#387

Due to climate change, where I am it is as through we are stuck in the state of locking--past autumn, before winter--and will miss winter entirely this year, going from a long unlocking to a short unlocking before an even hotter summer. Naturally I am presupposing. Days in February that are almost sixty degrees Fahrenheit are something I am thinking about, but in a slippery way, the unreality of it clashing uncomfortably with the plain fact. 

It's an uncomfortable thing, this evidence that if just a few human beings don't change their behavior, billions of humans suffer, along with most other living things. The ones who don't change their behavior don't suffer, of course. It is an amazing quality in an organism: when the stomach is full, the danger response is dulled. At the Bellagio, the champagne still flows and the air conditioning still runs, and so, the world is as it should be. 

Those who are pressing the knife to our collective neck will not themselves feel the pressure till they reach out their hand and no one slips an alcoholic beverage into their grasp. Then they will look around, really look around, and see what has actually happened while they drank on a full belly all their days and never stopped trying to get more.

*

Ah, for a dark and quiet earth. 

But no. The dark and the quiet remind us of death, and on top of that it bores us. We must have such noise and such light that we cannot hear or see, and we pray we won't feel anything either.

We always do, though.

--JL