January 2, 2012

So today I happened to read that the Chinese River Dolphin (aka the "Baiji") went extinct in 2006.

The last thing E2 knew about this amazing creature was user Johnny's excellent writeup from back in 2004, wherein he cited estimates that the Baiji might go extinct within "possibly the next 25 years." But in the actual event, it was all gone just two years later.

I guess we all missed this important development while we were busy studying for our master's degrees, jacking off in our bedrooms, working 9 to 5, and then losing our jobs in 2008. So it goes.

I guess I'll have to go update my least favorite node, the Dictionary of Recently Extinct Animals.

As I sat here at my kitchen table, thinking about all the crazy animals that have walked, swam, or flown this Earth - your giant sloths, marsupial lions, pterodactyls, steller's sea cows, freakin' elephants for chrissakes - I couldn't help but say, "Wow, it's a cool, cool world."

And my wife said, "What? Oh, for a second I thought you said, 'It's a cruel, cruel world.'"

That too.

Tyler, I have not slept right since you stopped talking to me. "Do you need help?" Dry mouth is the only way to know that my medication is working.

I look at the states on an old National Geographic map that I found when we empied my grandparent's house out. I try to remember how long it took to drive across each state. Arkansas -- well, I don't remember, because I drove it during the night without stopping. Not until the Oklahoma panhandle. In the desert, I saw some dirt-poor Cherokees shoveling red earth into the back of a decrepit pick-up truck. I hadn't stopped driving since I was at Julie's. She had been more or less able to take care of me.

She called it a trip, like an acid trip, but also a driving trip. Alone, I guess lots of people go on road trips, but alone and through depression and insomnia -- Denver to the New Jersey shore without stopping for a night's rest, singing all up the California coast and seeing redwoods. Chasing heartache with heart-throb. Police searched my car three times. I should be dead.

Tyler, I thought you understood. Now I am considering that you might just be younger than me.

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”
Ronald Reagan

It is a sad day for the people of Earth.

Add to the list another thing in which I was correct but wished I was not.

The war on terrorism had destroyed another fundamental pillar of our government. (Obama signs NDAA into law)

Is the President a weak defenseless man unwilling to stand up for American ideals or just another deceitful two-faced politician; either way if he's reelected it goes to prove no one is paying attention, and those that have paid attention seriously suck at informing others of the impending doom.

As you might have heard, it is Battlefield Earth and everyone is a potential Prisoner of War.

The world's most powerful Nation and its democracy is the middle of a coup d’état and everyone’s afraid to admit it because that somehow would take away from the victims and survivors of nine-eleven. Then again, people are stubborn and do not want to admit to their failures and when they are wrong, so it might not be about the vanity in a tragic death but about the pride of the living.

If you really think about it though, we should really find who is responsible and bring them to justice, because if we are wrong and we did go after the an incorrect group in the first place, those people in September died in vain. Hell, We Might be Murdering Hundreds of Thousands Afghani Escape Goats for Nothing, but no Christian god fearing American cares about that, right. As I understand, we have gotto thin out the herd.

It does not matter for whom the punishment belongs as long as there is punishment.

So is this what America is about, accepting a punishment for crime someone else committed?

I feel it is time to stop being so passive and embrace conflict. It is better to have fought and lost than to never have fought at all. It is time to stand up for what is right in the world, and to leave behind what is wrong, shattered into a tiny million little piece.

Start with every day things. If you see another patron being jived by a manager sticking up for a worthless employee, inform the fucker that he is not the one in control. We are in control and they take orders from us. There can be no top without a bottom, and there can not be a tiny worthless key stone on top of a pyramid without a huge base.

I want to flex my imagination for a bit. Einstein once said the fourth World War would be fought with sticks and stones. I believe his vision to be true but from my own perspective. I see an overall disarming of the public, and the only way we will be able to fight back is with weapons fashioned from sticks and stones. Nothing to worry about, all it would be is a little population control. Oh, that and a war over world Domination.

However, this is something I do not fret because it is 99% against perhaps a fraction of one percent. That would be me forgetting they would have control over the world’s most power military complex, and all of its armaments, but whatever all it takes is loose lips to sink ships.

Over and Out, Happy New Year Everyone.

So last year's over, conspiracy theorists remain crazy and wrong and yet the assorted governments and corporations of the world give us more than enough reason to be paranoid and afraid and the environment's going to shit and I had this weird dream I’m going to foist on anyone who's still reading.

*huff*

I'm wondering through an elegant residence hall eating a banana. I pass a group of girls who are naked or something like it, and totally unfazed, just standing around having a conversation. I stop at the patio, a wavy grandiose sort of thing. The sign indicates I'm on the fifth floor, but I'm clearly hundreds if not thousands of storeys above the ground. TG from work rides some sort of futuristic flying motorscooter. It's purple and appears to have been designed by a toy company in the 1970s. TG sort of hovers jauntily about while we discuss.... I have no idea now.

I look over the balcony and am amazed at the architecture in this city, elements of traditional filtered through twentieth century movements, so that below us I see a gothic cathedral that has been streamlined into an echo of Art Deco. The air seems pristine, and parkland and greenery abound.

So far, pretty cool, right?

For some reason, I wonder about really large buildings, and then I see them in the distance, huge, vast, mile-high monstrosities. Smog descends. The streets are in ruins, littered with corpses and debris. As I fly row-like over the desolate landscape I realize the city I had been seeing exists in the future of this future, a better world powered by clean energy, but one built after the collapse of civilization. Humanity struggled and the seas turned to a soup of death. A thousand years or more passed between the City of the End and the City of New Beginnings, and I want to return.

And I do. Relieved, I fly by some unidentified sporting competition and then over the city and I land in front of the tall residence hall I'd been in. I look around at the campus. Traditional buildings again, run through some kind of sandblasting and smoothing. I see people I know: the young couple next door, with their son, driving in a tiny sportscar. My nephews. Three local kids. N. No one has aged, and yet we're centuries into the future.

An elevator takes me to the fifth floor again, all a-bustle with students returning for the new semester. On the balcony, a char tells me that she hasn’t much use for Superman, though she allows he's done good. Yes, Superman is real, and generations of Supermen and Superwoman have patrolled the city, maintaining law and order. I see one now, a blonde bloke with a prodigious nose, who sits on the rail in the traditional red and blue outfit.

I'm glad I don't believe in made-up prophecies imposed on ancient calendars, or I would face this year with terrible trepidation.