“Nobody gives a shit what you want, ya big fuckin’ pussy.”
–Traditional
I have wanted so very badly to be the one who finally opens your eyes to the truth of yourself and the world we share.
I use the word ‘badly’ there in the layered and poetical sense, because although there is some charity in my Wanting to awaken you, my Desire is of course for the most part badly–or more accurately selfishly–motivated. I feel better about myself when I can credibly play the sage, and so I attempt to play it, over and over, to decidedly mixed reviews.
Quasi-altruistic bestowing of blessings of this sort will be a recurring theme as we proceed.
***
(It was a long drive and I thought well and hard. This may well end up becoming a long piece or pieces. But I worked out the beginning of it almost word for word in the silence, and I wanted to post that much of it intact, in a timely way.
To be continued.)
***
The truth of you is that there is a giant hole in the middle of your being; a Void.
The truth of this world, especially this overdeveloped allied angloMurican First World part of it, is that the same Hole abides in the virtual solar plexus of every single one of us, right down to notable sages like me.
I’m not going, yet, to go too deeply into how the personalized but ubiquitous holes got there. Take them as a theoretical given if it helps, and if you have any interest at all in maybe picking up what I’m laying down.
Instead of yet another Genesis tale, about spiritual Holes this time for Christ’s fucking sake, I just want to share a story I heard the other day, about some mountain lions from Southern California.
For attribution’s sake, this is the story I was listening to, even though the mountain lion part doesn’t appear in the truncated version I have linked. That part appears as warmed-over Goldfarb as read by Vairtere. OK, enough.
***
“So what happened in the Santa Monica mountains, essentially, is that when that freeway went through, it cleaved the mountain range in half, and it isolated so much of the wildlife south of the freeway, especially mountain lions. See; there’s this little population of mountain lions that lives west of Los Angeles, a very urban area, of course. You know, these animals are living very close to the largest city in the country, kind of amazingly. But, you know, they’ve been totally cut off from other mountain lions by this freeway. They’re essentially in this little island of habitat, and that’s been disastrous for them”.
Keep in mind that Mr. Goldfarb’s book focuses very narrowly on the effects of roads on wildlife. He’s using this cougar population as a dramatic example, one among many.
The disaster of this one freeway, for these few lions, went like this. Suddenly the western cats lived on an island. Well, sure, habitat destruction and all that, but … so what? More room for exploding human populations, a little less room for some cats. Meh?
With the band isolated, there was no more way to inject fresh diverse blood from other bands into the gene pool.
When the young male cats started to get the itch to breed, they had nowhere to roam to in search of foreign pussy.
That led to their fathers killing them as competition.
The fathers then continued to breed, but with the only available females on the island. Their own daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters.
Inbreeding, and a deteriorating local gene base. Increasingly mal-adaptive mutations leading the population into what Goldfarb calls an “extinction vortex, this long-term doom spiral”.
One freeway. Just another road among hundreds of thousands. One isolated problem among many, for one specific tribe of charismatic megafauna close by a major metro that hungers for this kind of drama–so we know about it. We feel for them, just like good NPR listeners are supposed to, just like we should.
There are many more problems with how we live, and that we live, than there are roads. All the roads, taken together and in and of themselves, are a minor factor in our own inevitable long-term doom spiral.
The way we eat and the way it is farmed: the sardines of Portugal in little tins, the coffee of Sumatra shipped green by the ton to our eventual cups, the Monsanto fields our genetically modified corn grows in; Nutella, Hydrox, Doritos, Spam, and grass-finished free range sustainably harvested loin of beef.
How we warm ourselves, or cool ourselves, according to the season.
Where we jet off to on our doubtlessly hard-earned international vacations, and the true cost of how we get there.
Our wars. The US military is the single largest emitter of the gases that are permanently changing the climate.
Our jobs.
Our increasingly autistic and transgendered children pumped full of Adderall and testosterone blockers to just keep them marginally on the right side of sane, and the 50+% of adults who are also on head meds, for depression and anxiety and the blue shaking horrors of their corporate Empire.
The way we habitually do everything we do, the System we fly our flags for, is not just killing cute sea turtles and darling polar bears and some mangy cougars in their LA ghetto–not just faceless dark-complected babies by the half-million in Iraq.
It’s killing us, baby.
You don’t even have to believe in climate change to know it in your bones, that everything that everyone in the Big Club does, and most of what you and I do too, is slowly driving insane and murdering everything and everyone we ever loved.
Our very selves included.
The way we live rips a big hole right out of the middle of us.
You’re not allowed to talk about it in polite company but you know it’s there, hidden beneath your ragged t-shirt or your lovely designer blouse.
What do you do, with such a hole?
You try to fill it.
With … something.
Next time we’ll talk about hole fillings.