No Zombies Needed

I had just started reading a blog called Notes from a California Naturalist, which was documenting the strange melting of sea stars on the west coast when she stopped writing.  Her posts were full of pictures and information and pain.

Sea star arms will detach from the body and walk around.  They don’t know they are dead.

What a perfect metaphor for the time we are living in.  We are witnessing a massive die off of the natural world, but the civilization based upon it doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know.  That’s the gobsmack…..that we are walking around a dying planet and few know it’s in terminal condition;  they don’t seem to even notice any decline.  Worse, we seem to be dancing on the grave.

If doomers ever organize themselves, we should use the sea star on our emblem.  It’s proof positive that you can be dead and still walking around, which is what I’ve always suspected of Rex Tillerson and others of his ilk.

Increasingly, whatever the mainstream society deems important is of absolutely no interest to me.  Nothing matters, really, but the physical world, the physical planet and it is crashing.  If you aren’t talking about that, then you aren’t saying anything of real importance, it’s all smoke and mirrors, bread and circuses.

It puts me in mind of the last season of The Wire, the greatest television show EVER.  In season five, David Simon and Ed Burns add into the mix “the media.”   We see reporters miss every big story there is because they are too busy chasing imaginary ones.  This is exactly the world we are living in today.  Exactly.

If extinction….possibility or fact…..isn’t the story of the fucking era……then what is?

Well, you know the answer to that one.