I'm thinking about the petroglyphs, the ones in the Arizona desert that are scrawled on stains in rust colored stone. They might be 2500 years old, though I guess it's hard to say. They overwhelmed me, even from a distance. All I could imagine was gently tracing a finger over the stone and feeling some warmth on the other side happily matching my own.
I get why they won't let me touch them though. If everyone could reach backward, it's all we'd do. The sheer weight of souls gazing into the past would break whatever feeble bridge was allowing them to visit, oily hands rubbing away the drawings and closing a door for good. Better just to look.
I'm thinking about the grind, brother. Every hot new app used to be a way to gamify some aspect of day-to-day life but now they're cutting out the middle man (the middle man is life btw), it's just games and algorithms. Lately it feels like the only way to make real money is to find a way to offer consumers a quiet death. Not a real death, just the sort of slow drowning of the spirit that lets you keep buying stuff for a few decades before your body follows. It's better for business that way.
Here's the pitch: you have no opinions, you have no skills, you have no wants or desires, you are a smooth orb of nothing and a subscription service helps make sure you still cast a shadow that resembles a human being. Sounds sick, right? I've become wealthy just talking about it.
I'm thinking about the spoon, of course. The one they put in our brains. It wasn't always a spoon up there, last time me and the scientists checked in Re: the plastic in my brain, it was just "some microplastics." Maybe it was a credit card? That doesn't feel so long ago. That could be the spoon talking though.
How many little plastic objects do they have to try and sell us before we've had enough? Julia and I went to the mall last weekend and saw a whole store that was just Funko Pops. That's probably the end of it, right? If the spoon was a problem I can't imagine we'd still buy the Pops. Maybe once the spoon gets bigger, we'll stop differentiating between it and us. Once we're plastic, the Pops will be our brothers. They all seem so certain of who they are, you almost envy them. But they're probably jealous of us too.
We can be both dead and alive, and we can buy brothers at the mall. Sorry, that's what I call a Spoon Thought. You'll have them soon too.
I'm back to the petroglyphs, little scribbled dudes with dongs and cool birds. Those are great things to draw, it's why people keep drawing them.
I know that I don't really want to touch the drawings. There are enough people out there trying to kill art. I just want to talk to the person on the other side of the rock about how I draw cool birds too. I want to compare bad art we made and never get asked why we made it. We could talk about how beautiful it is that art comes out of us as naturally as sweat, songs, and piss. You can't kill piss.
But god, if he saw me he'd probably just scream so much.
A little extra something for my paid subscribers. It's a little late night reading from a guy who's continually exasperated by the news and trying to make more stuff that exists for no reason. If you didn't like it, blame the spoon and forget what you saw. Thanks for reading. See you soon.