Winter has arrived…. At least for a few days until some freakish thaw. Time to strum through the Emergency Essentials catalogue and dream of young beautiful women on the combat lines blasting bad guys in fitted flak jackets all bombs over Baghdad and shit…. I mean hasn’t Lara Croft been doing this for a while and she’s far from a butter face. Just nice to know she is now recognized for her work… What, she’s not real? Oh…. That’s a lot of masturbation I can’t ever get back….

Is this the time to sift through photo albums and press flowers or arrange one’s stamp collection and browse Meetup.com groups in the hope for some affection from strangers, at least connect with the underemployed around some invented community of friendship book users or cat box decorators or book club rejects? Has the swearing in of the president allowed for a lull in the Obama drama and we can return to our collective elective beds and sleep away dreaming of Hillary 2016 or [Whatever Republican is Left by Then]? We can gather our papers from a few months ago still sitting on the doorstep and re-read them since the gridlock will continue and we will again meet the same issues, propose the same answers, and arrive at the same stalemate. We may see some movement here and there, but this is but a little dressing for the windows, and they have long since failed to match the drapes, which are gray, thin, and looking a little worse for wear due to constant fucking.

The season is far from easy for ranters and dabblers in the dark arts of online semi-anonymous screeds, comedy writers and political satirists. We are realizing that collapse is the fantasy of the Tomb Raider and COD Modern Warfare, and that like the Soviet Union, this union will not be overrun by Huns, hordes of dark raiders from the north, or Mexicans (a catch phrase most people use for folks who are often indigenous fleeing Zona Latina the oppressive racism amongst Hispanics and Mestizos against these non-Spanish speaking peoples). Our fall won’t be Rome burning, Alexandria being sacked (or was it raped?), Constantinople being felicitated, or Smurf Village getting Gargamel-ed. Our end will be this. Like the Soviet Union. Anathema.

Our national consciousness has become anemic, fed on Monsanto corn syrup and equal parts Honey Boo Boo, Horders, Doomsday Preppers, Housewives of [location], [location] SVU, Tony Robbins, Born Identity, 50 Shades of Gray, America’s Top [activity, employment, or skill], Obie Trice, Nintendo’s Deadly Towers, Who Wants to Be A [your currency here], and blipverts, the brief advertisement that lasts a tenth of a second and may cause certain viewers to explode… wait… that last one isn’t real? Oh. However, the rest of it is.

Our bodies electric have become far from it. Our problems are those of the Quing Dynasty, the Romanovs, Italy since Berlusconi or 1848 take your pick, the Avignon Papacy, or sundry other examplars of fat and sassy rulers pissing away their patrimony. Except it is not the few, but the E pluribus unim yet in our case if Peopleofwalmart.com is to be believed, it is more like ab unius multos since the material from these corpulent creatures could be sewed into several new humans of typical proportions. We have become so fat and lazy we are amazed at immigrants for mowing our lawns or doing any manual labor and say “oh they’re such hard workers and they enjoy making $1.23 an hour” we say, “oh we can’t get anyone here to work for $1.23 an hour and it would never occur to me to lift a finger because I am an innovator and job creator” because we haven’t seen an American-born teenager mow a lawn since 1987 and can no longer imagine what physical labor is since we rot in office chairs and slump into car seats and then spend a scant few hours farting into the couch before capsizing into bed. To so many of this nation, walking to the car is about as much exercise as is possible (except for those gym addicts who spend all their time measuring food… but that’s the same spectrum of the problem) and perhaps we need petition Congress to change our national motto to Piger Adipem et Stupidi.

As our consciousness and bodies have become mere corpses, so too have our souls. Fed on self-help and heaps of self-esteem so many have tossed out the sky god, the invisible man, and replaced Him with the invisible woman… Ayn Rand. Or the Cult of The Self. Or the God Particle. Or whatever makes us cum and feeds our food hole and makes us feel ok since that’s what it’s all about. As the MSM pisses and ejaculates about a war on [holiday d’ jour] or some other “culture war” and L/l/iberals (but not 19^th century sorts) ejaculate about great advances in who you can ejaculate on (not to say that marriage equality rather than the Ugandan Death To The Gays laws is a bad thing) we are missing out on an erosion about deeper equalities, what it means to be a person (person hood given to corporations), what freedom means (more constraining of the human condition and thought crimes), how we can relate to our environment (all nature behind glass), or being able to see corrupt bankers get the same justice as petty criminals under a common rule of law (they don’t). These t/T/ruth/s/es that have existed for good or bad in the Western Cannon have separated us, and have always separated us from the Apes/Pharisees/Xenu. One example this blogger has come across is hearing about a service that allows “backers” to “fund” an “individual” who will then pay back said backer such-and-such a percent over so-and-so years to dispense said loan…. I mean backing. The service is perhaps another Kickstarter, however, this is not ideas being funded but persons who are “funded” and the “backing” is paid back in a tithe of one’s income, not a fixed interest as set by the Lords of Usury. Just like so many Americans who indentured themselves to finance the crossing, like so many Chinese who voluntarily enter into a Faustian bargain in order to fund their coming to America, which turns out to be a protectorate island out in the pacific where the “Made in the USA” label is allowed to be attached but the workers slog away in World 3 conditions and can’t leave since their “backers” hold their passport and keep up hefty interest rates on the workers. But, boot strap individuals do work their way up and move on to great things, like Ben Franklin who worked for decades to pay back his backers… No? He fled his… uh.. backers, and then went on to invent Tesla and Whore-mongering cheating his backers out of their investment? I can see in the next few decades posters at cafes – “Wanted, Runaway Knowledge Worker, Damion Verde, 27, knows html5 – last seen during a hackathon.”

That the media is touting this as financial innovation is nothing surprising. These “journalists” were raised on the Pudding Warriors and chat rooms. Their knowledge of history goes back to last week. What was personally surprising to this blogger was not the existence of another DumbassStartup (DUST), but that several persons that I know did not see the moral and ethical issues of such a 18^th century venture coming back so far into our George Jetson future. Perhaps this is from so many decades of rot, so much shedding of those old faggy Greek philosophers for more greener pastures of Identity Politics™ and Relativism© (Richard Rorty was in advertising after all before coming to academia). And so, is it a wonder that we idle about, scrape the sinew of reality for an angle to sell, sift the earth and objectify every grain of sand, every microbe and protein chain turned into a product to the point that we will not only pay interest to our backers but future generations will be born having to play royalties to several companies just for using the star-dust of their own matter, their own genomes and proteins are a product and someone else’s intellectual rights and we again recreate Original Sin but without Adam, Eve, and God but with Rand Corporation, Monsanto, and Yum, Inc. holding The Fall in their hands, the stain of debt you must work your life away to repay.

And so, the candle has burned down, the fire is embers… actually the electric bill is due soon and the heat here isn’t so great as to continue to pay for it all night. So, to the long nights we all turn. To hobbies and hunger or however we keep our hours. The world turns, and the clouds look a little strange. We continue to stumble, some expect for gas prices to go down, the housing market to heat up, and for life to resume a’ la 2005, others anticipate… neigh, invoke a cataclysm as Millennials – minus the sky man and plus gold, guns, and grains, while some few keep to themselves and march on, knowing the weak won’t get much out of the earth since when Empire and their armies of Lara Crofts are through with it, there won’t be much to inherit.