Future Tents

             I was born in a hospital, and in that moment, that room and that building and that city had always existed. However, based on our forever as we understand it, that hospital was built and will be destroyed. We will certainly make the best of it while it lasts, maybe make renovations and additions as medicine changes and population grows, find new meaning, live and die.

We will be nomadic, when the Earth is burned and fucked beyond use and recognition. It won’t be weird or uncomfortable, at least any more than what we’re at now. It will be like the old days, the ones that you have to go somewhere else to remember. The ones that no one’s really sure even really happened because it’s been so long.

            We won’t live anywhere or when we can’t, the places that would need homes and regular air conditioning. We will have means and measures of adaptation, cultivation, a reason to be whom we are where we are and no more than that. We may not be able to fathom living on Antarctica, or underwater, or in space, but with a transient spirit we will see what we see.

We could all continue to live in cars if gas wasn’t dwindling. We’d all look pretty silly sitting around in wheeled structures that no longer operate, overgrown and rusted at the bottom.

We can make dwellings faster and cheaper now than we used to, we’re better at it. But the beauty of old buildings is inevitably lost, like the smell of an old book, though we’re tempted to develop facsimiles of tradition. There is a tiny old man who mumbles to himself as he passes out front that we got it all wrong and wonders what the world’s coming to.

             It’s up to us to exploit what we understand before it passes away, before we get old and ugly, when there’s no difference between whether I eat or not. I need to do something, to take care of myself. Everything happens for a reason and I can’t predict why I’ll come back to this body and page. That’s what it takes to read something. The same eyes and thoughts and posture and page. We don’t have to agree. We don’t have to do anything. 

When the sun comes out and I melt so slowly, I will not be broken. I will find a voice to argue with, to distract us from these politics and this warfare and strife and hunger and illness and suffering. I want to be put away so I may make my solid gold album in peace. But life is what happens while you’re waiting for life to happen. I miss my future, my family and my failure. I have all that I need and I don’t know who I am.  Almost one day old.

            We are champions of light, tourists of the underworld. The only thing we have in common.