He glared at her.  It had always been like this.  Which was why he hated her.  Without the slightest warning she could plunge him into nameless anxieties.  And the drop of ink spread, dull and gray, clouding everything in his heart that had been pellucid only a moment ago.

Except as I started walking down the sidewalk, I watched a truck veer from its lane, flatten a stop sign, desperately try to slow, momentarily direct itself, and then in spite of all the brakes on that monster, all the accompanying smoke and ear puncturing shrieks, it still barreled straight into me.  Suddenly I understood what it mean to be weightless, flying through the air, no longer ruled by that happy dyad of gravity &

mass until I was, landing on the roof of a parked car, which turned out to be my car, a good fifteen feet away, hearing the thud but not actually feeling it.  I even momentarily blacked out, but came to just in time to watch the truck, still burling towards me until it was actually slamming into me, causing me to think, and you're not going to believe this—"I can't believe this asshole just totaled my fucking car!  Of all the cars on this street and he had to fucking trash mine!" even as all that steel was grinding into me, instantly pulverizing my legs, my pelvis, the metal from the grill wedging forward like kitchen knives, severing me from the waist down.

        People started screaming.

        Though not about me.

        Something to do with the truck.

        It was leaking all over the place.

        Gas.

        It had caught fire.  I was going to burn.

        Except it wasn't gas.

        It was milk.

        Only there was no milk.   There was no gas.  No leak either.  There weren't even any people.  Certainly none who were screaming.  And there sure as hell wasn't any truck.  I was alone.  My street was empty.  A tree fell on me.  So heavy, it took a crane to lift it.  Not even a crane could lift it.  There are no trees on my lock.

        This has got to stop.

        I have to go.

        I did go.

In a white cloak with blood-red lining, with the shuffling gait of a cavalryman, early in the morning of the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan, there came out to the covered colonnade between the two wings of the palace of Herod the Great the procurator of Judea, Pontious Pilate.

Evolution gradually produced ever more intelligent people.  Eventually, people were so smart that they were able to decipher nature's secrets, enabling them to tame sheep and cultivate wheat.  As soon as this happened, they cheerfully abandoned the grueling, dangerous, and often spartan life of hunter-gatherers, settling down to enjoy the pleasant, satiated life of farmers.

        That tale is fantasy.  There is no evidence that people become more intelligent with time…Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers.  Hunter-gatherers spent their time in more stimulating and varied ways, and were less in danger of starvation and disease.  The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure.  Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites.  The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return.   The Agricultural Revolution was history's biggest fraud.

…

If the adoption of plowing increased a village's population from a hundred to 110, which ten people would have volunteered to starve so that the others could go back to the good old times?  There was no going back…

        One of history's few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.

        …

        Humanity's search for an easier life released immense forces of change that transformed the world in ways nobody envisioned or wanted.  Nobody plotted the Agricultural Revolution or sought human dependence on cereal cultivation.  A series of trivial decisions aimed mostly at filling a few more stomachs and gaining a little security had the cumulative effect of forcing ancient forages to spend their days carrying water buckets under a scorching sun.

Who has never killed an hour?  Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes.  The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish.  So you kill the hour.  You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream.  If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep.  And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body.  The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.

One forgets

that one is one

I must try

to

remember this.

Every profound spirit needs a mask.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUBrj0XpmY0

Franny London - September