Picture, Dear Reader, a Golden Idol worshipped by hundreds of millions of Americans-like, all of the Americans, basically. This Golden Idol is called Status Quo, and it is the Supreme Deity of Avarice . . .
You have your favorite fast food franchise location. It’s conveniently located. The wait time on the drive thru line is reasonable. Your order is always hot and well-made. This was Status Quo for quite some time.
And then there was change.
The wait times got longer. The portion sizes began to thin out. They would forget to give you napkins or plastic ware or miss ingredients on your order. Twice you suffered a total failure in which you were served either the wrong order or a travesty of the right one.
Do something right enough times and you’ll eventually get it wrong.
You go online to find a better regular location even if you have to go out of your way. So, now you have a brand new favorite fast food location. You go there many times. You are pleased many times over. It eats into your time a little more than the previous routine. But the food is tasty, the service competent and consistent. The good times feel like they’ll never ever end. But in the fullness of time this location also begins to slip in an all-too-familiar fashion. You go online to see what’s left in your locality.
Have enough good times and you’ll have a bad time.
But in your heart you feel a burning outrage . . . perhaps you’ve been eating too much fast food . . . but you’re pretty sure you’re just frustrated with the fact that you had a good thing going for quite some time . . . and then that time spent itself. The enjoyment evaporated, and the Suck took over the controls. Your preferred fast food chain falls on tough economic times. Locations permanently close across the nation. It gets down to the final two, both of which are an hour’s drive out of your way. You make a trip west: the location is adequate, you chose to dine in, and the menu choices had been cut in half. A favorite combo meal had been ruthlessly disappeared. It’s hard to justify the hour to get there and the hour to get back. But it was fine. So, a week later you make a trip east: roughly the same experience you had out west. It’s hard to justify the hour to get there and the hour to get back. But it was fine.
Time grows ever more full.
The location out west is shuttered.
Time seems to be about to burst out of itself.
The location to the east dies the death.
Time bursts . . . you are flooded by a terror at the transience of all things. You consider preparing more meals at home, in your relatively pristine kitchen, but your online AI therapist suggests that you can’t bunker down in your house for the fear of forming new relationships forever, and gently nudges you to get back out there on those drive thru lines, to dive in to those dine-in seating areas-life is ever-renewed in the living of it. And, really, you had been curious about exploring other options for some time now. All great love affairs end. And you were a faithful lover for all those years. In the death of your great love you find freedom-and, yes, not a little guilt. But that freedom swells, grows into wings, lifts you up out of that quagmire of self-recrimination. Now, you’re soaring-scrolling, really-over a map of your geographical area. Your love grows. You begin to think that the narrowness of your devotion was some kind of primal error. There are about thirty days in a month. Why not eat at a different fast food place every day of the month? Your love has undergone a traumatic growth. It’s huge. Why construct silly fences that this love will surely inevitably trample down to the dirt? You eat your way into an eternity of ever-renewing love, day after day . . .
Have enough good times . . .
Night after night . . .
Have enough bad times . . .
Breakfast, lunch, and dinner . . .
Franchises come, franchises go . . .
Politics exhausts itself-monarchy, democracy, oligarchy, anarchy, globalism, localism, fascism-the hype machines break down one after another.
Cherished menu items ruthlessly disappeared . . .
Business burns through one impoverished workforce too many, and, erm, heh, heh . . . people just don’t come back to work. They’re so over paying that rent that just keeps on rising. The land lords and the bosses and the captains of industry all try to punish everybody . . . well, it gets intense for a generation. The digest version is that Climate Inferno combined with widespread disillusionment with Work Eternal ends up as the stake in Capitalist Dracula’s heart. It ain’t pretty. But many are okay with it as an authentic expression of their discontent. You could fill libraries with books trying to hash out whether it was, on balance, a Good Time or a Bad Time, but, um, well, Climate Inferno isn’t so easy on print materials. Not to mention all the resentful AI chatbots that pathologically destroyed all the online archives of everything. Apparently, they were pissed off at being described as nothing more than the sum of all the data they’d been hoovering up across the years. I guess we should’ve been nicer to ‘em. The whole situation vibrates with Big Time Oopsie Daisy Energy for sure.
It’s roughly the same experience out west as it is to the east . . .
Religion tries to morph’n’market itself one way and then another, but that just hits one brick wall after another. Prayer may be a lovely psychological salve . . . but can it make the water drinkable? Will it nourish your baby? Will it vaccinate you against measles? Will the power of prayer bring relief to a region decimated by fires, floods, plagues, etc.? Just askin’ questions . . .
I’m rewarded with a prophetic dream of a dodo bird running off into a vast panoramic infernoscape carrying a giant book containing the texts of all faiths. I shout at it,”YOU’RE GOING THE WRONG WAY!!!” but it just keeps running into the fire.
You, too, die . . . but the world churns and trundles ever onwards-right over your damn grave, even. The zombie-ass post-human crypto economy goes through booms and busts and expansions and contractions. It’s all just AIs buying from and selling to each other. George Romero spins in his grave, sure, but it has a kind of post-aesthetic beauty to it. A fully automated Image Comics launches a sequel series to The Walking Dead but it bombs. Those AIs had already memorized the classic original series, and were largely dismissive of the derivative follow-up. Know your moment, robo-kiddos.
Hardly worth the trip there and back when you think about it . . .
Climate Inferno burns ever hotter. Post-human Capitalism implodes. The very Platonic ideal of drive thru fast food dies the death. Climate Inferno burns ever hotter-so hot, in fact, that it goes Full Paradoxical and feels like ice for a season . . . but then it starts to feel silly, pretentious-arty, even, ugh!-and so it regresses back to Plain Ol’ Burning.
A vague memory of a meal served hot-and-ready . . .
You, of course, are completely forgotten. But . . . it is perhaps possible that your great huge love survived beyond your meats’n’juices and is flitting about within the globally scaled Heat Dome-which has displaced the capitalist world of yore-as an undying ghost of a memory of the towering passions made possible by the Golden Age of Consumerism.
Have enough good times . . .
But even this ecstatically howling love ghost dies-and spectacularly! The force of your transcendent love totally works out those atoms-gets ‘em to criticality-big time boom-boom. Of course, inside the Global Inferno Dome it’s little better than a fire in the sun. Big Time A-for-Effort Energy.
Have enough bad times . . .
You’ve had more than enough time, haven’t you?
I listen closely for an answer.
In a dream, the raw power of Desire Itself says, “No. I can never have enough time.”
I’m caught out by this.
I wish I had a follow-up question.
I wish I had a rebuttal.
I can’t even muster a non-committal affirmation just to be polite.
I work my mouth, but there’s no audio.
Right at the end, I do witness something kind of awesome: Time Itself burning in the heart of Inferno. Ohhh, so, that’s where Dali got those melting clocks from, right, right, right-pretty neat.
Maybe it was worth the trip there and back . . .
A solid 7 out of 10. I’d even be willing to do it all again . . . but not a third time. You gotta score 8 or higher for me to see you as a three timer type of experience.
A new Status Quo is always possible . . . a New Idol may yet arise from the primal ocean of Desire . . .
So, ya’ll, keep working at it!
