Endless Vessel

by Charles Soule

All the printing presses are firing back up, now that no one wants to use these anymore.” He held up his phone. “You can’t hack the front page, after all. Can’t make someone see or hear anything they don’t want to. Simpler’s better, sometimes.” Lily nodded. “I like that you can finish the newspaper too,” she said. “It’s . . . finite. You can read it and be done. Better than just scrolling constantly, seeing the next bit of nonsense to come across all your feeds.”

The Grey wasn’t garden-variety clinical depression. It wasn’t an imbalance in brain chemistry, and it didn’t respond to SSRIs and the other common medications. Therapy, exercise, sleep . . . all the standard treatment methods didn’t make a dent.

SRIs don’t work either

Peter Match, noted possessor of one of the loveliest voices in popular music, had throat cancer. She reeled at the precise, calculated injustice of it. Evidence of a lower power.

What was the Grey if not a natural response to the Anthropocene Age?

Pretending that civilization was trending toward an increasingly humane world when in fact the opposite was true. Society grew increasingly imbalanced, the vectors of control becoming more sophisticated and subtle. Facebook instead of jackboots. Opioid addiction replacing firing squads. Endless debt just as effective a prison as work camps. The Grey was the obvious endpoint, a form of convergent evolution—billions of minds simultaneously coming to the same conclusion about humanity’s ultimate failure.

Sargasso Sea in the southern Atlantic.

Oops, not Southern, but central, stretching from Azores to Caribbean

There is a cautionary tale shared on tours and in VIP rooms and green rooms for fifty years: a guy in Three Dog Night screwed so many women, his penis exploded.