To Hell With This...And That

They say the world might end in a little over two years. There's a lot of talk about the Mayan Calendar ending and speculation about aligning planets and natural disasters. Then we have the seemingly increasing amount of absurdity in the world...in what people say and do and think, or the absurdity of the absence of thought. We have this rampaging greed machine that appears to be out of control: a monstrous business entity that's creating stupidity and sucking it right back up for nourishment. We have all this talk that we are now a parasitic race, we are the most abundant mammal and are far past the planet's sustainability threshold. And etc.

Everything does seem to be deliberating and accelerating towards an apocalyptic climax, that's for sure. Perhaps the human race has already reached its height of progressive, intellectual splendor and now it is finally collapsing into itself and regressing to its primitive roots before being devoured by the planet's defense mechanisms. Brings to mind a dying star, whether by an accurate analogy or just a misplaced connection of remote ideas. I don't know.

But then we were given the concept (through repeated exercise and combination of prior concepts) of a body of thought. Perhaps all this hysteria is pessimism in the face of a particularly harsh low-point in history, thus giving birth to a new doomsday vision painted with the help of our current trusted belief systems and academic procedures.

Is this period of time not vaguely comparable to that of the 60's? Everyone thought the world was going to end in a nuclear fireball and many probably believed it, but it hasn't yet. They gritted their teeth in anticipation, sitting wild with hysteria under the extreme pressure of the era's turmoil. That age saw extreme culminations of various socio-political forces and now a new age is experiencing new iterations of the same old impulses.

I don't know what to think, I only know to think. This way of going about things leads me through a series of panics and reassurances: a violent and draining emotional roller coaster, no doubt. I change the angle of the looking glass and switch out the colors of the lens and over the course of seconds become frightened and then tranquil, sometimes the two occurring in such rapid succession that I feel they are simultaneous. I get that old feeling of being torn asunder. In periods of lucidity I can sit and write and articulate the journey in words, or sit and play the guitar and articulate the journey in sounds. The articulations become cathartic and then it is over and I am left with a calm, a temporary clear head and still nerves. Then it is right back to the input-grind and the articulation and the cycle repeats.

I often wonder how I can stay afloat this way in a world that demands the conventional method.

It is all a cesspool of madness.