Curves Shooting Up
Posted: August 21st, 2018, 1:36 am
(Notes from Beatty, Nevada a few years ago)
I holed up in my hovel as the air box roared . . . Maybe some TV. *Click* . . . Something about Rome. Caligula drinking pearls dissolved in vinegar. Random, deranged excess and murder. Old noise. *Click* . . . The national debt was trillions, but it was fine. Nothing new under the savage sun, just bigger, more expensive. Everything owed everything else billion-trillions and megatons, and curves were shooting up and getting high, into numbing, impenetrable sheer magnitude, as the Machine rolled harder and faster, depleting, excreting, warring, whoring, screaming, flashing, crushing stragglers in the way, replacing old religions with itself, keeping us in beer and cars. The Juggernaut! *Click* . . . Off.
........I remembered a traveling art show that Sue talked about-- huge digital works on gallery walls. One was a Seurat painting with tiny images of pop cans as its "pixels," seen up close but not from afar-- a hundred thousand cans, the number tossed every few seconds. And others too, like sixty thousand plastic bags, or a half-million plastic bottles, and pulsing through it all, the black blood, 28,000 barrels a minute and rising, drilled out, burned and absorbed.
........But these were mere pinpricks. Even the big mines. If you clustered enough of them and pushed too hard, rock would push back. Simple physics. But by then rock was also known to shed its riders like dog hair at times-- for no particular cause. It outlasts shooting curves and asteroids. It is the asteroid. And nobody on the frontier wanted to talk of limits, or about saving the rock, not out West where mountains go forever wherever you go, so I kept my doubts to myself.
I holed up in my hovel as the air box roared . . . Maybe some TV. *Click* . . . Something about Rome. Caligula drinking pearls dissolved in vinegar. Random, deranged excess and murder. Old noise. *Click* . . . The national debt was trillions, but it was fine. Nothing new under the savage sun, just bigger, more expensive. Everything owed everything else billion-trillions and megatons, and curves were shooting up and getting high, into numbing, impenetrable sheer magnitude, as the Machine rolled harder and faster, depleting, excreting, warring, whoring, screaming, flashing, crushing stragglers in the way, replacing old religions with itself, keeping us in beer and cars. The Juggernaut! *Click* . . . Off.
........I remembered a traveling art show that Sue talked about-- huge digital works on gallery walls. One was a Seurat painting with tiny images of pop cans as its "pixels," seen up close but not from afar-- a hundred thousand cans, the number tossed every few seconds. And others too, like sixty thousand plastic bags, or a half-million plastic bottles, and pulsing through it all, the black blood, 28,000 barrels a minute and rising, drilled out, burned and absorbed.
........But these were mere pinpricks. Even the big mines. If you clustered enough of them and pushed too hard, rock would push back. Simple physics. But by then rock was also known to shed its riders like dog hair at times-- for no particular cause. It outlasts shooting curves and asteroids. It is the asteroid. And nobody on the frontier wanted to talk of limits, or about saving the rock, not out West where mountains go forever wherever you go, so I kept my doubts to myself.