Between storms

It's been a weird summer so far. I was waiting for it with a stark anticipation only to completely miss its coming. I ignored the solstice, despite it being one of the more important times of the year for me. Or at least, I like to think that it's important. And somehow the weeks flew by, it's the beginning of July now. I'm sitting in the kitchen waiting for the coffee to brew. Cool air with a hint of ozone streams through the open window. The sky is a deep gray, not quite over the last thunderstorm that rolled through an hour ago when already another one is coming. I finished replying to an email. Personal one for a change.

It's so much easier when you don't categorize, label, compartmentalize people. And yet, at the same time it's so hard not to do just that. It's probably hardwired into the reptile brain. Fried-or-foe, fight-or-flight. Only the theater changes. Start off with meat & mate, but at the end of the road, it's the mind. Fucking monkeys in suits.
I'm reading these press headlines on news sites and my facebook feed: Yoga is the devil's tool let's make a fucking protest, err sorry warn those poor lost souls; high ranking physician refuses to abort a child which will die in a couple of weeks anyway, just because his religious fanatics' conscience won't permit it; rednecks in the U.S. outfit their cars with smoke emitting thingamajigs and "fuck Prius" bumper stickers, 'cause “a truck is more than a car, it's a way of life”. All of this in the span of two weeks. Everyone is spying on everyone else. And little gems like the one about a 3D printer which can turn used PVC bottles into filament and print things like anatomically fitted casts for broken limbs, this stuff just gets blotted out in this flood of human stupidity. A fine print byline adrift in the news sewage system.

Back at the turn of the millennium apocalypse/post-apocalypse movies where the shit. Hell, earlier even, all the cyberpunk stuff and sci-fi before that. None of the Star-Trek socialism constant growth live long and prosper baby boomer bullshit. Good old end of days stuff. If I had to pick the scariest of the lot, I'd pick Wall-E. Not because of the barren Earth landscape, the dilapidated, crumbling skyscrapers. All these dying vestiges of a world long gone. No. The way humanity is portrayed in this movie scares the living shit out of me. Brainless blobs of fat glued to anti-grav chairs, constantly bombarded by multimedia distraction. See any resemblance?

Maybe that's exactly what we need here, a deluge, another dark age, a plague to wipe the slate clean? Nature's reset button? Her way of saying – stop acting like some damn virus, get your shit together, this is not the reason why you crawled out of the primordial soup in the first place.

After all, a renaissance has to come from something.

Looks like I went off on a tangent, digressed from my digression, as it were.

It started raining again, I'm almost out of coffee and I think I wanted to write something about the Summer. I'll have a cigarette, finish the cup-o-joe and enjoy the rain.