The fears and aspirations of so many have been lulled for some time by innovative, positive listicles and the season is upon us where the Orwellian machines start to churn out reflections on this year past – Anno Domini/ Common Era 2015 (or whatever number you assign in your culture) – and we civilians attempt to make sense of it all or just block it all out as best as we can in order to keep the candle of our humanity burning just enough to warm our soul.
Each of us has been made more cocooned in our digital movie, the story we tell ourselves about who we are since as total consumer materialists trapped in a behavioralist maze of corporatocracy’s invention, we continue to pile on the avenues of communication and yet seem to say less and less. Snap talking, Vine driving, Instagram brunching, YouTube baby first steps, and a dwindling mix of party wall shots as you and your friends age and the parties become earlier and earlier and solely on weekends. A rocking unease is settling on us and plugging our feeds with fearful apparitions and quite a few anxiety farts and in the mix of this are shooters and cooters and plenty of crosstalk. “Watson, come here, I need you” a distant memory, that first call that started this revolution we have not yet seen the terminal result.

Nevertheless, we have been quite busy in 2015. We made and invented numerous machines of loving grace that rock our minds and spirits so that we neither sleep nor fully at our senses but rail, not into the long night. And then something happens far off, and a Mirkwood tulgey smell is in the air. The sense and confident sanity we have is tested and laughing all hullabaloo we tidder giddy into a little brown bag and hope no one finds we’ve stuffed it secret into the incorrect recycling bin.
Perhaps it is time to dust off those old tins of kippers under the shelf. We could be mowed down for any number or reasons in 2016 or just explode into an amorphous disease from some environmental toxin created by atheists in laboratories – the companies of which are of course incorporated in vague small states of our Union. So, what should we remember for the year to and end? What can we find in the entrails of our latest history we can use to prognosticate for the future?
Is our Go Bag(tm) at the bottom of the closet covered in cat hair? That crank radio seemed like a good idea but where is it now?
Anger has arisen again. New, and this time from all directions. The same level of anger as back in 2008 that was quelled by Hopeabdchange but not settled by any major restructuring. The levers remain. The passengers take the same elevator. Our various cars and trucks laden with foreign consumer goods cross the same rotting bridges and causeways. And in the distant east it seems a rumble of what we fear are zombies. A trembling of humanity and a reawakening of our Long Emergency and an election year sure to end in some percentage of the population deeply offended.
And now, to return to some posts in the future about cats and cheese and attempt to avoid all manner or hiccups in topic and tone and attempt to return to travels in meditations on the various spaces, places, and people I see. Or… maybe it is time to explore those old haunts. The theory and practice of Doomers, and foist yet more End of the World As We Know It dribble on unsuspecting readers. As they used to say, “tune in next time and see.”

Editor’s Note: Some changes in the author’s life have removed time, distracted, and confounded leading to a break in posts and then this rant that is more crazy than normal.  Perhaps the next post will be more neuron-typical.