. . . REALITY LOST . . .
. . . now, right before the nuclear holocaust, there was, of course, the collapse of whatever was left of democracy on Earth among humans. As irrevocably dire as this situation was, it must be said that many felt a strange exhilaration as the lies of religion crumbled in real time. Many on Earth had been told too many stupid and hateful and self-defeating things all in the name of God and/or the State and/or Money and so to see all pretenses be dropped was a bit of a lift to folks, y'know? Futile rebellions of pettiness and bitterness raged in the Final Days as those who were done with all the bullshit decided to live as they pleased and no longer submit to bogus laws and courts and faiths and so forth.
And then the bombs and the missiles and the mushroom clouds and the ensuing Omnicide and all the rest-we've been over all that again and again, we get it. Truly. We get it.
But what we don't talk about . . . is Me. The Last Thing. The Inescapable Thing.
Reality.
Yeah, that's my name, don't wear it out.
Reality.
My existence is controversial, because, At the End, Death was supposed to be the Last Thing, the Inescapable Thing-or Nothing. Nothingness. Dispersion. Dissipation. Disorganization.
Nope. Wrong. I'm the Last Thing. Reality. Because I'm the baseline, the context, the deep background, the system of systems, the works-
Reality, baby! You just can't get outside of Me. You can't supersede Me. You can't cheat Me. You can't bribe Me. You can't kill Me. You can't disappear Me. You can't lie to Me.
You can lie to yourself. You can deny Me.
But you just don't win against Me, not ever.
Armies. Propaganda. Prisons. ICBMs. Concentration camps. Denialisms-so much empty gesturing in My Face. Rude, but futile.
I'm the Thing That Cannot Cease.
Even if there's no one left alive to remember Me.
Yeah. It's a sad truth. You can only half beat Me if you do yourself in, which, I guess, is what you did. Not all of you. Most of you had no problem with Me, not in any major way. But there were enough to ruin it for everybody. Sad but true.
Ah, well.
Y'know, I keep thinking about an image that prevailed in the Final Days. It was something called the Burning Drum Major. It would appear on posters and streaming videos-the fundamentalists really took to it. As did the so-called 'defense intellectuals' and 'action intellectuals'-the usual suspects. The Burning Drum Major was clothed in spectral fire, and accompanied by slogans: MARCH INTO FIRE, CLIMB THE ESCALATION LADDER TO THAT MEASURE, HELL IS THE ONLY REALITY, HEAVEN IS FOR LOSERS-I mean-heh, heh, heh-it was amusing how the fundamentalists dropped the Heavenly Pretense and admitted that they were all Hot for Inferno, just like we always knew, right? Heaven was always this vague, ethereal place of abstract solace or something, whereas Hell was far more vivid. And it's always more fun to elaborate the torments of your Enemy than think on an eternity of refills at the Great Country Buffet In The Sky-heh, heh, heh!
Yeah.
Here I Am.
The Last and Most Lost.
Just Me and the Burning Drum Major for the Duration.
Tee-hee-hee-hee-hee-hee!
Oh, shit . . .
