I love every one of you, but you’ve lost something.  Gain. It. Back. – Bathroom Wall, Brooklyn

The Pope told us to fek off, some huge shit explodes over Russia, Gangnam Style pushes Charlie Bit My Finger Again out as top viewed youtube video, cruise ships continue to breakdown inconveniencing thousands and demonstrating there are still thousands out there who do not arrive onboard by mistake, who are not impressed by HMS dragoons, or find sea travel the only way to escape an oppressive and murderous regime, but willingly sign up, fork over sonorous amounts of CHC for the chance to swim ashore, get food poisoning or enjoy five says of smelling ass juice and salt water being towed by a few fishing boats, someone named Bladerunner [allegedly] kills his hot model wife on Valentine’s Day in Africa – and they’re both white, a girl attending the swearing in ceremony of the POTUS gets shot in the face and killed a week later, and 72 hours or news coverage is taken up by a guy sipping from a bottle of water…. Fuck me.  The End Times are here. Four of us at dinner predicted the next big thing – submersion of a large land mass (that or convergence of the Polar-Grizzly bear hybrid and Killer Bees to create a Polar killer bear bee), atomic meltdown/explosion (such as an accidental detonation of a bomb in a developing nation), a specific crop fungus causing massive failure (and the rust on the Home Depot tomatoes doesn’t count), and I called digital clusterfuck of a major system like the electrical grid.

“Of all the things I worry about, dying because the planet was hit by a meteor never occurred to me.  I mean, not that the rest of the planet was blown up, but that I could die because a meteor hit me.  Have you called Walter?  I want to hang out more with him….” -Girl in café

Are we getting the message finally?  Is this what the end times look like, or is this increasing level of Holyshitwhatthefuckisthat a product of a webcam world where cameras shoot each disaster about the globe in seconds, and dumbasses in moments have turned key images into memes, antimotivational posters, and added genitals where they don’t belong.  The world is one huge screaming bathroom wall and we but toilet traders of infotainment.  When disaster strikes, I am hardwired to reach for my camera.  Snap a pic, post it, and move on with my day.

One development in the world of abundant stimuli is the prevalence of cameras and other recording devices. Drivers in Russia have cameras to avoid scams.  NYC has cameras because of the Terror.  Food-O-Mart has cameras to keep us from taking the kale or sneaking a few Brach’s candies without putting a nickel in the box (just dated myself).  Right now as this anonymous café I sit at, three cameras are glaring at me.  I have a computer I call a phone that I take everywhere and it records all my movements.  My use of The Google results in a digital track so that while I am black out drunk and remember shit, Uncle Google knows where I have been and how many times I’ve watched the Ai Se Eu Te Pego video.  The bank knows when I take a cab, since I pay with a card.  The insurance company knows when I have been late paying the gas company.  The credit card companies know I have a thing for lines of credit.  My face is recognized by cameras everywhere and the machines know more about me than I do.  Pandora knows what music I like, Facebook how often I call my mom and does a better job in tracking birthdays and anniversaries that I could ever, Google knows what I write about on e-mail, documents, and what I put on my calendar.  I gave up counting the cameras on my way to work.  I gave up counting the ones installed at work in the office, especially since they put in new ones and never removed the old ones.  Drones are all coming back from the various wars in order to take more pictures, record heat maps (not sure what that is), and provide more jobs for an industry built on spending $250,000 to blow up a $.67 an hour goat herder and whatever the cost of a goat is in Afghanistan… which is detailed in the Afghanistan Livestock Association’s 2^nd Quarter report, that I found on the internet in three seconds.  However, I don’t have the time to evaluate whether the data is valid, know who funded that organization, or anything other than I can find a link and spider it giving the impression of knowledge when it is nothing more than yet another clever reference.  Another factoroid floating out in the universe.

With all this information, gathered by the Gubberment on their War On Terror™ or corporations who want to sell you shit, or the Job Creators who want to ensure you know your place in the pecking order, or all these cameras, we wonder who will guard the guards, but another question may be placed on top of that, who will watch all this shitty footage?  This makes the data feed of SETI seem like a few scribbles in a little girl’s diary.  Oh, we will build computers that scan for abnormalities, we have that covered by technology, we will replace analysts with nanotechnology, and we will use computations to scan the population Dear Netizen.  Perhaps, but until this HAL or Mother is built, we have streaming steaming tubes sending all this digital defecation and peeing in our eyeballs our faces sticky from sticky pages our minds cum dumpsters for so many news feeds. So many cameras, so little time to edit ourselves.  The world seems crazy because we can see more of it at once…. That we have believed G/g/o/_/d could see everything is even more frightening.  If we individually and collectively have become this neurotic and crazy seeing the tip of the reality of Mother Earth day-by-day, can you imagine seeing all of reality all the time and at once from the start to the end of time from dust being born to sparrows farting to knowing every cute cat video ever to have and will to be made…..  Lovecraft believed that we humans would go mad if we saw even a slight glimpse of the netherworlds that exist within our own…. But were those gods already insane to begin with, having been exposed to us for so long….

Frightening things pound on and on and splash new horrors upon us from all points on the globe.  They killed the guy who killed the cops – or he killed himself.  Or he was dead for days and the police burned the house down to hide the fact.  Or they pulled a Waco.  Or a Ruby Ridge.  Or he was deranged on SSRI medication.  The Pope resigned for health issues.  Or to avoid being subpoenaed by the Hague.  Or because he is old. Or because he works for the World Order and is moving to a bunker because they’re going to flip the Switch.  The thing that exploded over Russia was a meteorite.  Or a new weapon.  Or God’s message writ loud.  The Bladerunner didn’t kill his wife, he shot her through the bathroom door.  Armstrong didn’t take drugs, but was forced to confess on Oprah for reasons still murky but have to do with a black president.  There is already a Wikipedia entry for the former cop turned cop killer.  An official version of events created by Uncle Internet as well as the official alternative versions of events, yet we know less and less about what really happens.  Some say there is a secret Wikipedia of things yet to occur, as the Gray Lady used to maintain obituaries of notable people ready to go, or that this wiki is created by the illuminati or the Jews or Jew-Polar-Grizzly-Killer-Bee-Bears. It no longer really matters what is true, over what we may choose to believe so we may make some sense of the world and gain some control of the constant barrage.  So much magic around us, such an amount of energy taken from the earth every nanosecond to bring us these live feeds and tweets, and in this, what sense of truth outside of pithy statements we read on our social media, our RSS feeds, our trending sites, and how this differs from those we read written on the bathroom walls?   We  trade this information and to the crude penis drawings, add our own scribblings and make the best of it.

“We are buried beneath the weight of information, which we confuse with knowledge.”  – Tom Waits