The year is in its death throes. Only today and tomorrow remain. The rest of 2025—barely recognizable as it collapses into its ultimate decay—is a mound of shattered and splintered days—nothing more than smoldering embers and ashes. Gasping for a few, final, labored breaths. Most of history, rewritten to suit the grotesque bigotry of authoritarian autoeroticism, tells stories of events that never happened or expunges true-crime documentation about actions that should have never taken place. Illusions and lies, stitched together in fabric so tightly-woven it is water-proof and truth-proof, comprise the artificial fabric of the past; the “official recounts” explaining life as it never was to true believers tortured into accepting empty vapor as irrefutable evidence of fiction as the only real facts. Presented with the options of willingly accepting the suspension of reality or fighting against honesty in all its forms, we have chosen both. With an inexplicable fervor, we have ceded to a maniacal minority the reins of power. “We?” Who are we? It is “they” who agreed to embrace their own powerlessness. What have “we” done in response? Clearly, not enough.
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The air outside my study’s window looks weak, as if it is starved of oxygen. The translucent tree trunks and limbs beyond the glass are still and quiet now, but as the atmosphere continues to thin, they will change. First, twigs and limbs will moan—almost inaudibly. Soon thereafter, their soft expressions of emotional pain will become louder and their once-rigid wood will become soft and limp. The trunks will slump in irrepressible grief, as bark slides in waves onto the ground. Birds already have abandoned the forest in their search for breathable air. Deer, too, have scurried away, seeking an atmosphere more hospitable to living creatures. Squirrels and turkeys, stuffed with the bounty of their pre-winter feeding frenzies, waddle away in the hope that their plodding retreat will be fast enough to avoid the worsening oxygen shortage. Time, known to require massive infusions of pure oxygen, came to a halt several hours ago, as expected; as we know, the cessation of time is the canary in the coal mine.
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We have known for quite some time that our Sun will one day spend the last of its fuel. Before that time comes, our planet may plummet into temperatures so cold that atoms will be unable to move. Or, conversely, the star will ignite its final store of hydrogen gas to incinerate our planet and all those within the Sun’s gravitational pull. Either way, we know our existence eventually will come to an end. So, why do we seem so terror-stricken to think of an ending that comes much sooner? “Temporal proximity.” That’s my hypothesis. Nearness in time. As the distance…whether actual or imagined…between then and now shrinks, our anxiety skyrockets, zipping past distant galaxies at speeds far greater than light-speed-squared. The simple solution, of course, is to employ a mechanism I call “time elongation.” Time elongation is a process that either dramatically slows the progression of time or actually extends the size and duration of time’s many component parts. In the latter case, for example, a second can be be expanded to the size and duration of a year in today’s experience. Thinking of the coming apocalypse in that context, we have all the time in the world. The logic of that line of thinking, though, may be similar in some ways to equating the time between elbow replacements with the likelihood of dying of frostbite in the heat of the Australian summer.
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Pessimism and realism live across from one another on the same side of the street. Their grandfathers and grandmothers, respectively, were arrested for crimes against insanity, but the charges were dropped from a high-flying aircraft whose pilots had been smoking marijuana. Needless to say. While some people are busy building concentration camps, others focus their efforts on building concentration campuses, where college students are forced to live the impoverished lifestyles of aspiring academics. Though my writing may seem like it is fueled by illegal substances this morning, that is not the case.
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Sometimes, the only real problem is the lack of a solution.
