Random Matter Suspended in the Dark*

At the moment I can't be bothered to give a tinker's damn about the human allegory in the White House or the FBI or the other alphabet agencies or news orgs or whatever. PBS>CNN forever anyway. What I'm concerned about is a little thing called the shared predicament of the whole damned human race. And it is one race, with myriad adaptations manifesting as physical differences that a bunch of yard apes still think is important enough to scrawl swastikas over. Screw em, that kind of person is lost and dying out anyway. I am focusing on the rest of us. People who can still see, and feel, and think.

We’re in a pretty uncomfortable boat, all told. It's tough out there in the Grid. We crave acceptance, social standing, and love. As we play soul-Tetris, we often have to play the piece that doesn’t fit. Without the satisfaction of being received as we are, isolation comes on as sure as puberty (and the two are likely to coincide). Feeling alone when we’d rather feel connected is a very strange sensation to explain. I’ve never lost an appendage, but I imagine it’s quite like the syndrome known as phantom limb.

In this case, it’s not an arm or leg we miss. It’s the rest of the human race and the web of life we dismiss as fuel and food. It’s the sense of clan, or family, or community in general. It’s the feeling of being connected to everything that we get in glimpses from time to time. That fleeting joy that leaves a gaping space when it goes. It hurts, damn it.

The more we suppress awareness of this pain the more it manifests as ignorant and destructive behavior. We’d do well to cop to that and start addressing it in the form of solutions. Otherwise we’re just passing the buck to our kids and their kids and so on forever or until we’ve wrecked the place beyond repair. I suspect our best hope of escaping the undertow of mass extinction is to stop pretending this is working for anybody and start getting creative right now.

I leave it to you to determine what that means in your life.

*Lifted from the song above.