Cracking Rocks

Chris Spangenberg

Yawning Saturday came slow that week, like all preceding Saturdays and all oncoming Saturdays, typical burning wreckage in the fast lane of the suburbs. Fresh air over into lunacy, each moment driven near to desperation... And they haven't even seen the daily papers yet, picked up their lifeless phones, nor stepped out of bed with the wrong foot. But there is something terrible afoot, erstwhile conversations halt to a grind-house when the body detects the undercurrent. Flushing skin and bristling chicken hairs, lead in to rapid breathing and cue speeding heart rate, zooming down the M1 for a pack of milk and a carton of eggs. It must be oil. Only the black smear curdling in the gas tank can tear hair out, form cartels, rape oceans, and drop the dollar faster than a ton of lard. Or it's the rising influx of immigrant workers from the South, or from the East; hell, they might even be coming from outer space! Some point with hat in hand to the economy, that slump hiding under the rug, leaving no hump at all. Pressure points tethered to a cobweb of possibilities, all bad. But how strange, these ideas! Like Soylent Green without people. How so very strange indeed...

Fossils belong in museums; not in privatized gas tanks where they are grilled mercilessly and pooped through the exhaust; not in drums of steel where they gather dust; not in sentimental value jet fighters taking off to bomb the next Baghdad; not in toxic plastics which choke little children; and most certainly not in the Enola Gay that dropped the bomb. All of the above most notably, but the war machine must be fed. Its stomach roars like Jim Cramer without crack, and we are more than content to feed it. Though it looked like nukes have been in for a while now, coming up shortly to North Korea and the flat stares of Middle Eastern ambassadors shaking hands with political America. Beside the point, it has been posed that we must look for more sustainable sources of wanderlust and bloodlust and power. Sustainability, in the sense that we must sustain our Western habit of bleeding the planet dry, whilst hounding everyone else in the third world not to act the same we act so as not to disturb the delicate ecosystem of political power. Real Promethean dastardliness, the kind of bastards we'd hang out to dry... usually. But this is old news, revisited merely for the purpose of re-visitation. The only true point was that dirty pots and pans in the kitchen will still be there the following day, thus, something must be done.

That is why I propose... We need midnight oil to fuel the new world... No aerospace cubs whizzing like bees and bombing poor faceless empire ants. People have come from all over the First World to get their share and they won't leave without it. It is the most vital commodity out there this moment, right now, that one second a second ago. And that commodity is time, that of which everybody thinks they already have, like pre-purchased tickets to the show. For in this exciting age; with plenty of entertainment, ways to kill the time, and plenty information to lose your mind to, there is simply no time to do everything. No time at all; yet the presumption of an existing correlation between money and time, or time and fuel to sustain, are wrong. It is only the flashbulb condition of the world or person that is altered, not sustainability. The correlation is made in the mind, and the mind is false. We first need to differ our perimeters and physiological understanding of time, and until we have time, only then can we worry about fossil fuels and funhouses. People think they have all the time in the world. They're wrong. They only have a moment, and that moment is already over.