Modernism had failed yet we still cling to its vestiges like a stubborn tick, hoping it will yield one last blood meal to sate our thirst. Maybe when the atmosphere has reached its critical capacity for CO2/NOx/O3/VOCs we will simply shelter ourselves in our cars and comfort ourselves listening to old CCR tracks as the birds begin to fall from the skies. Like canaries in the mine shaft, the species of the planet are rapidly waning in number as the toxic shock of human progress begins to cross the final hurdle momentarily preventing mass genocide of the biosphere. Already, in early spring, the air quality is rapidly declining and the fogs of industrial exploitation are bellowing northward toward the poles. This winter was particularly long and grueling in S/ON which has led people to conveniently forget the immanence of global catastrophic change. As the spring progresses into summer and the air becomes a soup of particulates and synthetic pharmaceuticals global warming will, once again, become significantly salient and particularly poignant. As the elderly and infirm begin to drop in the streets, gasping for air, the majority will enclose themselves in their vehicles and maximize the air conditioning, convincing themselves that all will be resolved through denial and ignorance. The way it always has been in the first world. Through the categorical enslavement of the poor and those who have not been bright enough to follow suit in exploiting every last natural resource available, the status quo has succeeded in finally marginalizing themselves. The majority has consequentially barricaded itself into a position of maximum demand and dwindling supply. Thinking that we must drive to work, that we must produce more waste than product or resource, that we must consume at pathological proportions far exceeding our necessities, that we must indirectly endorse the death of innocents in order to maintain our hedonistic lifestyles, that we must turn a blind and ambivalent eye from all the blatant unsustainable structures of maintenance we have constructed for ourselves. No matter how guilty I feel for fucking the earth, I can still experience illusory redemption by participating in earth hour, by buying organic, by composting my greens. Unfortunately, Gaia does not care what argumentation the parasites use to defend their position of self-absorption and vanity. Just as we would swat at a mosquito siphoning our blood, so will She respond in deadly fashion. The end of time will be relatively unexpected and swift, similar to the Boxing Day tsunami of December 26, 2004. In a flash of light, in a ball of fire, in a moment of unbridled reconciliation, the goddess will strike, attempting to rid herself of the cosmic insult that has been deposited on her epithelium. The entire history of human development on the planet is a relatively microscopic endurance taken from the perspective of universal time. The planet has been slumbering in space for millions of years, and our brief appearance has awoken her. And She's fuckin' pissed. More frustrated by the pace of geologic evolution and cosmic delay than in the momentary inconvenience of anthropocentric human phenomenology, She prepares to mount a campaign of sterilization, the likes of which have yet to be experienced by humanity. Just as we would wake up in our bed infested with body lice and institute a mass extermination, so will She do the same. I find it morbidly ironic that in our oblivion and pride we have condemned ourselves to discontinuation. Seeing as our genetic recombination concealed our degeneracy in the illusion of superiority, however, it's only fitting that we now face the global eradication of our germ. For how far did we expect to advance in this time-space continuum without the logic to foresee the consequences of our colonization and indiscriminate urbanization of that which cannot be abstracted into reductive empirical components of utilitarian opportunism? Perhaps we can simply get in our cars and drive off into the sunset like so many cinematic lemmings. Knowing our capacity for prudence, we would likely take a wrong turn and drive off a sheer cliff face, frantically and mechanically following one another to our misfortune and demise. After all, all's well that ends well.
