever they were told, they did. They were clay mixed with fertilizers. They had the applause of the masses, they liked to have in charge. They give them their example of extreme obedience. The masses had been reared around them. The masses continued to think that the only thing they knew was the way that all should be. They took advice in the relationships they would sustain.
Chances that accrued for some had sloughed off those like him. He saw injustice in relationships, refused participation on these lines. He became indignant, which was palpable within, noticeable in dating, unattractive, spineless and depressed. He couldn’t fathom why no woman had pursued him. He lived the species’ fallacy of over-valuation of the self against the market. By his 30s the romance that had been stoked in him by pop was flat, leaked out. As soon as he equated dating and panhandling, his expectations in the realm of love had gone to where potential partners could not close a sale. The game of love, he’d learned, was as unjust as the game of bureaucracy, employment, gambling, and any other that had been devised by imperfect actors, his colleagues and companions, who were everywhere he turned and always underfoot. The pursuit of excellence in such a system might have been foolhardy, but it was the only good response. It was the furnace of refining, to get a speck of purity from kilograms of dross. His participation in the maintenance of order was conservative, a bit of truth he didn’t dwell on. Philosophy had run a droll plantation of its own. His plan regarding love had ended, to be continued in a man-of-power’s book. But it was still best-practices to decide things in a fever. It set a base example for control. What a peaceful role it modeled. Examples leapt and waved with stamina.
“What do you want Santa to bring you, little boy?” “A couple options.” Their every wish will be for opportunity — for jobs, their kids, a novel entertainment, to see someone again, to bring them back to life, or for intimate congress. Good for them it all will come true, if not in this world, then after they are dead. Yes, to have a good time, they only first must die.
15.1
One rule is never be hired by someone dumber than the new hiree. This will give the new hire even-footing. Unfortunately as chances go that one is a wisp. It almost never happens for the book smart. It becomes another way to make them suffer for who they are, the person they were born as, which is so carefully policed both in and for the different groups of not-so-common traits within the culture. Not for nerds though! Insofar as they spend a lot of money on their fantasies, they are valued. The book-smart trait that sends them seeking comfort in a superpowered world is scorned by anyone who doesn’t have it. It’s understandable. The existence they hadn’t asked for is limited compared to select others, and this upsets them to consider, more than all the virulence they launch at sports team’s rivals. They’re limited athletically — it contributes to their profane wishes against some with athletic gifts. But the oaths and approbations that erupt from their psyche toward a pro athlete are local earthquakes when compared to the Pacific ring of fire they feel toward the aforementioned trait. They are as bitter as boiled thistle. Their guard snaps up like they were on Korean DMZs when they realize they’re in a conversation with a nerd. The high-school wheels start spinning up to life. They’ve kept their teenage social skills both sharp and lubricated.
All the suns conspire against us in indifference. Every hour’s on record. The animals are conscious but only the hyenas laugh at us, brave because they scavenge. They say their stomachs are of iron, they can eat anything. Tolerance is nurture, and nurture in this century goes on unregulated. Capital has standards and practices through tort, because health and safety is important and we need it. Rearing has none, cause it isn’t. The state knows how to turn bad rearing into money. It’s farming the abused. It knows the stress that manifests in bad decisions — it puts them in for-profit prisons where it makes a kindly buck. It manipulates a horse’s drive in mating. Then we learn this conduct for each other. We’ve amplified desire beyond the limits of our wiring. Daily there’s another austere feeding. If they want to live, they’ll sit down at these meals. They see their taxes pay for bombs that kill women and children. The state imprisoned H. Thoreau for his refusal to contribute to this murder.
People had their sorrow to pass on. It felt too jagged not to share. All the pleasures of impediment were to be savored in its sundry best. They wanted to be aids, these stones. They wanted us to think of them as the opposite of what they were. They claimed that they built character, these choking bones in every bite, these vacuums of our childhood verve. They are the implements of inner surgery, performed by the self. State training means we do it to ourselves. Others have a vigor to show off with beaming pride. The failings of the state don’t move them. Not only is conception not put into practice, it does not occur in the first place.
Immobility in senescence is a gift, as is the dignity of hygiene plucked away. We will adjust our navigation. Problems we don’t think about amass, the bulk of life goes unconsidered. We treat our outlook like our outfits — it’s just as changeable.
His dread was multiplying in her absence. One thought the mascagnine would cease once over with, but it had all the consideration of a hindrance, parroted by those unable, or unwilling, to speak the mind that they were born with, rather than one shaped by the state. Instead the the breakup continued purposeful — fulfilled each time it got to re-enact its trenchant depth in victim memory. Good thing we get a century to digest delicious lessons.
Belief without evidence can have import in terms of culture, an instance where being wrong has phenotypic benefit. If certainty can be banished once, it can be banished lotsa places. The brain is then tickled to be as intransigent as life’s impediments. Endorphins are released in voting against one’s own self-interest. Churlishness takes power.
In a human world that takes away control, we somehow falsely activate our higher selves resisting missives. Heretofore the rain will never reach us. No man, woman, or gradient will break our hearts again — no friend shall ever let us down — not when we refuse to make them.
15.2
He walked along the reeded bank, wildly seeking out an omen why he should not throw himself in gatored waters. One did not appear, so with a curse he cast himself upon the waves. He did not drown and was not eaten. What he got was uncome-at-able. Attention stayed besotted with her. What counted, he was clean of all collusion.
She’d been the sight to separate the unfamiliar from the chosen. He said I was a burden, she cried to her mother, gussied up as love. These things are liquid gold in rain, he would have pleaded in another age, hands open, palm-lines up, shaking in the air, in reference to the thousand special moments intimate with her, he told himself that they could have anew. Possessive and obsessive, going hand in hand. Too often clear thinking was equated with his thinking.
They both had a family to consider, but she perhaps thought more of hers, being fierce in the defense of her younger sibling, while he was an only child, the most beautiful thing to be with two loving parents, for which he was their ocean of fresh-wanter. They’d built up his esteem so well and carefully that even in his teenage years he was independent of them, so that when he was grown up, after college, with a job and an apartment, he was in danger of going weeks without their conversation, including sometimes texts. Parents want to talk to their children, from their teen years on, more than the children want to talk to them, even if they have the most loving conscientious kids who put their parents first — still the parents have a want that’s unsurpassable. The difference was our heroine had a mother who had, at the end of her authority, become “a friend and confidant.” The love was there between her and her dad but it had a distance that became apparent when she was pubescent. In the acrylics of propriety, his hugs had little of the force she remembered when she skinned her knees when she was little. She perceived this as detachment, which with the propa-g that turned to social pressure bade her live a summer of dieting alarmingly. A family friend, a counselor for those loyal to a certain faith, with teen children of her own, began to see our heroine in offices, and the work they did arrested the behavior before it enlarged into disorder. Summer rehab as they called it was a milestone in her clique — she would not have risen with them without this rite of passage and thus maintained the clique’s respect. There were a couple budding alcoholics and another smoker (along with our heroine), but it centered around eating for the rest. The Eightfold Path of propa-g — right figure, fashion, speech — all claim conformity and by this, obedience — wiped out a baker’s dozen freshmen every year.
Every fall it’s getting warmer. There are severed wastrels in our bygone streets. It’s a night-time drive through cool and foggy air that runs into a traffic jam.
15.3
He tried to kiss her as if that would make her feel like getting back together. She let him and it didn’t. Except in the moment, it was three-fourths true — it was the same as the kisses that they shared on sofa-beds, and meaning “I love you.” Their lips went past their thinking mind into the feeling they had sowed, it was a lustrous canopy, a touch could last forever, the space between them then dissolved, again. Momentarily. Then he felt her pull away, and the space between them cruelly, dumbly grew again. The space was full of opportunity, contingent on excluding him. The powerful would see her as a single use, would throw her in the landfill, if she tried to keep old boyfriends in their midst. Half the rituals of afterlife were waiting to perform themselves on cue.
Maybe people will not starve on the collapse of systems anymore. Maybe the supplies ne’er will run out. Maybe in elected governors and unelected corporate totalitarians, high school douchiness will wilt. Maybe 60% of the budget won’t go for bombs and armies, and basic income is enough for anyone a year.
Controversy begets interest. Then the line to someone’s pocket is attached. Then Fugazi’s Target thinks it was their choice to pay, whatever it may be. The line to someone’s pocket will sustain itself, not its environment. It will jelly-spread its ooze on every roof. It will be evident in tweets. It will recuse our infrastructure. It will obligate the varied peoples to do chores and no allowance. Corporate logos, the symbols of our faith, the portrait of our dictator that hangs in every home.
All the sameness that we railed against as teens will be there in our senescence. Its attacks and their effects will be just as sharp (we won’t be). Age will bring to us the peace of just not caring, not in malice, but the absence of a feeling that once had turned our face. He’d never seen so many beds of coral turned death-white. The crabby denizens of teenage thought spent their billions on amusement and control. What they got for this astonished — some moments free of worry at the end of a long day. They got nightclubs in a stick-up part of town. They got there early, hours ‘fore the dance floor filled, so they got a parking spot in the fenced and patrolled lot. Then they didn’t have to walk for chancey blocks on indentured streets, risking shattered windows, lumps on faces from the lumpen. The homeless gauntlet was persistent, rounded out with brigands. Taxi rides from a better part of town were not for broke teenagers pre-gaming with what chemical that they could get their hands on. This group contributed their cover charge, attractive presence. The close-by lot attendant sometimes let them park without paying, since they came so often, but the door enforcers weren’t so lenient, unless a girl would lift her shirt, which some laughingly would — there were not floods of the uninhibited, but neither were they singular in number. There was a front bar and a back bar, and the walls were filthy or else painted black — it was hard to tell in low-watt blinking lights — and the neon graffiti had gone matte, eroded by the perspiration of the youth, by the drive to replenish. There were cracked mirrors in dreadful toilets. The steam in there in summer would have powered riverboats. The fragrance came from fog machines, a putrid chalk. Balls dimpled with secondary colors spun on motors. Spotlights gave the fog a graveyard pallor. There were platforms for the drunk and needy to display their dancing. These risers were as big as coffins side by side and stacked on top. The floorspace was blockaded with mausoleum speakers taller than a man and dedicated woofers spat cruise-reversals into inner ears. The beats replaced the din in injured psyches. Everyone who went there unprotected, which was everyone, got tinnitus in their middle years, while just surviving cut the volume on the din. And they’d sprint down lightless streets, past folks who didn’t look like them, to get there, to see a teenage woman dancing, badly, in her bra, to sex acts in the spotlights, under songs that called for what they wanted, thump-a thump-a stop-a burning down the rainforest, the country makes enough wealth for everyone.
When the last call was sounded and the busted dam of music stopped, the normal bulbs came on and the place transformed to what it was, a warehouse that had once packed cow legs for Chicago, just downriver for their distribution south. The implements of rending that remained, after these hundred years, were in the judgments of the clientele, toward themselves and one another.