Bitter is the Taste
Somewhere out there they are chasing him down. They are running him to ground. The last Great Free American Man, his clothing torn by brush and bramble; his back bent close to the ground, moving quickly, quietly, a harried crouch over rough terrain. He can hear the dogs, their pullulating howls echoing in broad pools of sound coursing over his head. There are no more defensible positions, no more valiant stands. He feels fear and the ache of burnt adrenaline twisting his muscles into clumsiness. He is so thirsty, a need so great it is nearly iron.
They will kill him quickly, a ruthless precision to the strikes. He will snatch a lungful of air into his burning lungs, catch a kaleidoscope blur of sky and tree canopy before he falls, unsung and unremembered.
Our world today has new rules. One of these rules is safetyism. Safetyism is formed as follows:
The world is a dangerous place.
I have a right to feel safe from these dangers.
Your actions, words, and lifestyle choices make me feel unsafe.
Therefore, I have a right to be free from your actions, words, and lifestyle choices.
Once you accept these premises, you may then demand that all kinds of behaviors, people, and objects be stricken from your life.
Here in California we still play mask theater. We play mask theater by wearing masks we know to be ineffective against stopping a virus we know is not very dangerous.
Our most common trait today is obedience. Obedience of the citizen populace is directly proportional to its distance from a metropolitan area. Cities are an endlessly replicating feedback loop of obedience, a human centipede of compliance. In cities you are likely to find masked pedestrians and masked drivers, people dutifully standing six feet apart outside of a coffee shop, patiently waiting their turn at the to-go window.
These are quiet horrors. You cannot see the sheets of rich red blood rolling off the sidewalks, but make no mistake, blood has been shed. Anxiety is a city’s true currency, and Man in cities has always been an anxious beast; his primal instinctual nervous system inflamed and abraded by the constant chaos of noise and the presence of strangers to his Tribe, but now he is told he must confront an EMERGENCY: the invisible, seditious spike protein, Science’s golem dutifully following its orders. Millions have set aside their dreams for two years now-denied themselves pleasure, companionship, the touch of family and friends-so that they may prove their loyalty and virtue in this battle against the EMERGENCY. Is there a measure of the quanta of human suffering this has caused?
They pack the nine, They fire it at primetime
The sleeping gas, every home was like Alcatraz
And motherfuckers lost their minds
The laser beam goes out across hundreds of channels. The message is endlessly replayed.
“We assure you, citizen, these sacrifices are necessary”
If you oppose these beliefs, you are misinformed. You may be treated like a small child for your ignorance, or they may deem malice in your heart, a burning wickedness; you are then the forked-tongue deceiver, lies scuttling from your lips like millions of spiders. If you oppose these beliefs and have a platform that allows you to share these beliefs with others, you are a contagion. You spread misinformation. Safetyism, and our current EMERGENCY, mandates your removal.
Millions of these little verbal schoolyard beatdowns handed out across the nation. Not satisfied with the current state of affairs? (squint) Well, where’s your empathy? Where’s your empathy for all the DEAD people? Where’s your compassion for all the people who have LOST someone?
My sympathies are with the living.
We let them leach the colors from the sky. We let them call down the angels to scratch their eyes out. We let them take each other away.
Two things I am intimately familiar with: Depression and Alcoholism. There is always a dark, quiet, cool corner beckoning. Errant code, or a blood defect—the mammal set against itself, a perversion of Nature. It doesn’t matter. I am now more than ten years beyond when I should have died. My greed for more life is an abundant flowering, a purple bruise. Give me more of everything: More Volume, more Light. Let me build a cathedral so that I may raise a worshipful sound.
Life is porcelain-fragile; the Universe conspires against a beating heart. In the end we will only have each other; those we have met full-hearted, with whom have shared our triumphs and sufferings; with whom we have learned to sing, if only but a little.