Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Unlikely Elephants

Go to bed. Instead of writing about things that will make you excited and think about dinosaurs and Jericho and resurrected woolly mammoths piloting flying cars around the Eiffel Tower.

That first audacious crazyman to say, "We will carve this unmovable boulder into a wall, that will stand in the desert with other walls, and we will live inside."

And now the audacity is holding up a plastic cup and feeling like a skydiver with a malfunctioning parachute masturbating until he hits the ground. When did we stop being thrilled over the fact that we have the power and the resources do whatever the hell we want? We threw stones, then we threw spears, now we have WALKED ON THE MOON.

The future is taboo. Don't have hope, kid. You're killing everything. The story is ending. Buy some wheat grass at the co-op and tuck your race into bed for a long, long sleep.

One of those things you can't really let anyone stamp out if you don't want to is thoughts like supercharging silver linings, expanding them, setting up a lemonade stand in the fucker. Thoughts like "The human story is beautiful and frightening and unpredictable and is leading somewhere none of us can even imagine so let's pop some popcorn and see what cosmic dramas we get to enact before we die."

Let that rattle around down below. It feels so strange, to have hope. To have confidence? In this enterprise we've been steamrolled into dismissing as the death rattle of a golden order and the dissolution of all things, forever and ever, anon anon? To hold up a piece of plastic and see something that will stand testament to our existence thousands of years after we've all eroded back into the ground?

How absurd. How thrillingly, thrillingly absurd.