I see a great darkness in the future. A lessening which traumatizes my generation into bitter solitude. A world of cramped leaky concrete spaces, shitting in buckets, sweating and scavenging and scampering from one place to the next. A Kowloon Planet to harvest the world’s corpse. I drift from moment to moment siphoning every ounce of pleasure, convenience, and joy from what the modern world has to offer. A tactical hedonism of experiences one day locked away from me, like a man hurriedly slurping caviar out of the can with his fingers as he faces the wall next to the others, hearing the gunshots and thuds proceed closer and closer to his right ear. I see children wide eyed at wizardry and resplendence in hearing the barest explanations of their curiosities about the world before they were born. Tormenting their parents with more innocent questions that don’t want to be answered because they’re too painful to remember and it’s easiest to live with what the world is now when you can push the past into a distant dream. I feel weariness, a foretelling of gradual lessening impinging itself on me through the years months and days as I slowly acclimate to the creeping squalor of a fractured society. I can smell iron and taste blood in my mouth, thinking of what could be done to me and what I could do to others. I savor every moment of speed, power, glory, and freedom I can harvest from this life until I am demoted to squalor and stillness in a rusted world of broken things and immaterial inaccessible data. I look into the dead eyes of a woman at a karaoke bar in the middle of a desert town. Her best years behind her, a wry tired empty smile. A melancholy at what she’s already lost, what little she had to begin with. A man screaming into a microphone while a Kevin Gates instrumental blows out the speakers. Five ugly people gyrate and clap. She knows them by name. Several dozen people’s lives contained entirely in this shithole bar in the middle of the desert. The last ones to leave before the party’s over. She smiles and she doesn’t know why. It’s because she’s going to die before she has to see it. It’s what I selfishly wish could happen to me too. Knocked out of life’s game of musical chairs while there’s still music to be played, while there’s still chairs to sit in. It’s what I pray for my parents, hoping they die before it really all goes to shit. Some part of me knows I’m not getting bailed out of this one. All I can hope for is for my kids to be born into the aftermath, bathing in it from birth not even knowing the loss. A turbulent struggling Now and Normal that harvests me and feeds them with grit. I see a great darkness surrounding the little campfire we huddle around for warmth. The shadows creep in and the flame flickers around its last carcass of wood. Thunder echoes through the sky and the wind takes on a wet coldness.