OllieBlog

The city finally decided to quit. One day, it woke up to the stark reality that decades of filth and corruption had corroded away its once rosy and industrially efficient optimism, leaving it with nothing but an insurmountable economic gap (between its teeming masses and those who actually owned the parceled land), and a new baseball park (an oasis of artificial green brought to life with incomprehensibly large banks of high wattage lighting, constructed on acres of land fill: slowly smouldering tire rubber, soiled medical supplies, and all-too-human greed). The city didn't consider its situation to be particularly unique; it felt no more betrayed than any other metropolis you might care to mention, but it could stomach the sordid reality no longer. As the commuter trains slithered and squealed through strip-mall suburbs, they could make out the skyline through thick misty smog, a bar chart of denser monolithic gray forcing its way into the infinite, slightly less carbonized void above, plotting the onslaught of financial district success over human dignity and compassion. Somewhere, up in that dreary expanse, new cities were to be constructed. Some glorious day all corners of the universe would have all the benefits that modern technological urban planning has to offer; public transportation so slewed from published schedules that many drive instead, spurring sport utility and taxi generated gridlock into chafingly new, violently immobile heights; destitution in friction with cancerous gentrification and its inexorable evictions; foundations of toxic waste. Some day all planets, everywhere, would be Chevron Planet, would be Kafka Prozac Strip-Mine Strip-Mall Planet, and no faster-than-light drive could help you escape the intravenously administered advertising campaigns. "Jab it straight into your fucking eyeball," to quote the Prophet. For some, the city felt a compassionate responsibility: for those without 401ks, mutual funds, high tech stocks; a piece of the military-industrial bubble. Others, with their ant behaviours, with their spiritually bankrupt starkly fluorescent-lit cubicled and air conditioned necrotic spires, with their bipartisan small-minded conception of the entirety of existence, with their well appointed subterranean fitness clubs (fluorescent lit, also) - for those people the city could only feel barely fettered nausea and rancor. The occasional misfit would appear among such worthless moneyed masses: someone who hadn't questioned their life path of expensive institutional learning facilities, of Judeo-Christian white collar work days where the mental and moral spirit was wittingly prostituted, of dining out more often than not, of purchasing to fill the void, of global telecommunications, of laissez-faire ethnic cleansing; someone who nevertheless yet had human remnants which viscerally recognized the complicity, the affirmation, the condoning of travesties of such scope, complexity, and surreality, that no human could sanely comprehend. Thousands of years had to pass before larceny transmuted from a slimy grub into the transnational, transgressing, ballistic corporate hive-mind stage, able to transubstantiate slavery into Free Trade Agreements; fingers poised to open hell on earth as National Security brought to you by our sponsors; the unholy power of shrewdly marketed, tele-operated and tele-vised rape, vivisection, and gluttony. Fully immersive surround sound, high resolution, high speed, laser generated, laser deciphered, texture mapped, motion blurred polygonal pornography piped through wireless demon boxes directly into occipital lobes that have witnessed more guttings and guns held to the head than sunrises or newly born near-sighted mewling kittens. Strategic public image planning meetings were being facilitated by professional mid level junior vice presidents who knew how to work hard and, God Damn It, play hard. Tightly packed remote influence devices silently communed with Low Earth Orbit sentinels, negotiating the economic rise and fall of all states. Hulking electronic intelligences monitored the world's communications, recording anything remotely suspicious for later mudslinging. Large screen flat panel displays rendered up-to-the-second charts, tables, and video clips on purchasing power dissected by various demographics; on military troop to-ing and fro-ing; on advertising penetration, baby. Newspaper editorials followed the best of national interests, honored sanctioned history, and fastidiously checked the registration of the four color seasonal sale spreads. Money flowed as chi through the parallel universe of electronic commercial networks, drawing the blood of politics, power and genocidal free trade along behind. Business as usual. Life as we know it, Captain. Rats raced to line up every morning and afternoon for attitude adjusting drug boosts. Fast food drive-throughs dispensed millions of vials of legally harvested and refined mind altering, productivity enhancing, gamete mutating sludge. To pause was not an option. White collar workers everywhere bought high energy fitness bars to assist their corporate climb. Sedentary data serfs consumed new age herbal infusions. The end of the millennium was nigh, when embedded systems would (hopefully!) lose their collective minds, leaving modernized military machines floundering, when plague would ignore over-prescribed antibiotic treatments and decimate first world populations, when neighbouring south asian nations would meet warhead to warhead: when the shit would hit the fan. Throughout all this, the huddled masses maintained a generally sanguine attitude. While many hoped for the best from humanity, it seemed treachery, deceit and ruthless natures were expected, and rewarded. Only a handful questioned the fundamentals of the rampant disease doctored up and labeled 'society': work under duress, fervent reverence for sports shoe manufacturers and nuclear individualism. The cream of the crop quietly constructed multilateral agreements on investment to dogmatize their god-given right to profit, never mind those pesky human rights. Even supposedly educated people were either resigned to or, with demerol dharma, found: adolescent shooting sprees, rampant genetic deformation, popular sit-coms, hydro-electric dams, and crumbling ice caps quite reasonable. The important questions appeared only as advertising tag lines, or were answered with the thump of a xenophobic religious text. Nothing could reclaim the lost seconds, decades, opportunities or meaning. Day's End constituted another one survived; not shared, not explored, not experienced, not lived. True wealth lie buried, obscured, marginalized, maligned, bereft of significant market share and catchy jingles. Accounting software had fields solely for that which was green and Trusted in God. In sort, lives no longer of true worth.