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When your senses are acute, you can’t escape. And you see the disconnect we have from … everything.”
Sanctuaries and times of plenty. It wasn’t just a winnowing. It was a life.
They believed they were contributing to the future even as they took the future away.
The truth we never uttered: that the Republic could become a husk and our borders a quagmire of death and discomfort …
Most people in New York City had started wearing masks, to keep the pollution out, but also to protect privacy.
He, like me, could remember the idea of the Commodore 64. Floppy disks. Dial-up. But, unlike me, he might remember punch cards, too.
eventually, I’d bought into systems that despised me.
But the system was fixed, and I helped to fix it.
We were a legion of fools in masks. A rhapsody of masks. A rhapsody of fools.
The look of a man who thinks he understands the world and how much it wants to fuck with him. A sourness that creeps in when you have no more hope of being successful.
We could not leave anything untouched. And, for some, the compulsion grew not to simply do the deed, as my father did, but to be heroic for it.
“The first thing to realize is that you are all alone and you can rely only on
yourself,” she wrote. “And if you can realize this is a good thing, not a frightening thing … that is a miracle.”
a good guy, a humble guy. A guy who was a little boring. Who people liked because he was a little boring. There are worse things than being a little boring. Although not many.
Purpose is overrated. Along with mission statements.
“To be porous. To see colors no human can see. To receive what we cannot receive. To be receptor. To be transmitter.”
Always somewhere else. Until the garbage piled up and the buses stopped running and security forces patrolled streets instead of cops. Some places, militias conducted roadblocks, and no one tried to stop them. Military tribunals popping up. A federal government in crisis. Cell towers destroyed by conspiracy theorists. At the very least, we had become a failed state. Was the world a failed state, too?
I could survive among these new intrusions, but the mental strain became intense. How I blocked the outer world from my thoughts, only for it to intrude. Each time more alien, more different than memory.
I knew that she had not believed anyone would implement her ideas. That was why it existed here and not out in the world. Delusional. Naïve. Unworkable. Dangerous. That is what the enemy called the necessities for survival.
And as you walked out into the world, what had captured you would capture others and they, too, would be transformed. “We must change to see the world change.”
References to the salamander’s unique defensive toxin, and the alkaloids in the flowers preferred by the hummingbird, which could be hallucinogenic to humans.
