Back to Australia for an earlier release from EXEK. You can judge for yourself what this says about me or my mental state but this is where it is today. Other dimensional, somewhat heavy, with loops of electronic feedback over the strings. Feedback over feedback. It’s just where things are.

The numbers from yesterday keep looping back. It’s not a blame game. It’s nothing to do with who dropped the ball and who could have done what and didn’t. Or did something wrong. The pandemic has been rather an indictment that came down on all of us while we were focussed on something else. We were never paying attention so it really was just a matter of time before the boot dropped.

And it dropped.

Now it’s pressing down hard like a man grinding out a cigarette on the pavement, making sure our collective delusions are extinguished. You think that sounds melodramatic? I don’t. I’ve been sitting here nearly a year on watching people resisting the truth and grasping on to shreds of ideas and theories and crying about getting back to normal. Crying for the blue pill. Wailing to be re-integrated into The Matrix. The lamentations aren’t about partisanship or loyalty, unless we’re talking about remaining loyal to simulation. Many of the loudest cries are coming from people who would claim to have taken the red pill. They might describe themselves as “woke.”

Whatever…

Who am I to judge? I’m still hung up on the number. One in six people who were with us eleven months ago are gone and that’s what I’m snagged on. That and the real truth that we were so entirely unprepared for it that it’s probably safe to say that it wouldn’t have mattered who was at the helm here on this rock flying through space. What would happen at this moment if another existential threat presented itself? We’re still not prepared on any level. And before this sounds like a panic screed, it’s really not. It’s just a statement of fact. We are an ant colony in a field that’s about to be plowed under. The machinery doesn’t even know we’re here and no sleep will be lost up in Heaven, presuming there’s a Heaven and there is a god or at the wheel.

“The universe is monstrously indifferent to the presence of man.” ~ Werner Herzog

Truer words rarely spoken, eh?

So the idea among the blue-pill religious sorts is that if we can go through these trials and tribulations without becoming monstrously indifferent ourselves then we will have an eternity of bright, sunshiney joy in some miraculous cloud city somewhere. My question would be, how are we to go through prolonged suffering without coming to hate he or those who brought it upon us? It seems to me that would require an impossible goodness. It’s setting the bar awfully high, so how many people are actually going to make it through those pearly gates? A good handful maybe. Maybe those who died young, having not been around long enough to boil up some resentments.

So no, this is not a test. This is just the indifference of the universe, and I’m not even going to call it monstrous. The rewards of living a good life are plentiful but less tangible even than the promise of an eternity in Heaven. They are threads in the same rope that brings the hardship. The warmth of the sun from this distance gives life and at the same time it burns everything to a cinder. You don’t even have to travel to the sun for it to kill you. We make our way along through all of this no different than the ants in the colony, unaware of the immense machines that are about to come through. The rewards are intangible not because they are vast, but because they are fleeting and they come simultaneously with the punishments for existing. They are plentiful though tiny and if you’re not seeking them in every moment, you lose and all of this is for nothing.

Every single moment, or you lose. For good.

So maybe I’m hung up on 500,000 because it’s the only number that really matters, and it matters because it’s the most honest, truthful number of all aside from the number it will add up to by the end of today. It matters because it is living, breathing, dying proof that we are ephemeral. We are dust. This isn’t bleak. Truth isn’t bleak until you measure it against unrealistic expectations. You can have a really fucking beautiful day until you become invested in mythology, religion, nationalism or whatnot, that’s going to be proven false by nightfall. Radical agnosticism. No, this isn’t a statement about a destitute existence. For me, it’s an arrow pointing to hope.

For me… You can grab it where you find it. How you find it is none of my business. I’m just giving you biased advice.

Selah.