IF I HAVE TO WRITE

All we've got is all we've gotten.

If I have to write somewhere, it might as well be here. I'm running on 3 hours huffing brand new fumes, appalled by the mass of my personal belongings and the future to come. The future is always already now, like you or them or him or her, I'm tired of trying to catch up. Most people I talk to agree running for the bus makes you look like an ass and I've since adopted a Seligmannian outlook of a primitive learned helplessness. Beyond matters of missing the R4 or the 99, of course, this grade school pop-nihilism equivalent of surgically extracting one's amygdala can be quite freeing. We live in a pattern-based world that is inherently entropic. We have expertise on the rise and fall of stocks and bonds when the world wants to destroy itself. Or at the very least, destabilize human shenanigans.

We live in a place where less than 5% of the global population dictate the worldview, culture, trends, definitions of carbon footprints, political climate, actual climate, history, gender, -isms, video essayists, capitalist transactions, “ecological” preservations, tourism, shock Safari, media, lingo, vernacular, jargon, blogs, rights, hopes, dreams, reservations, arms dealings, legacies, content, algorithm, recommendation machine, eugenics, apartheid, medical apartheid, bodily control, immigration policy, pharmaceutical price hikes, Sherman antitrusts, legal system, safety codes, safety colors, lingua franca, branding, people on camera, people sans camera, drone strikes, homines sacri, technologies, Luddites, literature, apparel, opportunities, air quality, wildfires, atmospheric pressure, weather, numbers, charts, license plates, pavements, asphalt, highways and freeways, powerlines, musical (sub)genres, the very notion of discovery, and finality. America does not, however, dictate freedom. It may very well dictate the old adages, the ancient notions of emancipation, the self-assured postbellum (Civil War) pride, giddy in the exchange of documents, let them be free not any different then let them eat cake. In reality, serving as a postponement of slaughter, building up to mindless rage, head in their asses, helplessly learning, learning helplessness. I grew up two continents away from the US of A and learned everything about it unwittingly. I was at the opposite end of the globe, deprived of local politics and communal gardens, looking at falling men and women next to a spectacularly burning building, in an event that would perpetuate the erasure of an entire culture and religion under a vague threat only known as shadowy terrorism, beneath hijabs and turbans, or pagri, or taqiyah, or god forbid, a “niqab”. I don't know what that is and I refuse to learn and accept differences. Or I can only understand a burqa in relation to a hijab. It always goes back to the hijab, and the turbans, and the duffel bags, and the photographs.

We live here, knowing, seeing, intellectually comprehending the fact that other people exist, that other existences are present, but still we listen to All-American all-stars, consuming…slouching over…a bottom feeder next to the hog trough with slow IV bag drip, drip, dripping. Drip, drip, [AIR BUBBLE] dripping. We open our eyes and open our third eye, onto Instagram, Reddit, Twitter (I refuse to call it otherwise), YouTube, Snapchat, fixating on the freshly piled garbage, decomposing with each passing second as we're looking at it. We've all seen so, so, so much stuff. And there's so much more on the way. We've replaced Viagra with reels a la TikTok, replaced leaded water with Trumpian tweets, replaced TV with Nature™, replaced the great suburban experiment with systematic gentrification, replaced homelessness with unhoused, replaced Capital with capital, replaced fluorescent lighting with diffused, eco-friendly soft lighting in our very own, personalized panopticon. We design hostile architecture for long-termist (derogatory) nuclear semiotics, whilst being drawn to “Top 10 Haunted Places in Vancouver!” ourselves, and we spelunk, and we go under abandoned tunnels, and we marvel at pyramids, and we take pictures of Easter Island moai, and we fly over the Bermuda triangle on a daily basis. We are also slowly realizing everything all at once. Absorbing, ignoring, crazing, all of the above.

We're an accessory, singular, after the fact. Or rather, we're an accessory in the wake. We're all getting too comfortable again in our offender status. We live in constant denial and hypocrisy, and we sometimes live in harmony. The pendulous, centaur-esque human experience, makes us all habeas viscus in the twenty first century of the white anthropocene/capitalocene/plantationocene.

We live, and then we die. Sometimes we do stuff in between. Sometimes we sit and write. Sometimes there's nothing at all.

There is no takeaway. We don't provide takeout boxes here, sorry. Would you please direct your attention to the tip screen?

Have a nice life.