You come out of the dark, and a young Japanese schoolgirl--couldn't be any older than 19--is standing in a heavy-lit archway, the blinkered 'sort-of's' of her eyes only visible in corners due to the convex glare rebounding from the heavy light and onto a parked Miyata windshield, right back into the bloodshot lower-left cleft of each eye, sleepless veins like miniature pipelines slogging her fossil fuel blood to the energy markets of her face (but it ends in death, hopeless economy! it begins in death like OPEC!)

There's concrete, and there's stone: the former a collection of synthetically compiled chunks of the latter. In either regard, it might just be the end of the World, tho just an intermission during an afternoon matinee for the world. There are a lot of things you don't understand. There is plenty more you do, and yet you believe your own humility when it whispers, "You don't," tho you are entirely unaware this is delusion and not humility, but some unconscious form of ascetic worship of WONDER!! You're going coocoo for cocopuffs WONDER! We can remember what J.B.S. Haldane once said: "I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."

I was born at the edge of the Cold War. 4 years after America's Operation Just Cause deposed Nicaraguan dictator Manuel Noriega using heavy metal music and heavy metal weapons, loaded to capacity with heavy metal bullets. 4 years after the slow-dissolve tablet of the Berlin Wall finally faded upon the German palate. Brian Mulroney was my Prime Minister at birth. I was also alive (tho not 'conscious,' per se--intellectually conscious, that is) during the Prime Ministership of Canada's first female Prime Minister: Kim Campbell (she was only leader for just over 3 months and thus I cannot give her time in office the full credibility it would have deserved had she been a fully elected candidate instead of an inter-election Prime Ministerial appointment; when, for godssakes, will we have a Fist Nations' Prime Minister? I would like to believe the only reason there has been none is because the indigenous people have categorically rejected the game-fantasy we have stomped upon their land and the world and self-righteously crowned as 'realistic, sober, objective;' tho maybe I'm wrong, whispers Humility: "I don't know").

There is the endless and omnipotent consensus that the world's about to end. For those who study history, they will often notice that when 'then' was 'now,' it was often and always the end of history. 'Now' is the always-result of 'then' and it will never change unless we neglect its consideration. That's really all theory takes to disappear: stop thinking about it. (as if that were possible, ha!)
Because the impression has been one of pollution and confusion, our wide un-thought idealization as children has often led us to emulate all the bad habits we witness growing up, even if at one point we cloudlessly rejected them because the damage didn't seem clear, it was clear.

I was 8 years old when I took my mother's cigarettes from her bedroom while she slept, and proudly announced to her the next morning that I had thrown them out. She had become furious, tho I had done it out of a militant concern for her well-being. During my years of primeval arrival on this planet, mom had almost lost her life to breast cancer. I can't remember understanding much as it happened, nor do I recall fully understanding the implications of death until my grandmother died and I watched my dad fight back tears as he read aloud her eulogy, recalling a story I can pick through scattered memories stored in grey matter to resurrect only one fact about it: they were on a boat, pulling up to shore. My grandfather--the cheeky Briton-optimist he is--made some silly joke, and my grandmother pitched in. The rest is somewhere else in space.

However--regarding death-- I feel that even then we never understand the full implications of death in witnessing another's death, but only through dying ourselves. Which is fine. None of us need to understand these implications until the time comes (and even then, it may just drip away once you've reached the Light. Which is fine).

Returning to the cigarettes: I had absorbed the common knowledge they were awful for you. 'Death-sticks' indeed, just like that scene in Attack of the Clones. Tho I understood nothing of the chemistry, a box or a video or an authority explaining their potential 'results' or 'consequences' was enough for me to righteously desire to save my mother from her own acquired vice.

14 years later, I skulk through the streets of Victoria with Chris, high on ******* and chain-smoking Export-A Gold on the subconscious condition that the world will probably end soon enough for none of this to matter. Tho as I said: For those who study history, they will often notice that when 'then' was 'now,' it was often and always the end of history.

History is comprised of an endless succession of losers who sincerely believe they've figured it out. The only redeemable characters in this Human Odyssey are those who have realized nothing in particular. The people who think, believe, and conceptualize as an infinite process; something without a result. Something with abstract 'goals' that only fit for awhile, not forever.

I'm nobody special. Tho, at the same time, I am; and at the same time and in terms of my relationship to this greater Human Odyssey, whether I will matter in this giant plot is in part up to me (should I write a book? 10 books? Relentlessly pursue the arts, whether that be rapping, writing, music?) and in part up to sheer probability (if I do write a book, will many notice? Or will it be swept under the Great Rug of the Present-Into-Past and be forgotten to thought?), and regardless of all this: the rocks will forget. The trees will forget. Both space and dark matter will have already forgotten what I am doing and what I may one day do.

But life can't be approached on a basis of personal impact; honestly, who wants to pursue the writing of 10 books or the creation of albums in the same way the capitalist approaches economy, for sheer attention and accumulation? Those desperado's, those who chase-the-game-of-success, they have already lost. They lost as soon as they tried to win. There is nothing to win, no award great enough to keep, no person you love or have loved who you will one day depart with for the very last time. But to depart with a personality may be tragic, it is only a true void in concept; when one removes the individual (both themselves and the one they love) from the eternal context of the universe--the ebb and flow of tides to the movement of the moon, the soft breeze supplemented by a fan placed next to an open window, how your hand--when clapped to the surface of a wooden table--is one with the matter in that table regardless of how transiently you perceive such a touch as an interaction. In essence, it's all still here; it always was, and never won't be.

tho maybe I'm wrong, whispers Humility.


                                             *"I don't know."