Homeless Story of J, Part 11

This is a work of fiction.

-----------------------------------------------

XI


I eke out my days as a “dirt hermit,” a solo shaman hiding from the Processors. They are like dog catchers who loop the time clock around your neck, leashing you to a chain of money.

Go to a shelter, you get Processed. Herded to then next shelter, and so on.  Finally there is Skid Row. A freakzone ghetto asylum, miles of lattice in all directions. Skid Row's ashpalt moats keeps you in, teeming with crime, crazy homeless people like me, with police blocking all the exits.

I'm a dirt hermit. I stink. My clothes rot. I look like the protagonist in Ordinary Wolves, that paleo-eskimo.  His greasy Parka.  Its patches of duct tape and crusts of caribou blood.

People forget that our ancestors drove stone knives into the throats of cervids to finish them off.

Slasher films, which cost $20 per rich kid owe their visceral impact to the kill. Slender animals with feminine necks. Most of human history is the tribe, blood-drenched as they cut up what once roamed free. 

This Earth!  It is miracles destroying miracles to create more miracles.

If you’re raised telecommunicated and decide to be the last eskimo, or a dirt hermit, you have to go back a long way, but once you do, you find yourself right in the middle of a hundred thousand years of stabbing animals' necks.

All this ordinary bloodshed is in all of us.  Somewhere.

Don't assume that your ancestors had no morals.  They did not act like ants as we do. They did not swarm.  Today, when we go to war, we act as brutally as ants.  It was Churchill who fire-stormed whole cities of civilians--children, noncombatants, their homes, possessions, their dogs and cats.  

I read that a firestorm is just as bad as a nuclear bomb, in terms of devastation.  So Britain and the United States are equally extreme in evil infliction.

A dirt hermit must look crazed and out of place. Contact with raw earth makes you a necessary pariah. You must be farouche.

Without a Processor, you won't be upgraded to the latest version of the Program.  The Program will not see you, even when you stand on a street corner and watch the thousands of tin coffins go by.

Humanity used to kill wild animals.  But now, we kill the wildnerness itself.  We are the Bridge Species on this planet.  Our future is techno-machine.  It didn't take us long to murder nature.

Nothing like 'us' has happened in the last five billion years. The Permian Extinction and the Triassic Meteor Strike, those were different extinctions than the one we inflict.  Those extinctions mere set evolution free to play.  

Our extinction, the human-caused extinction, is the murder of evolution.

Welcome the end of nature, and the new Era of Machina Convolvus.

(Note to myself: "era” is “are” backwards)

There is no stopping our blind march.  We all say yes and we all act no.  

We are as much pawns as that first primal algae which turned the sky from methane to oxygen.  An algae that destroyed its preeminence by teeming.

As I watch the reorientation of the essence of our planet, I am like a frail old man watching an avalanche.

At least I've had my time. Thirty-seven years is nothing to regret. Ten with the spirits.

J