The Deluge

by Stephen Markley

how many of the stories were the same. Guy got in trouble with the law or was on the verge of getting shot over some bullshit or just owing too much money to turn down the signing bonus. Regular army’s mostly ex–drug dealers from what I could tell.”

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Ain’t quite anxiety, ain’t quite depression. Not quite wanting to punch people out. It’s just this clawing feeling like something’s about to happen.

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Think about the millennium of your progenitors who’ve lived and died, son, so that when the cum spilled out of your mommy’s asshole at the wrong angle a mastermind hick like yourself could be born into the light of consciousness.

“Small world that you and I ever met.” “So small, it makes you understand the difference that can be made if you go about it the right way.”

All the bumper stickers and parades and ‘thank a veteran for your freedom’ bullshit—all the pedestalizing. All the movies. All that isn’t for you guys who went. It’s for the next time. How else do you get children in Oklahoma City or Fallujah to kill people they’ve never met? Convince them they’ll be heroes.”

the service would include hagiographic words from his friends,

The dead don’t receive honest criticism.

“We are not at a crossroads,” Pietrus writes in his introduction. “We long ago took the wrong fork. Now we must do everything in our power, including sacrificing our comfort, our livelihoods, our economy, and partial, carefully excised pieces of our democracy, to save our species and all species.”

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She held out the slip and looked at the three of us like she’d caught us comparing scrotums.

Haha

“Bad weed makes you paranoid, good weed makes you understand why you should be paranoid.”

I was kind of one of those people just taking classes that sounded interesting, and a few of them happened to be in philosophy. It’s like I majored in a hobby.

At some point you have to learn to take your parents for who they are and not let it rule your life one way or the other.”

“it’s like you’re really upset that our species is destroying the atmosphere with smokestacks and cow farts, but back in the Proterozoic, when it was just mats of dumb algae calling the shots, the algae was like, ‘Fuck yeah, this planet is rad, and it’s all ours!’ And then they went and farted out a bunch of oxygen and exterminated themselves.”

I’d never realized how intoxicating passion could be in a person because I’d never really encountered it before.

“It’s a no-win situation.” She tested the sauce, blowing at the steam before slurping off the wooden spoon. “Either I’ll lie to you and feel like shit or tell you the truth and feel like shit.”

It is a surge of passion, exploding from a crowd that has just been informed that the world as they know it will be gone within their lifetimes.

To say there was ever any return to normality isn’t quite right, but there was an acquiescence, a decision that a certain amount of chaos would be tolerated in order to let the world grind on, and within the context of the climate crisis, this was very bad news indeed.

“How do you know all this stuff?” She made a face like she was sniffing the juice of a leatherback milkcap. “Dude, I read a book.”

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I thought about how there will always be something about me that finds happiness too painful.

“They get old enough so you can’t just give them a time-out or take away their doll. And they don’t listen to you anymore. You try to give them advice, but it’s useless.”

On a more philosophically macro level, as soon as you pick up a brick, bat, or gun and tell yourself that this is the only way, then there is no end to what you will do.

McClann had her lips pursed in an excruciating pucker. She looked like she was watching her cat burn to death but had been told if she intervened, her other cat would get it as well.

Lol

The older I got, the more addicted I became to my exercise routine.

one pilot petted his drone and said, “We chase terrorists through their holes flashing the strobe [lights] and blaring death metal. I can’t imagine how terrifying that would be.”

“You know what the deal with Florida is, Corey? Florida’s been underwater for most of the billions of years the planet’s been around. It’s only recently, geologically speaking, that Florida stuck its neck out. That’s because all these organisms swimming around the shallow water shat and died. And all their shit and dead bodies piled up and cemented into limestone. Florida is literally a pile of shit and death.”

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Corey laughed some more, and Tony indulged his fantasy of Corey’s properties all washing away.

Ha

To let the infotainment bath of the day stream over you was to slowly scrub away at the skin of your own humanity.

That’s what parenting was, never getting over all the grave mistakes you’d made while cherishing a special fear: that this part of yourself, external to you, was in constant danger.

He saw that the captive audience of American Evangelicals was ripe for a hostile takeover and that he could generate income by preying upon a group already eschewing critical thinking.

The piffling anecdata of the faithful peddled as law and conscience.

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“I just want one year where it doesn’t feel like the world has gone bug-fuck insane.”

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“Sounds like you love it, though. Being a dad.”

“It comes with this undercurrent of always being sad. Like I understand how quickly it’s all going by.

“People are looking for someone easy to blame. People don’t turn into animals; they were always animals just waiting for a chance to let it out.”

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Financial crises are typically proceeded by credit bubbles, and the explosion of new housing added to the coasts between 1990 and 2030, both in the US and globally, perhaps represents one of the most ignominiously stupid bubbles in the history of capitalism.

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The difference between 2037 and 2020 is that there is no vaccine on the way for the greenhouse effect. The difference between 2037 and 2008 is that this panic is largely justified due to sea level rise.

The Uniform Relocation Act, governing compensation for displaced renters, will be amended with more generous subsidies and incentives for communities to relocate to new public housing in Climate-Resilient Mobilization Cities (CRMCs).

Advertising is an insidious form of pollution that has distorted the economy in myriad ways,

We cannot force any state to decarbonize, democratize, and redistribute at the barrel of a gun, but we can use the imperial power of the United States, its economic muscle, and its impressive propaganda capabilities to galvanize a sense of planetary purpose and equity.

Distinctions of race, ethnicity, religion, and national boundary have long been antiquated. In a world of transnational threat, they’ve become exceedingly dangerous, and we must devise additional policy with the intent of mollifying these ancient and pointless hatreds.

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“Boy, Hasan, you always got something to say that’ll curl the milk in your mama’s titty.”

Curdle not curl

“And what these revolutionaries don’t seem to understand is that capitalist-economic collapse will doom the planet as well.

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“We know AIs have surpassed human intelligence but that doesn’t mean they’ve achieved consciousness. I tend to think consciousness is just going to turn out to be pointless mental pollution organic life coughed up while it multiplied. But what if one of these AIs decided it liked spinning yarns?

Was it worth it? Was a raped and murdered world worth it for a few decades of excess? How did you let this happen? You all knew. Everyone knew.

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