The Tank is Empty
People need basics to survive. Everyone needs food and showers, a bona fide philosophy. Everyone needs clean water and fuel. Water and lipids leach from a fish’s body buried in a tub of dry salt. We season the salty repose of our feckless desires with a desiccated fish.
What is water to a fish? The missing names we tried to earn flow through years and histories adorned with endlessly accumulating data. We ‘are swimming in data’. Big deal.
What is a name to humans? Think of the billions of people you will never know. Go on, count yourself among them. Good job! Namaste: better versions of the you ‘you’ promised yourself you were, not an animal on a rock in space, something essentially within a form of telepathic understanding, something fuzzy, soft, forgettable, together.
Ok, is banana. Bananas need water, but not necessarily a LOT of water. Recirculation tanks that reuse water used to irrigate banana crops can reduce water consumption by 80%. Reduction of water footprints will make or break some of the crops we currently enjoy. It will take some meat with it. When you have this many people crawling around on a space rock, you are going to have issues with scarcity. People need access to water, mostly for agriculture. We are going to have problems figuring out a global economy when the globe is experiencing logarithmic acceleration of occurrences of natural disasters. I consume this probability with a thumb scroll. Weirdly, the problem is still there.
Political Circus is a Diversion
How do you put all the gas and oil back in the ground? Petroleum takes millions of years to form deep in the earth. How do we put the minerals back, squirt the ore veins back into the rock? How do we replant the forests that took the species of flora and fauna dwelling under their canopies? Our polluted world is hurting the chances that intelligent life survives here. I do not fault anyone. This is about entropy. The rich are good at staying rich, and they are good at ignoring the cataclysmic backlog of issues facing our imperiled world, generally speaking. The poor have trouble gaining socioeconomic access to resources. They are focused on surviving poverty.
This is what I have seen, anyways. So, when the gas runs out, there is no plan. Rather, the plan was created too late, and thwarted by those who care neither for working people nor life on Earth in general. Profit, profit, profit, as though it were something alive, stands rooted in the transactional nature of managing food supply, the basis of civilization.
Apps, apps, apps everywhere and not a drop of reality. I feel, as a working person, I should prepare for the dismantling of our infrastructure, but I am focused on buying affordable produce.
How could I move to a planet or a moon? I must bring the host, life itself, with me. We all live inside of this warm coppery ocean. We shall paddle there if able, but the far shore is so far away. We are going to need food, medical training, and supplies to maintain the ship en route. It would make sense, it would be more feasible to send any type of hardy organism to a planet in order to seed it with life. So…we send something tiny and indestructible.
Plot twist: We are programmed by robotic crystalline tardigrades to reach this new habitat we seek this century, after a billion years of planning, but the tardigrades that made the ”warp construct” that I am totally lifting from the movie Contact died, toast. The idea that we are inside of a simulacrum without origin, possibly a buggy one, I like it. For a billion years, no one knows what to do with the higher-dimensional forces that keep us in flux. Perhaps, that is best.
Mysterious Parable
Shoulda, Coulda, and Woulda sit around in the park feeding the ducks. Shoulda says, “I need to stop feeding these ducks, but I am unable to resist.” Coulda replies, “I could clean up all of this duck poop if I had any money to buy a scooper.” Shoulda nods, hands Coulda some more rotten bread. Woulda leaps up and drowns the ducks. Horrified, Shoulda and Coulda shout for Woulda to calm down, but the ducks end up floating on the surface. Coulda and Shoulda toss the useless bread into the water, and they watch it sink. “I am so tired of these ducks swimming on top of me,” says Woulda.
The Global Collapse Anxiety
So, basically, we are all watching this world fall apart, but most people are forced, because of an accepted lack of money, to work, and the work we create destroys the world. We are burning our house down to stay warm.
Does anyone need half of the crap they own? No. Make less ado about everything. I look forward to the end of this period of human suffering among a global feudalism that comes down to egotistical, apocalyptic pissing contests. I long for the illusion of a truly unifying paradigm that will provide solace in the years ahead. I want to leave this physical plane believing we will make it to another place to live free.
What I mean is, I want to promulgate this belief. I would want my bones there, among the loved, the kept, the admirably performative. That would be home. In the meantime, my pad is fat. Back to sleep.
My concerns about the Earth and the environment are considered immature and inconvenient, ignorant. That is what people told me for a few decades. I was ‘mental’ for worrying that people like being ignorant and pampered. I was [swirl a finger by your head] convinced we would be caught in dangerous skirmishes for basic necessities to power our villages and feed our spawn.
If you check the internets, you will find estimates for the end of petroleum happens this century around 2070, but, really, the way money already wrecks this place, I give it until 2050. After all, if special interests skew the equations by which we as a society, or a globe in a cut-rate huddle, represent our interests and act upon them, then our ‘informed’ opinions are sadly lacking in value. We could use a more literate public, holy smokes.
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/its-about-forty-years-until-oil-runs-out
doi: 10.1098/rsta.2013.0179
Famine creeps. Disorder as a result of climate change is inevitable. Famine and disease are coming home. Famine is a product of trade alliances and trade division. All of these things are foreseeable, except for Paul Prudhomme’s Crazy Hommes Spice. There, ruined it for for you.
Helplessness and Stuff
“But I am powerless. ” I am willfully ignorant and unwilling to face the problems of woeful banking convulsions in the twilight of the Petroleum Age. Not to say that petroleum is going to disappear. In a hundred years, stuff will be rare, like gold. It will be rare because it will be hoarded. You can still make petrol and lubricants, but not as much revenue and subsidized contracts. Welfare for the rich.
The poor will burn garbage, and the rich will burn the poor to survive. My descendants will live inside garbage, wear garbage, and use garbage to perform deformed services that cast aspersions upon survival itself. The economy will be lethal. Ironically, in our new Dark Age, where the money hides the forces that move it, the uninitiated will walk among the adepts unaware. Our global inequalities assure the perpetuation of misery for thousands of years. We shall survive this decade, maybe the century. At 20% of the speed of light, we could escape the solar system within two hours. If you could build the things, that would be swell.
A minority of the voting citizenry of the most powerful country on Earth failed to elect a twice impeached con artist who seems to have organized a right wing fascist coup. Money put him there. How money gonna no money banana? I can see the writing on the wall. Everyone can. No one likes to read stuff like that. It does not make you say, “Goo goo, gimme gimme!” Boring, like water and air. It gets thrown around a lot, but it rings true. The rich enjoy protection, unbound by laws. The poor are bound by laws, but they have no protection. Trussed like suckling pigs. My state doesn’t even have Public Defenders.
Waste – You Can Stop Reading Now. I Am Just Supporting an Argument That wILL nOT gET yOU pAId.
Our waste, meet survival. Survival, meet our waste. Will we survive our own pollution? Will our oceans die from plastic or from acid? Will our pollinators die and bring forth a wave of cannibalism for a decade? EDIT: We might eat one another. None of this would surprise to me. There is precedent.
Scientific evidence points towards increases in pollution. The multiplied effect on the environment, on our water and air, is measurable and trends towards eventually lethal. Luckily, because of technology, this legacy will haunt our species for thousands of years. Check the motifs in Corinthian and Doric columns that swim through the architectural facade of our modern cities.
dARK mONEY
Special interests are in the dark, in the dark money. How do you count it? So dark it looks like bricks of pumice wrapped in joss paper. Money to burn to appease the dead.
These ‘dark groups’, they conceal their activities for strategic reasons. Privacy is a valuable commodity. Everyone is sort of uninformed, uncertain, and wary. Stressed. In need of distraction.
Being somewhat in the dark becomes a lifestyle choice. Indifference, and a soft bombardment of digital media, these whirling halls of knives slice the intrepid social justice warriors over time. These halls are endless, and they are full of trap doors and unseen exits. They recede into darkness that stretches for thousands of more human years. No one ever comes back. You pack yourself into the salt and wait.
The idea of ‘control’, though, is also swayed by dreams and feelings. We dream. It has no off switch. It is so vast and wild it is difficult to trace the control system. Even if robot lizards from Andromeda take control of our bodies, our bodies will conjure strange dreams. It is a bland funge of esoteric finance that is unable to dream of riding a chickenmoose through a waterfall. Actually, with machine learning, sigh, of course it can render a dreamlike image of me, dressed in green screen leotard, riding a company chickenmoose through the lot behind studio 5a.
Purpose of Labor – Perpetual Control
The purpose of labor is to perpetuate wealth and deliver goods and services. Banking systems fight for dominance. We are ruled by a pile of money derived from decisions made over time. Money reinforces itself by disappearing into the hands of randos.
We leave our carcasses behind. Inside this simulacrum of a larger dying body, we leave our cells, this prison. We drink the waters of the long dead from our electroplated taps. Our identities are stitched to a pressure wave welling up from flesh through a reference of time, an impulse spiderwebbing and cascading through an ocean. The tide of our sewage, the roar of our coal fired power plants are the movement of a sleeping hulk.
Economic systems use billions of parameters to perform deep analysis of emerging economic trends. Access to these resources are not necessarily guarded. Access to these resources are invented by people who claim that power, and that power itself is wasted on a few people who have an incentive to ignore the approaching calamities of the PostPetrol Age. I think about this in traffic.
Fifty State Banana 