Titular Stuff Here

It’s a ragged sort of heat. The call of the west again.

Then a discomfiting sort of rain. It’s my first day out of the house in nearly three weeks. Just 2 days ago I was fetal, on the bed, unable to sweat the thoughts away.

I found a litter of puppies feeding in the corner of the living room, and dry shit streaked on the bathroom towel. The Christmas tree is canted and some of the balls have unfurled their string covers revealing the styrofoam balls beneath. I remember the last year they had glass ornaments the piles of colored glass shards spread about the living room and the multiple band aids on my cousin’s feet. Those styrofoam balls must be 25 years old now. But it was the smell that was truly distinctive, a mix of sour broiling turkey mixed with wet dog fur, overfull litter box, and Lysol.

Someone’s cut and paste — forlorn and left out in the desert — cries out for purpose. There is no liability. There is no curse.

I considered the crow a baleful thing; it darkened my day instantly like a light speed sarcoma. My day, my year, my life was shot in that cut and paste. And in that instant I wrote this, and never wrote again.

“Why was it so unthinkable that we ourselves—not necessarily tomorrow or the next day, but eventually—follow the same well-beaten trail toward oblivion as the dodo, the black rhinoceros, the passenger pigeon . . . and all the countless other species whom we ourselves had driven from the face of the earth?”

— Mark O’Connell / Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back