It’s two hundred thousand years later
And I think about you
Where you roamed, what you saw, what you felt
How you lived.
I look at my hands, and notice that they’re so pristine. Yours must have been bruised, and maybe the lines that run across your palms were darker.
Hello from the future. We’re stuck in a rut out here. There’s a lot of people who choose to ignore it and are completely happy living mechanical lives because they don’t, for some delusional reason, find it mechanical. But I don’t know why I’m not happy with it. I think it’s a small percentage of us who are not so happy with it. I don’t know what this percentage is, maybe twenty-five? Maybe even less? I have no idea, I haven’t done a methodological statistical analysis on it. But I’m guessing that it’s a few. Did you like the feel of touch way-back-when? Me too. See, we haven’t diverged too far off.
You know, I have a crush on a guy who existed over a hundred years ago. I’ve been reading his writings, and it’s reaffirmed my suspicion that people of the past were, actually, just like us today. Hard to believe since the believer in me used to think that we are so special because there’s a lot of new weird things happening that’s never happened before. But this progress… as they say, always sucked. Even in the past it sucked. But to be clear, it’s not even about what sucked, it’s this rate of sucking; this relative change from the baseline, that sucks, and that is exactly the same as the sucking that’s going on right now. We’re talking about the amazon jungles being destroyed, but we have no idea how WILD New York City must have looked before it got turned into a concrete jungle.
Progress, as they say… it was always coming, it’s still coming they say, as we watch structures getting stacked before us one at a time. This exponential fast rise of… what? We “progress” and forget the trail we leave behind. So where are we headed anyway… building concrete jungles one after another. They worried about conservation in the past as they inhaled coal during the industrial revolution, and some of us still give a damn today. So how are we any different than those who complained about progress, and how are those in support of progress any different than the delusional happy people we meet today who love a nice smooth oiled up car that runs fast and a nice cup of cheap labor coffee from Starbucks? But what can you do? It’s herd mentality. They talked about stupidity in the past, but it’s trickery more than anything. Maybe trickery is stupidity. You go to the grocery store and think your milk comes from there. It’s not your fault anyway. Just go with the flow. Go home, watch a mystery show, eat chicken wings and get fat. Get everything sterilized, get more immunocompromised and survive through life in a much more complicated fashion even though it doesn’t make sense, but then simplicity didn’t make sense, did it? That’s why everything’s so complex and confusing today. Why does it matter anyway, it’s too complicated and irrelevant to me me me now now now! Just go with the flow. Everybody’s doing it. And those who aren’t finding satisfaction from it are the unhappy ones, and they’ll be the ones taking antidepressants anyway. The sweet smell of progress! The wonderful scent of dead skin leather, the funny crunchy taste of popcorn chicken. That goofy animal label, it’s so cute! Let’s sit near the gas run heater, open up our devices and go somewhere else in our minds. Checked out. Lost. Even more confused. Oh happy life.
