Surreal Dystopia Pt 2 - Chapters 7-12

Chapter 7 - Disengagement
Meanwhile Paul’s brother Phil is waking through downtown on a religio-spiritual pilgrimage to be fully present in the act of living.
He’s been embroiled in the observation of society’s existential crisis. As a former philosophy major he was all too aware of the trend society was taking. It mirrored the life of the thoughtful individual, who spends their lives surrounded by meaningless nonsense until the mind rejects it.
Eventually the soul refuses to accept any more nonsensical input from the delusional world around it and enters a phase of nihilism, leading to an existential crisis. If nothing in your life means anything, what’s the point of living?
The way out of an existential crisis is to realize that the only answer that ever mattered is, the individual must decide for themselves what the point of their own lives will be. Everything else is just a distraction.
Then the meaninglessness of the world around you becomes background noise while your life is the greatest song you will ever write, play, sing or dance to.
Society seems to be stuck in the phase of, “who am I and why do I even bother existing?” A tricky phase to get out of for an individual. He wondered how long it should take a whole social structure to find its way out.
He passes by person after person lost in their heads. No one’s willing to pay attention to what’s happening around them, it hurts too much. They’re all desperately attempting to disengage from reality by looking at their phones, listening to music or having imaginary conversations in their head.
No one looks each other in the eye anymore.
Phil smiles at a kind-looking woman he passes on the sidewalk. She quickly looks away, lest she be mistaken for flirting. People in cities like this never smile at each other for any reason other than to indicate sexual interest. Thus, a friendly smile is taken as an advance, and the other person will only return it if they’re not afraid of attracting further attention.
He smiles as well at a man he passes, who stares at him with a confused look, wondering why a total stranger would possibly be smiling at him. This man hasn’t been smiled at for over 6 months.
A woman walks out of a building laughing at something with a beautiful smile on her face and when they meet eyes he can’t help returning it, it’s just a natural reflex for him. She immediately frowns and as her boyfriend follows her out the door, she deliberately gives him twice as much room as needed, intentionally stepping in front of Phil to remind him that she cares infinitely more about being polite to her boyfriend than she does about Phil’s right to use the sidewalk.
He laughs quietly and turns into a small parking lot wedged between two buildings.
He walks very slowly, attempting to take in every single detail of the world around him. All the most beautiful parts are the things you pass by every day without ever noticing until you slow down and look.
A vine sprouted out of a crack in a parking lot 10 years ago, and is now covering a building. Testament to the indelible ability of nature to survive even the most challenging environmental changes.
He passes under a billboard suggesting that people get the latest covid vaccine.
Viral contagions tend to bounce back and forth, they go away and then the next generation comes back. But with plagues of this nature, each successive wave is typically less intense than the last and over time they dissipate into things that no longer merit the amount of fear once held.
The trick is remembering to set aside the fear once it’s no longer needed.
The social construct of fear contagion prefers to build on itself, and loathes the suggestion that the fear it’s already decided to cling to no longer serves any purpose.
Meanwhile the pharmaceutical industry’s latest profit increase has to be maintained in order for the CEO’s meagre billions to continue growing at the same rate. People in these positions tend to forget that losing money and gaining less of it are not the same thing.
It’s a similar principle to the refusal to release fear once it no longer serves a purpose. There’s always some reason we feel compelled to build up more and more of something, and so rarely do we find a reason to stop hoarding and release our unnecessary baggage.
This is the reason society finds itself in a nihilistic existential crisis. It’s spent centuries hoarding all the meaningless nonsense it could, forgetting to let go of it once the former purpose has passed on.
This particular billboard says, “covid loves a crowd.” The media has seemed desperate to keep people from grouping together in the past few years. Conversations, crowds, thoughts and feelings are all dangerous to an empire that depends on fear to maintain its status. Thus, they discourage people from getting into groups by claiming their newest enemy loves groups.
This is essentially the same thing as the demonization of other cultures, who we’re intended to see as enemies in order to validate our right to take what we want without letting them keep what they need.
‘Now the enemy is covid,’ he thought, ‘it used to be Muslims, then Russians, then Germans.’ He could trace the list of supposed enemies back for quite a long time, all the way back to the original enemies, the people who were just trying to live their lives without being required to conform to what someone else told them to do for reasons that evaded all notion of realism.
He’s reminded of the lyrics, “you never stole from the rich to give to the poor. All you ever gave to them was a war and a foreign enemy to deplore.”
The real enemy was always fear. But we were tricked into believing that was the only way to survive so we started clinging to it instead of letting it go.
We’ve been fighting this spiritual war for millennia and now is the time to wake up and realize the Truth was always inside you.
The Light was always inside you.
Phil smiles at a woman pulling luggage out of her trunk. She assumes he’s staring at her butt and gives him a dirty look. Because looking silently at someone’s butt from 30 feet away is rude. He shrugs and keeps walking.
The wide range of reactions he gets when he smiles at people is a never-ending journey of bizarre emotional traumas being displayed to others in order to hide it from the self.
In cities like this, people are typically seen as either an enemy or someone to have sex with. Very little is between those two. Women tend to blame men for this, yet they still indulge the exact same reasoning.
That’s why smiling at them is taken as offensive, they’ll smile right back when they’re interested but the pervasive assumption that this is the only reason tends to lead to a lot of inappropriate responses when they smile at men. So they prefer to glare. It’s safer than risking a social engagement.
‘Engagement,’ his ADHD brain fixates on that word. After repeating it 10 times over the next several seconds he wonders what it originally meant. Surely it wasn’t always such a point of contention.
A truck parked nearby has a sign that reads, “Iron Apple: Food Safety Certified.” The truck is covered in rust and graffiti. While he knows that doesn’t relate to the food within, it seems to mirror the not-so-great ingredients that are almost certainly inside the ‘certified safe food.’
When we talk about the growth of knowledge we call the iron age, we typically discuss the wars and the development of what we now consider to be civilization. We rarely see it as an opportunity to improve the world in truly meaningful ways. Back then there was so much growth, so many chances to learn. Instead, the social structures redesigned to include war as a means for integration, rather than peace.
Engagement can mean several things but essentially they boil down to a coming together for either conflict or resolution. These days people usually choose conflict, while wishing they could resolve their problems. This confusion goes back a very long way.
Phil smokes a joint in the alley. He watches the trees, the ivy, the grass.
So rarely do people take a moment to appreciate the true beauty of the life they pass by every day. We feel this subconscious urge to be surrounded by green, brown, red, other healthy foresty colors, yet we so desperately try to distract ourselves from them that we almost never truly notice how wonderful they are, these living beings we can’t stop trying to distance ourselves from.
Phil, and many others like him, have started taking every possible chance to connect with other lifeforms instead of running from them. He wants to find ways that we can all co-exist in healthy, mature ways that allow mutual prosperity. And it all starts with taking a moment to appreciate them.
There are almost 100 cigarette butts around the base of a small tree nearby, they’re all the same brand. Every day someone comes out for a smoke break, sits under the same tree to relax, and leaves their butts sitting there. They’ve never once noticed that being under the tree is more relaxing than smoking. They leave the butts there when they’re done, then cycle through yet again, every day.
It’s incredibly lazy to just make the world tiny bits worse, one step at a time, over and over, and tell yourself it doesn’t make a difference.
All it ever takes to improve the world is deciding, in one brief moment, that we want things to be better instead of worse.
Phil notices that a vine is trying to reach over to the tree, to wrap around it so they can continue growing together, wrapped in a loving embrace. He shifts a branch gently so the vine can rest on it.
He takes another moment to pick up a handful of cigarette butts and throw them away. The woman who glared at him by her car sees this and wonders why he’d do something so disgusting. The tree is grateful that it won’t have as much poison in the contaminated soil its roots are trying to grow through.
All it takes to make a difference is one moment of deciding we’d rather make things better than worse.
Phil moves on.
It’s all the tiny details of this space that make it beautiful. We want to appreciate it but we’re so engrossed in the fear of reality that we’d rather try to escape from it, so we never let ourselves really appreciate the subtle delicacy of the vine growing across a brick wall, its courage as it conquers a world that seems so intimidating and yet has so very little power over those who are willing to grow beyond it.
He smiles at a woman passing by.
Jill rolls her eyes. “Ugh, what? You like my breasts or something?”
Phil smirks, glancing downward briefly. “Yes but I was just being friendly, there’s no need to be so rude.”
Jill is having another atrocious day. “Look dude I’m not interested in whatever sick depravity you’re about to ask me for.” The last guy she spoke to asked her if she’s single.
Phil couldn’t care less. “Have you ever taken a walk just to be present with reality? It’s really not so bad if you take your time and settle in.”
Jill walks onward, not listening to whatever crazy nonsense the latest lunatic thinks is worth her time. Phil glances briefly at her hips swaying as she walks, then turns around and walks the other way.
Jill didn’t have time to be present in that moment, she had other moments to rush off to. She wouldn’t be present for those either, because she’d have other moments on her mind then, as well.
She lived in a constant state of trying to prepare for the next moment, which would surely be as bad as possibly imaginable, and never being present in the fact that most moments simply weren’t that bad.
She never once considered that the worse moments could have been easily avoided if she’d been present in those that led up to them.
She was in a hurry to make it to the meeting she was expected in. Her outburst at her co-worker yesterday resulted in a formal complaint, and now the department thought she was abusing Bill.
Had she been present with her own feelings in the moment she screamed at Bill, she would have noticed her frustration had absolutely nothing to do with him. She was angry because of a large number of aggravating instances leading up to that one. Some of those were inevitable. Most of them were easily avoidable.
She passed by trees and birds without a care in the world. The car turning in front of her was an agitating obstacle as she had to slow down for a whole second to accommodate the driver’s selfishness.
She’s not normally as furious as she had been for the past few days. She’s actually a very sweet person, just doing her best to get by. Everyone was testing her, the whole world seemed like a huge network of problems that just couldn’t help butting themselves in her face and she was sick of it.
A woman coming out from a parking lot wedged between buildings carries a piece of luggage trailing behind her. They both look at each other from a point of contention and they haggle with how much space to leave each other instead of just being polite and sharing the sidewalk.
That other woman is also quite kind inside but after being cheated on by her husband she’s decided all other humans are a waste of time, and that the only way to get by is to take care of herself at everyone else’s expense.
It’s a common defence mechanism in city life, everyone feels so isolated and alone, so very helpless that they’re required to tend their own needs. No one else can be trusted.
The truth of the matter is, everyone has been taught the opposite of emotionally healthy self care. No one has the ability or interest to help others because they haven’t learned to help themselves, and they’re unspeakably drained by the day-in-day-out struggle to pretend their emotional needs aren’t in serious distress.
As Jill crosses the street she’s thinking about what Phil said. She slows down just a tad and takes a look at the faces of the people going the other direction.
They’re all walking without looking forward. Every one of them tries to pretend there’s no one else around, just hoping to keep barely enough open space to continue moving wherever they’re going, and that they won’t have to face the inconvenience of acknowledging the presence of other people.
A young man looks her in the eye and they both stare blankly, trying to not display any emotional response as they pass. Neither is willing to admit to themselves they’re both sobbing inside. They both wonder what the other is thinking. They say nothing and pass by without a second thought.
They both disengaged from the moment and kept going about their daily struggles.


Chapter 8 - Radically Illegal Life
As Phil carries on his pilgrimage through Life he eventually comes across a small grove where benches have been provided for residents of the nearby apartment complex to sit in the quiet as cars drive past revving engines and honking their horns obnoxiously in the downtown traffic.
He sits on the benches and watches people passing by, wondering what their stories were. These faces, the experiences behind their expressions. What hard-earned victories had they achieved? What suffering was inflicted unfairly on them?
As he watches the people coming in and out of the cafe across the street, he notices they go in looking perky in anticipation of their latest fix, and come out looking vacant. The smell of the caffeine addiction being delivered was intoxicating enough without actually drinking it.
Ever since he started using half salt to decalcify his pineal gland, his caffeine addiction has become unbearable and he can no longer help noticing the way everyone just assumes coffee will help and never notices it’s making them feel worse.
People tend to equate the feeling of alpha waves with being tired. In meditative circles, many people practice quite a long time to produce alpha waves, which are supposed to be very easy to produce for a healthy brain. The constant shrinking of our pineal glands with regular caffeine intake causes a suppression of these waves which are not only very healthy but a basic necessity.
In fact, experiencing alpha waves is a very pleasant feeling which is not the same as being tired and in no way interferes with your ability to function, but we’ve all been taught to see this feeling as being impaired in some way, so we dull it by suppressing the gland producing them.
The pineal gland is the centre of spiritual awareness called the third eye chakra, an opening capable to piercing through the veil and witnessing reality as it is. It naturally produces DMT.
By suppressing the entire population’s spiritual awareness they are kept in a state of fighting against themselves, never knowing why they’re so unhappy with their lives and they continue paying for an addictive intoxicant that worsens their condition and stops them from seeing the underlying causes.
Phil sighs and looks around at the rose bushes surrounding him. There are thousands of seeds ready to be planted, but no one has any interest in the plants once the flower petals fall.
On a spur of the moment decision, he begins filling a bag with them, harvesting hundreds of seed pouches. He can’t say what he’ll do with them but somewhere inside he feels it’s very important.

Meanwhile, Jill was at the meeting with Bill and the department head, a man named Leslie.
“How can you say I was sexually harassing you?” Jill was trying not to scream but, “this is too ridiculous!”
Bill very calmly explained. “You clearly made a comment about my genitals and mental capacity. If a man does this to a woman he’s sexually harassing her, where’s the equality in that?”
Jill rolled her eyes. “Oh, for... Look, it was just a joke.”
Leslie, who had overseen many sexual harassment complaints over superficially similar issues, was not impressed by that excuse. Bill had a point, when the gender roles are reversed in this circumstance it’s typically a fireable offence. “It may have been a joke but it was highly inappropriate for an academic setting.”
Bill repeated, “you commented about my genitals, that’s sexual harassment.”
Jill glared daggers at him. “You’re only doing this because I interrupted you in the middle of mansplaining your stupid research.”
Leslie interrupted, “this is not acceptable behaviour, Jill. Please calm down and let’s just talk this through, ok, because you’re on thin ice right now.”
Jill takes a deep breath and settles for a moment. Bill says something but she doesn’t hear it. She suddenly tunes in and realizes she needs to be present here, it’s too important to risk ruining things.
She looks at Bill and tries to listen to what he’s saying but she can’t seem to focus into the words. There’s something wrong with this experience but she can’t figure out what it is.
Leslie says something to her and she nods quietly, pretending to know what she’s agreeing to.
Her knee hurts, her mouth is dry. She’s craving chocolate. This entire proceeding is absurd and somewhere deep down she doesn’t even want to be a part of any of it. She wants to call Bill a whiny man baby but all she does is glare while wondering what she’s doing here.
It feels strange somehow, the fact that’s she’s so present in her body, absorbing the moment, and yet so completely detached from the conversation. She hasn’t heard a word since she stepped into presence, can she really be present in the moment if she’s so far from the conversation?
Her guts shift as they process her breakfast. She can hear music playing outside the door. Still not a word of whatever Bill is talking about.
She shook her head and snapped out of it. Leslie was saying, “what are we going to do about this, Jill?”
She took a second to think about her response. “I don’t really know what there is to address. It was a rude comment that went too far but what am I supposed to say about it now? I won’t do it again.”
Leslie shifted uncomfortably, not sure how to feel about accusing a woman of sexually harassing a man.
Jill gave Bill a compassionate look. “I acknowledge I shouldn’t’ve been so rude to you, it seems like your symposium has a lot to offer the world but -”
Bill interrupted, “that’s not the point, Jill, we all know I’m going to crush it but I’m concerned that I can’t work next to you anymore without feeling unsafe.”
Jill’s anger boils up again. “Why are you doing this? It’s ridiculous that you can’t even work across the hall from me just because I said you have correctile dysfunction!” Leslie looked extremely uncomfortable. Jill continued, “Look, it was a rude comment and I shouldn’t have said it but it’s not that big of a deal.”
Leslie saw where this was going. “I’m sorry Jill but if you won’t cooperate with this then I’m afraid I’ll have to let you go.”
Jill is stunned. Is this really happening? “You can’t be serious! What about my research?” she’s about to go on but someone inside her doesn’t really feel like it’s worth arguing about. Was this project ever worth her time in the first place?
She straightens up, adjusts her skirt and looks Leslie in the eye. “Alright then, I’ll get my stuff together.”
As she turns and walks out of the room she glares at Bill one last time. He has a confounded look on his face. He can’t believe how un-PC she’s being about all this.
As she walks past the receptionist’s desk, the song ends and a radio host says, “well, today a liberal Member of Parliament said they’re reexamining the housing crisis.”
The receptionist says to herself, “of course you are but ya ain’t gonna do anything, are ya?” Liberals love to pretend they’re concerned about these kinds of things but when it comes right down to it, they’ll use the same excuses conservatives do to avoid having to dip into their budget to solve the problems facing society.

After a short walk from the rose bushes, Phil arrives at an old battleground, a national heritage site which is fenced off to prevent people from entering, lest its pristine condition be soiled by the presence of living beings.
It’s a pretty dingy area, not exactly the chic part of downtown just a few blocks away. This is one of those places joggers pass by as quickly as they can, hoping junkies don’t ask them for change.
There’s a path that circles around behind the battlefield, under a bridge that crosses a railroad. It looks like a good place to get mugged. He lights a cigarette to show that he’s cool and walks down the path with a little nonchalant swagger.
He starts throwing the rose seeds into the bushes. This place is so bleak and depressing, it could use some colourful flowers to lighten things up a bit. Junkies and hobos deserve pretty stuff too.
November is a perfect time to seed plants in the wild, they’ll get covered by leaves as winter sets in, and in springtime they’ll be ready to grow.
As he circles the site he comes across a plot of bushes on the other side of the fence and throws handfuls of seeds into it. It occurs to him he’s technically vandalizing government property.
Eco-vandalism.
Governments don’t want life growing on their property unless they want it. They will often pay their workers to uproot any plant they haven’t specifically paid to plant there.
Be you plant, animal or other, you must attain government authorization to be alive.
Planting pretty flowers around this old national heritage site would probably lead to a hefty fine if the cops were around. Headstrong rebels come in many forms.
He gets to the next corner, a path along a small, overgrown railway, wedged between the battlefield and the newer, much larger railroad.
There’s a small encampment of homeless people living in tents. They’re having a fire and trying to live as peacefully as they can in a world that doesn’t want to be reminded of their needs.
For people with nowhere to live, keeping themselves warm in this allegedly dangerous way while trespassing on unused government property is highly illegal. Then there’s the fact that they’re intoxicated to mask the pain of being outcast for literally no reason by a society that will make you prove you deserve to breathe.
Phil doesn’t really care what they’re doing or why, he’s got no concerns about the supposed danger of approaching these destitute humans. He’s just planting seeds.
Tax money is supposed to be going toward the solutions to these issues. The entire point of having a government is to resolve the issues facing the populace. Governments these days don’t really see themselves as having any responsibility for their people, they’re just playing the same tired old game as they have for generations.
If the police knew these people were here, they’d be driven out. That’s what the government was willing to pay for. That’s what Phil’s taxes are going toward. Not toward solving the problem, just pushing people out so they can’t be seen in their obnoxious and highly offensive shelterlessness.
Phil feels intense sympathy for these people, a wave of tears wells up in his chest as he passes by, wishing there was something he could do to help them. He tries to hide the tears, lest he be seen as weak by his fellow men.
One of them looks at him curiously, wondering if he’s some kinda narc. Phil smiles awkwardly and mumbles, “have a good day, man,” and wonders what could possibly make him think that’s an appropriate thing to say to someone in this situation. But there’s nothing else to say.
Nothing he can do or say would change things for these men, and it kills him to watch.
He lights up a joint to dull the pain of watching his fellow men suffer this way.
Society is built around forcing people to prove they deserve to eat and have a home. You have to contribute something worth X amount of theoretical value to the current social paradigm, and if what you’re capable of contributing isn’t worth enough to be able to afford rent, then apparently you don’t deserve to have a place to live.
If you can’t ‘earn’ enough to eat, then you don’t deserve to eat.
That’s the way it is these days.
So few people actually care about those who find themselves in these challenging situations. An overhyped virus throws the economy out of whack, thousands lose their jobs and homes, and are forced to live on the streets, and no one is willing to do anything about it whatsoever. ‘It’s not my fault you can’t afford to survive, why don’t you get a job?’
The government consistently refuses to address these problems. They claim that fixing the economy, and providing shelter to those who can’t afford their own after a market crash, is harmful to the economy. They say that people who expect solutions to problems don’t understand how things work.
They bicker endlessly about the proper way to address the issues their society faces, then they go back to their lives and pretend there’s not a problem. It’s bad for their ratings, and much worse for their budgets, to actually care about these things.
The worst puppet show ever is the one we’re all living right now.
This issue doesn’t stop with the government. Phil has seen thousands of day-to-day people try their very hardest to pretend these human beings aren’t their problem.
Women wouldn’t approach these people, being afraid of being raped by the presumably dangerous humans who are just scratching out a living in a city that couldn’t care less. Even most men would be too intimidated to walk past.
Phil knows for a fact there’s no danger here. These people are just trying to survive, to stay warm as November withers in preparation for the solstice.
Most people like to pretend the homeless are dangerously insane and probably didn’t handle their emotional traumas and mental illness well enough to conform to the absurd requirements of society. They’re a dangerous and undesirable presence. It helps people feel better about the fact that they’re not willing to do anything to help.
It’s so much easier to look the other way when you convince yourself they’re a threat to you, or that they somehow deserve what they’re experiencing.
It’s easier than opening your heart to their suffering.
It’s a shit load easier than trying to force the government to do something about it.

Jill arrived at her favourite qi gong studio. Her teacher Chad spends most of his time flowing around the room, just feeling the energy circulate.
She didn’t even go back to her office after the meeting, she walked straight out of the building and came here to relax. She used these things as a way of avoiding mentally stressful situations. It was a convenient escapism that didn’t involve intoxication and helped promote spiritual health, while still not forcing her to confront the emotional distortions she was attempting to hide from herself.
As the door closed, a couple walked past discussing a recently publicized criminal charge against a billionaire who supposedly raped a woman over 30 years ago.
She sat down, suddenly enrapt in the image of this poor woman, being afraid to come forward for decades, until the man had enough money to buy her a house and suddenly decided it was worth pursuing.
Chad smiled at her gently. He had once dated a woman who accused him of raping someone 10 years before he met the woman, who had never met the girl she accused him of raping.
He and many other men have been told to repress their sexuality for the comfort of emotionally insecure women. Now emotionally castrated, he saw women as genital-less androgynes and had not expressed sexual desire in several years.
He danced his way closer to her. She wondered if he was gong to flirt with her. Sometimes she felt that he had some weird, creepy crush on the women who came to his studio. But she knew he was a nice man and she respected him, after all he’d helped her learn basic self-defence moves in case she was ever sexually assaulted.
“You’re here early,” he said, “shouldn’t you be at work?”
She scowled at him. “I got fired for sexual harassment.”
Chad was appalled. “That’s terrible, I’m so sorry to hear that.”
She suddenly realized she no longer had any way to pay rent. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I can’t believe men think they can just get away with whatever they want.”
Chad nodded sadly. “I know what you mean, men these days can be really cold-hearted.” He believed that men who behaved badly to women were really reptilian extra-terrestrials from the constellation Draco.
Conspiracy theorists and new-age spiritualists alike believe that modern western culture has been heavily influenced by a collection of extra-terrestrial races with advanced technology, and are quick to blame the misbehaviour of an emotionally traumatized society on interference from everyone’s favourite interstellar boogeymen.
Supposing these reptiles are real, how bad could they possibly be? What do they think while watching how we behave on a day-to-day basis?
Jill looked up at Chad with a sense of hopelessness, discretely eyeing the sizeable bulge he seemed so eager to brag about all the time and shamelessly waved in her face every time she sat down.
He sat next to her and put a hand on her shoulder comfortingly. She assumed he was going to flirt with her.
He said, “A long time ago someone told me that when things fall apart it’s because we’ve subconsciously created situations that destroy aspects of our lives we don’t like. And because we’re not emotionally stable enough to process what we really want, our hidden psyche sabotages our lives to keep us safe from the things we pursue that we don’t actually want.”
She had no idea what he meant by that. “Do you believe in destiny?”
He laughed. “Destiny is something we blame when things don’t work out the way we wanted, while letting it take credit for our successes. It’s a mental cage we build around ourselves to protect us from responsibility for our actions.”
He scrutinizes him, trying to tell if he’s lying or joking, or if he actually believes that. “I just feel like things lately have been taking a really weird turn, like everything is spiralling out of control and forcing me into a situation I don’t know if I’m ready for.”
“The Divine doesn’t give you anything you can’t handle, Jill.” He held that platitude close to his heart at all times, begging for some condolence from his own abysmal state of affairs. “I don’t know why things are happening this way but I know there’s a reason for it. There always is, even if we can’t see it.”
She lost sight of the room around her, gazing at the Buddha statue he kept in the corner overlooking the qi dance people did in his space. Nothing seemed to make sense anymore, and the more she tried to tune into what was going on, the more elusive it felt.


Chapter 9 - Existential Absence
Jack made it home after a very stressful day of accomplishing absolutely nothing across a long series of distressing amounts of effort being put into minute trivialities that had no purpose to offer the world as a whole, much less to his life.
He sat on the couch and stared blankly at the wall, hoping the world would unravel around him, and for a moment he almost felt it happening. Then his mind rejected the possibility and the walls returned to their fixed, rigid shape.
The cat, who always saw what Jack’s eyes had tried to see for that brief moment, offered some helpful advice. “You have to stop trying to tell the world what it looks like, and let it show you what it really does.”
Jack barely noticed. He could feel reality spiralling around him and wished he could surrender to seeing the waves of surreality disintegrate into pure, perfect, peaceful tranquility. But something inside wouldn’t allow that to happen, because he was afraid of what it might mean for his emotional state.
Was he having a mental breakdown? He’d been pondering that question ever since his beer with Zoe, and had no idea what the answer could be. “What does ‘mental breakdown’ even mean?”
The cat purred softly. “That’s a good question. What does ‘mental wellness’ mean to you?”
Even if Jack heard the question, he would have had no more idea how to answer that than the other questions that would’t stop presenting themselves in his unstable awareness.
He’d begun to suspect that the social norms proclaiming themselves to be the epitome of mental and emotional health, actually had nothing to do with any semblance of health whatsoever.
But where does that leave us?
If nothing we think we want to be is truly healthy, then who are we to ask what would actually be healthy? What does it mean to want, if you think you want one thing because you’re subconsciously afraid of acknowledging what you actually want?
And if you’re subconsciously sabotaging your own goals, then what part of your desires will actually be safe to pursue?
He didn’t know if these questions even meant anything to begin with, let alone how to go about finding an answer.
His brain tried to reach for a beer, or a weed grinder, but he wouldn’t let his body move. “If my addictive impulses come from the brain, then who is telling the rest of the brain not to pursue them?”
“Depression and disembodiment go hand in hand,” the cat meowed, “you feel yourself trying to check out of reality because it hurts, and suddenly you don’t know which part of you is resisting which other parts.” Silence for a moment. “You forget how to distinguish what’s coming from you, and what’s just programmed into your autonomic nervous system.”
Jack frustratedly ignored the cat, believing she wanted a treat. “If the things I want won’t make me feel better, but I still want them, then how do I figure out what will make me feel better? What if I don’t actually want the things that will make me feel better?” He hesitated to follow up with the next natural question. “What if I don’t want to feel better?” Where would that put him?
What does this mean to the course of your life, when you realize that nothing you want is going to make you happy, and that being happy hasn’t been in your priorities since you were 5?
Jack waits for that thought to trickle further down his spinal column. As it lingers, he dreads the next question. “Am I afraid of happiness?”

Jill was lying in bed, staring equally blankly at the ceiling, hoping it might reveal more answers than Jack’s wall did.
The woman on the street, two very long and bizarre days ago, had said something about asking your inner child what she wants. The man on the street today had asked if she’d ever been truly present in reality.
If she wasn’t present in reality right now, then where was she? In her head, but what does that even mean?
“If I’m in my head, instead of being present in the moment, then is my head a space separate from the reality of the present?”
The ceiling was tightlipped about answering such metaphysical quandaries.
“If I’m not experiencing reality from my head, how do I get back into it?”
She thought about the meeting at work today. She’d been fully present in her body, in a way she’d never experienced before in her entire life, and wasn’t able to hear a single word Bill and Leslie were saying. Did that mean they weren’t part of her reality? Or did it mean that her body was still not present in reality?
“What even is reality?”
She felt insane even asking these questions.
She tried to remember what happened at the qi gong studio, after Chad had walked away from her there was something very powerful and inexplicably real that happened to her, staring at the Buddha statue, and yet she couldn’t remember a single thing about the experience. It seemed far away, fuzzy and somehow intangible. Was that reality?

Jack was wondering the same thing, what does reality mean, and how do we touch it when everything we experience happens exclusively in our heads?
“What if I’m not real?” He wondered if the cat would respond. “What if I’m just someone else’s dream?”
The cat purred a hilarious laugh. “You should really study Taoism.”
Jack’s gaze was transfixed on the wall, as if his mind was afraid he’d fall back into the same delusion he’d been living in for so long, if he moved his eyes long enough to stop receiving philosophical puzzles from the wall.
He struggled to return to his room, to the physical world he wanted so desperately to get back into, but that deep loathing for his entire life refused to go back.
He thought he had a distant memory of someone telling him that severe trauma was causing anti-social tendencies. He couldn’t remember who would have said that to him.
“Is questioning reality an anti-social tendency? Wouldn’t that mean that society wants us to believe its version of reality is the only acceptable one? But why would it be so important not to question that, if there was nothing more to existence than this?”
There seemed to be a gaping void of awareness trying to call his attention to its apparent insubstantiality, but where to even begin doing so? Would he have to get out of his head to experience something his body was incapable of touching?
If reality couldn’t be perceived by the brain, then does the brain lack realism? If so, how are we to touch true reality, when the only thing telling us that we exist is our brain?
“What if no one ever saw something real, solely because we were all discouraged from looking in the only direction that would lead us into reality? What if all this diseased social construction is just a distraction from something we’re supposed to be a part of, but are afraid to believe in?
He remembered during covid, how suddenly one person not being afraid was seen as life-threateningly selfish to those who clung to fear as a life preserver. Why does that memory seem to very relevant to this line of questioning?
“What if we’re all so afraid of touching truth, that we’ve beaten ourselves into a collective delusion that perpetuates itself by feeding on a constant cycle of fear programming?”
The cat looked interested. “Are you about to break through?” She jumped over to the couch and laid down next to him, putting her paw on his leg affectionately.

Jill sat up in bed with a sort of malaise. She wondered if this was why people do drugs.
“What am I supposed to do with my life now?”
A voice rose up from inside her heart. “I wanna play.”
And she realized it, plain as day. If nothing really makes any sense, or has any meaning, and if we’re all just going to die some day anyways, then why not just pursue things that will make you happy?
She jumped up excitedly and grabbed her journal. She hadn’t written anything in it for months. She opened it up and prepared to write down something inspiring and exciting.
“Wait,” she paused, “what would even make me happy?”
She had never really asked herself that question before. She groaned in despair and fell back into bed. “I just spent years working on this stupid symposium and now I need to get a new source of income. How can I support myself and be happy at the same time?” She was certain, in that moment, that continuing her current path would bring her no further happiness than it already had.
“What does happiness even mean?” She screamed at the ceiling.
The ceiling was still just a tight-lipped sheet of gypsum.
“I wanna play!” the voice rose up even louder this time.
She looked outside. It was getting colder every day. She bundled up and went for a walk, hoping to find some sort of clarity by grounding back into the world, but she was immediately lost again as soon as she stepped out the door.
She ended up at a playground, walking up a slide and laying down on a rope bridge above the wood chip floor. There were no children here, just a man walking his dog and a young couple making out under a tree.
She watched them for a while, feeling a nostalgic longing for those tender days, when everything about someone else’s body felt like a miraculously fun adventure, exploring the soft hidden pieces that no one else had ever touched before, being touched in ways that filled her with ecstatic bliss.
Then she realized she was getting horny watching teenagers make out and shuddered, fearing she’d be seen as a pedophile if someone noticed her doing this.
Guilt-tripping herself, she dragged her way up and stormed out of the playground.
It never occurred to her that the desensitization she’d experienced around the casually self-abusive sexual expressions adults are encouraged to grow into was the reason she felt a longing for a more tender and innocent approach to something that was, in the end, totally harmless.
There was nothing about youth that was sexually exciting to her, beyond that tender innocence and - dare she say - childish wonder that teens experience, before they become jaded to the mutual exploitation of bodies that more ‘mature’ people indulge in when they start seeing sex as a drug instead of something beautiful and natural.
What she wanted was that sense of vulnerability and excitement, the tenderness of discovering someone on an intimate level for the very first time. The feeling of two hearts entwining and touching each other in all the deepest and most passionate ways.
None of this was something she was willing to allow herself to see. She was too busy shaming herself for being wet at the sight of teenagers kissing.

Jack had been roused out of his existential dread by the cat, and hadn’t done anything other than stroke her for the last 20 minutes. The feeling of giving her pleasure in a totally selfless and loving way was something he hadn’t experienced for far too long.
It was the best feeling in the world, giving happiness to this tiny, adorable little creature that couldn’t possibly hurt him, without expecting a single thing in return.
It was bliss, or the closest to it he’d felt for as long as he could remember.
The warmth of her body and the soft, rapid pulse of her heart was getting him excited in ways he didn’t want to look at. She looked so adorable cuddled up like that.
He tried to ignore his half-erection until he realized it was actually getting hard again. He wondered if he could go see Zoe now.
But then he realized how very far away this experience was from anything he’d be able to do with Zoe. People don’t have sex with the same level of affection they pet cats with, not unless they’re really, deeply in love.
And Zoe didn’t love him, she probably wouldn’t ever care about him in the slightest. She just wanted his cock.
The cat didn’t really want anything from him, just to be with him. That was all he wanted from her, too.
He wondered if he’d ever have that feeling with a woman. He never had before, that he knew for certain.
He turned on porn and exactly 10 seconds later he turned it back off. That was miles away from what he wanted right now, it didn’t even hold his attention. It felt repulsive.
He longed for something so much deeper than he’d ever experienced that he didn’t know if he could put it into words, let alone share it with another.
Zoe called him at that moment. “Speak of the devil,” he chuckled to himself while throwing the phone onto the chair the cat had moved from.

Zoe genuinely felt bad for the way she treated Jack the day before. She knew it must be hard for a man to have that experience, especially with a woman as gorgeous as the one she was looking at in the mirror. She wanted to give him another chance.
She just couldn’t stand the whininess he’d fallen into lately, always trying to say that things should be different, that he wanted more from her, like his emotions were trying to act up.
She couldn’t believe a strong, smart, handsome man like that had suddenly become so insecure and emotionally fragile. What could be wrong with him? That was why she dumped him, she couldn’t take listening to him whine anymore. But then she couldn’t find a man with his package, either.
She just wanted to have some fun, where was the harm in some casual fucking, it’s not like she needed to meet his emotional needs, that was his problem, not hers.
Her emotionally unavailable father had taught her to provide her own mediocre self-satisfaction instead of seeking affection from others. She subconsciously wanted to earn daddy’s love by being attractive and having an attractive man who could give her the love she craved, except she was afraid to admit she craved love and, just like the men in her life, only felt safe expressing love through sex.

Jill hadn’t had sex in years, just like Chad. She felt completely unsafe with the idea of sharing herself with others. The world seemed like a never-ending barrage of inappropriate behaviours begging to spray their grossness all over her - innuendo very much intended.
The shame her parents had built into her sexual expression after her first boyfriend was never addressed properly, neither was the heartache of the disastrous breakup. She felt safe and secure in her loneliness, unwilling to risk opening up to another human being the way she had with that stupid young man back in high school.
It never occurred to her that, just like her at that age, the boy had no idea who he was or what he wanted. And just like her, he still didn’t. She secretly wanted to know if he regretted his behaviour, and he actually did, but neither was willing to reach out to the other.
That was why she’d built this life for herself, why she’d fabricated a whole personality around being a one woman army, taking on the whole world all by her onesie. She was a strong, smart and independent woman who didn’t need anyone else and was totally unwilling to admit to herself how desperately she wanted support from another person.

While Jill, Jack and Zoe would all tell each other that their needs and desires were completely different, as well as the reasons they hid from these feelings, the reality is that they all experienced different manifestations of the same underlying desire.
They all had severe trauma around the reception of love, which caused them to feel unsafe reaching out for it in the ways that would bring them the emotional fulfillment they craved and deserved.
That was why they’d created these lives for themselves, constantly pursuing an empty distraction from their sorrow and lack. That was why their entire lifestyle, and all of their social interactions, were based around driving away the one thing they truly wanted, and that in turn was the reason they were so very empty inside.
Their lives had been filled with meaningless nonsense, instead of pursuing what they truly wanted they instead pursued something they didn’t want whatsoever. And slowly but surely they were grinding themselves down to bone and grit in the dogged pursuit of this meaninglessness.
And if nothing they pursued brought them happiness, then there was no real point, which over time had created a nearly unbridgeable void between them and the real world. Their utter dissociation from reality had gone completely unnoticed by a culture that thrived on perpetuating this exact cycle.
Like Claude, these three and everyone else around them had been taught these misbehaviours by people who were taught these misbehaviours, a cycle stretching back a very long way indeed.
And it was beginning to seem impossible to break out of, solely and simply because the breaking point was very rapidly approaching. What seemed unattainable was in fact inevitable.
The mental breakdowns they were all experiencing in their own ways were a crucial part of healing from core traumas, something all of them had to face in their own way and in their own time.
The entire world was approaching a point from which these cycles could no longer be tolerated. The emotional strain was becoming unbearable and soon every one of them would begin to choose something radically different from what they’d been taught, for no reason other than that it felt so much better inside than the fear.
But for now, the disembodiment of an entire global populace was proceeding on course, safe and sound in its collective shame and fear.
Right up to the breaking point.


Chapter 10 - Believing in Unicorns
Jill woke up feeling a little dazed, having spent the last three weeks feeling somewhat inebriated beneath a detached numbness she couldn’t quite place.
She had no idea what to do with herself now. She had no job, no funding for her research and quite frankly, no interest in going back to any single part of the life she’d been so desperate to preserve so recently.
She sat in her room and meditated, practiced her self love affirmations, looked at the red and blue colors that filled her room. They never quite matched right and she always loved it that way, it felt perfect inside.
This was the only place in the whole, wide world where she felt truly safe. And now she was afraid to acknowledge the possibility she might have to leave it soon. She couldn’t afford rent without a job and, after three weeks of searching, things didn’t seem to be improving in that regard.
She wanted to do something that brought her happiness but what exactly did that even mean? She wasn’t ready for another episode of existential dread but she had to answer the question sooner or later, didn’t she?
Maybe she could try getting some kind of crappy night job to pay the bills until she felt confident enough to pursue something that caught her interest. She knew how easily a dead end job sucks people in, sometimes they never even get back out of it. People end up locked in servitude for their entire lives doing that.
She wasn’t ready to face that possibility, she had to find something better.
But what could she do that she’d enjoy? She sighed and continued meditating, trying to be fully present in the space around her.
Her attention kept getting called back to the colors. She’d always felt safer and more content with vibrantly coloured surroundings. And it seemed to be the only aspect of her space she felt a desire to be present with.
“Is it possible to find a job to do with colors? Is that a thing?”
Eventually she decided to go for a walk, maybe she’d come up with some kind of inspiration. She had to believe there was something out there that would actually help her be safe and happy, and pay the bills without excessive amounts of stress and overall misery.
Bundled up in the cold, she rarely got spoken to by men during the winter months. The surge of constant harassment she was exposed to a few weeks earlier, starting around her job interview, had abated once she wore more clothes and it hadn’t picked back up again yet.
Her job search hadn’t picked up either, though. She’d sent out tons of resumes, custom tailoring them to every job, showcasing her wide range of abilities, knowledge and natural talent. Not a single response beyond a bunch of automated, ‘better luck next time’ messages.
It was disheartening as fuck.
But she had to believe she could make this work. Surely someone out there wanted a literal genius to come help improve their marketing performance.
She reached the same park near her home and as she passed, she noticed a sign saying, “pink is an imaginary color.”
At first she felt this was an attack against little girls, telling them their stereotypically favourite color didn’t exist. Then she realized it meant because pink isn’t a spectral color, it’s a combination produced only by excitation of the pigment receptors in our eyes.
“But that doesn’t mean it’s not real,” she sighed to herself. She remembered being a little girl, with her binder covered in unicorn stickers and pink glitter, how fun it felt to cover everything in her life with prettiness.
The feeling we have inside when we see something pretty can be far more real than anything our attention is called to by the fear telling us not to give into the joy of being excitable.
She used to believe in unicorns, then everyone kept making fun of her until she became afraid to admit it, and over time she stopped believing. Why? Just because other kids were mean about it, that somehow meant they couldn’t be real.
But if the feeling they give you is real, doesn’t that mean they’re real in a more important way than the emotional distress that might be caused by imaginary people continuing to bully her for believing?
She shrugged these thoughts away, she didn’t want any more surreal, existentialist metaphysics nonsense today. She was far too busy trying to find her way out of this senseless funk and into a job.
She walked past an intersection partially blocked by construction. A policeman was standing in the centre directing traffic, despite the fact that the traffic light still worked. She wondered how long that construction would be there, how many man-hours would be paid from public taxes for an officer to be there doing the same thing the traffic light was doing on its own.
The next intersection was perpetually clogged. A bus had been sitting there for multiple lights, waiting for enough space to move forward, and at the last moments of a yellow light the driver decided to drive through anyway, he couldn’t keep waiting for people to leave space for him, so he took a spot blocking the entire intersection and patiently waited through the entirety of the opposite green light, ignoring the stream of horns blaring furiously.
The third intersection was exactly the same as the first, with another officer directing traffic beneath a fully functional traffic light. “Tax dollars hard at work,” she muttered darkly to herself.
As she waited for the light to turn green, the officer got her attention and yelled, “you can cross, no one’s moving.”
She smiled and waved, stepping out and feeling very embarrassed about having complained about him a moment before. He was just doing his job.
She wondered how much bad vibes this poor man picked up every day. She knew how unpopular police are but she also knew people need to be nicer to each other. Maybe if everyone would just relax and stop judging each other, things would actually improve a little bit.
Everyone is so afraid of being themselves, afraid that everyone else will be mean to them, but everyone else feels exactly the same. We’re all holding back on being happy because we think the rest will hurt us, because they’re all holding back on being happy.
That’s why no one believes in unicorns and magic anymore.
It used to be fun to believe in faeries, it felt good inside, then we started closing up and not allowing our internal lights be seen by others for fear of being mocked. What we never saw was that everyone else was taught the same thing in the same way, for the same reason.
Those who are courageous enough to break the cycle are never really thanked for it, but it doesn’t matter because they’re too busy just doing their thing. Believing in unicorns is its own reward.
As she gets to the opposite corner, she skips a little and blows a kiss to the officer in gratitude for just being a good person.
What has she lost by doing that? Absolutely nothing. Having seen it, he might now feel a bit more appreciated. Maybe it’s made someone else’s day so much better, just having that one moment of human decency.
It could certainly make the world better if everyone were just decent to each other.
And it costs you absolutely nothing to just be nice to people.
A kind-looking old man sees her skipping and smiles at her. She smiles back and keeps skipping. She smiles at the next man too, who says something inappropriate but she pretends not to hear and keeps doing her thing.
It feels good to just be nice. And when you get those warm fuzzies, everything else seems a little less bleak, and the stuff that’s still dark doesn’t seem so painful anymore.
While she’s doing this, she doesn’t notice that she skips past an alley with several homeless people trying to survive. One of them wonders what she’s so happy about. “White people,” he mutters to himself.
As she continues on, she barely notices the constant sound of horns blaring, the incredibly large numbers of machines running everywhere, the bleak overcast of a busy and thoroughly miserable city going about its daily grind.
She also doesn’t notice how firmly present she is in the act of being happy.
She smells burning sage and without even thinking about it, she follows the scent through a door into a crystal shop, selling gorgeous gemstones to spiritual weirdos with rock fetishes.
Everything inside is so colourful and happy.
“Ooooh!” she immediately feels even better in this space. “So pretty in here!”
Barbara, the woman at the cash register, smiles warmly. “I know, it’s such a sweet place, isn’t it?”
“I love the colors!” Jill says, walking deeper into the store.
Everything is arranged by color, forming a rainbow that stretches all the way around the room. Pink, not being part of the spectrum but also connected to the heart chakra, is positioned in the middle to bring a calm, loving energy to the whole space.
“It’s beautiful!” she’s lost in a childish sense of adventure, just enjoying the reality she’s confronted with here.
She walks around the room several times, trying to take in all the sights of every wonderful type of stone here. Mother Earth has so many gorgeous gifts to offer us, if only we would take a moment to notice.
Barbara says, “you look like you’re having a magickal, faery-filled day.” She loves seeing the smiles people wear in her store.
Jill pauses. “Why do you say that?” So strange this woman would mention magic and faeries.
Barbara says simply, “I don’t know, it’s just the twinkle in your eyes. Faeries have that effect on people.”
Jill remembers meditating in her room this morning, being called to notice the colors over and over, wondering if she could have a colourful career. “Is there maybe a job opening available here?”
Barbara looks nervous, “well we’re not really hiring right now. Do you have any qualifications?”
Jills perks up. “I specialize in marketing analysis. I could help you boost your business.”
Barbara’s impressed. “Hmm, well maybe. Here’s my card, send me your resume.”
Jill grins from ear to ear, sure she’ll get the job. “Thank you so much!”
She skips out the store back into the traffic-filled chaos of the city streets.
Everything is looking up for her.
She’s ready to believe in faeries and unicorns again.


Chapter 11 - Sons of Anarchy
Paul and Andre have been meeting regularly after work for over two weeks now. It all started with a joint but now things have progressed into a true bromance. Andre has something to do after work today but they’re walking to the subway together anyway, joking about video games.
Andre is laughing, “I’m the best CoD player I know, man, I shoot your ass down quick-fast!”
Paul raises his head to the sky, remembering back in the day, “I used to be pretty good at that shit too. Used to get ‘Most Headshots’ after joining for the last 30 seconds.”
Andre shakes his head, “Nah man, that’s just cause most people aim for the knee. I’ll actually win the way that takes skill.”
Paul shrugs. “Yeah, honestly I ain’t about that no-more. It was fun a while back but then I realized it’s just part of the way people are kept in this mindset of glorifying guns like they’re so central to our culture.”
Highly addictive video games give endorphin surges for every kill, aligning men’s mindset with the idea that violence is fun and will accomplish something.
Andre’s mind clicks pieces together suddenly. “Yeah, it’s just the war machine profiting from more brainwashing. You’re right, man.”
Paul nods and lights up a joint. “Yeah man, it’s literally just more ways to convince people we need the government, just in case we need military defences from our imaginary enemies. BAM, headshot! Cause that’s an important social need. Not better health care, more guns!”
They’ve been talking a lot about the governmental systems of control, and Andre is getting curious about Paul’s views on anarchy. “Yeah but that’s the problem, we do need a government. We’ve tried anarchy before and it doesn’t work, we always circle back to some form of control.”
Paul passes the joint, saying, “The problem with anarchy isn’t that it couldn’t work, it’s that we aren’t currently ready for it to work, we’re too emotionally insecure, we’re too unstable. But we don’t have to be, and we don’t have to accept that as the way things will be. We’ll grow into it. Why not start now?”
Andre passes the joint. “Right now?”
Paul takes it. Before he takes a hit he yells out, “why not!”
Andre give him a humorous look. He can never tell if Paul is serious about the things he says, but always finds it amusing to listen. “What does that mean, exactly?”
Paul takes a quick second toke and passes it back. “It means takin’ responsibility for makin’ things better on our own. It means declaring we don’t need regulation because we’re mature enough to be capable of self-regulation. It means choosing to make the world better, right now, and just keep doin’ it, just because we can.”
Andre thinks about it for a moment. He exhales, “it’s true though. Why not, just, right now?”
Paul picks up a piece of garbage and throws it away in the nearby garbage can. “My point is, the government wants us to think that guns are important so they can keep selling them, and that we need a military to protect us from all those nasty bad guys who are so pissed off about us selling guns to their people and killing the peacemakers.”
Paul was raised watching shows about gun collectors and other blatantly obvious propaganda pieces, showcasing how glorious and beautiful guns are, normalizing the idea of owning a whole armoury for self-defence purposes. It’s on public cable television, if you want free TV you get propaganda.
Andre was raised in the projects, where blacks believe they need guns to protect themselves from white police, and end up shooting each other over fear of being perceived as weak.
Paul has been harassed by police more frequently and violently than Andre has. Being a punk in a fascist police state doesn’t go over well. He’s been threatened by police over literally nothing on multiple occasions. That’s why he and Phil moved further north and out of the prairies.
Andre is a fairly law-abiding citizen, for the most part. Getting occasionally ripped off by dealers who think they’re hardcore has left him with a general sense of mistrust, and he’s considered getting a gun himself, to show people how dangerous he wants them to think he is, so he’ll be taken more seriously.
A few of his friends own pistols to protect themselves, just in case it’s necessary to aim for the head like in zombie movies. They’ve been raised to see it as normal and manly to present themselves like thugs, despite not being part of gangs, believing it’s cool to act like one anyway.
Andre says, “you know how many guns they sell to Africans? They’ve been stirring up wars in Africa since they left. Since before they left.”
Paul looks sadly at Andre, not sure what to say about that. “Yeah. They assassinate politicians who disagree with their political views and install bloodthirsty assholes to perpetuate war cycles, just to keep their profit margins up. Meanwhile they’re flooding Hollywood with movies about badass cops and people with AKs selling coke.”
“Right? And then they go over to Columbia and smuggle coke stateside, and use the money to move Russian weapons into Thailand or wherever.”
“Bomb the shit out of Syria while they’re having a civil war, to distract everyone from the fact we’re stealing oil from people we invaded for having illegal chemical weapons we sold them.”
“But don’t let Iran use nuclear power, just in case they wanna make nukes.”
“Right, while kissing Kim Jong whatever’s ass instead of disbanding our own massive nuclear arsenal.”
They grin at each other mischievously. They could go on like this a long time. There’s a gleam in their eyes and they wanna hug it out but don’t wanna seem unmanly.
Paul shifts the subject. “So, you got a girl?”
“Psh!” Andre scoffs, “hell no, fuck that noise. Girls are crazy as fuck, bro.” Paul laughs. “White girls always wanna act like they ain’t racist just to get some dick, meanwhile they treat us different anyway just because we’re black.”
Paul sighs. “Yeah, I bet.” His last girlfriend acted PC while making racist jokes she claimed were ok because she dated a black guy.
“You?”
Paul laughs, “Hell no, man. There’s a few chicks I bang once in a while but no one wants a relationship anyways. Too much hassle to care about someone else’s needs when we can’t even take care of ourselves.”
“Right? I got no time for your crazy mess.” Andre was secretly crushing on his neighbour, who seemed like a sweet girl, but he didn’t want to open to someone that way without feeling secure in himself. His ex blamed him for her cheating on him, because they never spent any time together, because she was never available. He’d really cared about her and it hurt to be accused of something that was her fault. “Women always tryin’ to blame us for their own bullshit, anyways.”
Paul circles the conversation back around. “People act like they’re above takin’ responsibility for their own decisions. We’re all just tryin’a survive in a world so full of its own shit it’s about to explode, and when things don’t work out it feels like someone else’s fault. But we gotta start taking accountability for our own shit, and learning to keep ourselves on the level, so we have enough energy left to help others when they need us.”
“Yeah, it’s true. Gotta watch out for your own.” He and his friends always had each other’s backs. “Back in the day it used to be tribes holding it down, now we got no tribe cause the whole fuckin’ city’s devouring itself like a bunch of starving rats.”
“The central point of the right to own guns is to protect each other but who the fuck protects other people in the first place? We’re all like, yeah I gotta protect myself from everyone else cause they got guns, so I gotta get a gun!”
Andre gets it now. “That’s why you wanna go to anarchy? Like that show with the bikers? Because people could protect each other as a tribe, instead of relying on control systems that just oppress the fuck out of us.”
“Exactly!” Paul yells triumphantly. “You got it dead on, brotha!” That’s a headshot worth repeating. “The problem is, like I said, people aren’t mature enough to make that shit work. But we can all just decide to make things better, and help everyone else get on, and things can work out because we all just make things work, together.”
Andre shakes his head. “Yeah but that’s the problem, we ain’t gonna do that. No one gives a fuck about protecting others.”
“Yeah well, a true militia is there to protect its people and make sure everyone gets the help they need. Everything else is macho-man bullshit.”
Andre smirks. “Tiny dick syndrome.”
Paul laughs, “exactly.” There’s silence for a moment while they ponder the possibility of a self-regulatory population, free of the violence-aggrandizing propaganda being shoved into the male psyche at every possible moment. “But like I said, we have the ability to make things better. If we would all just learn to actually take care of ourselves, we’d be able to help each other as well.”
Andre nods and thinks on it silently. He wonders if people will ever be willing to do that, or learn how.


Chapter 12 - Trauma Dumping Jet-Streams of Qi
Chad is with his favourite client, Barbara, who owns a crystal shop nearby. “Remember, with every breath, sacred life force flows through you as it flows through all things in this world. Breathe in light, breathe out light.” They move slowly, allowing their bodies to move themselves. “Feel the streams of prana flow around you, let the subtle forces shift your body where they wish.”
Barbara’s hips were feeling very tight. “There’s been a problem with my root chakra all week, do you mind doing a little reiki, please?”
Chad smiles. “Of course, just lay down on the blanket over there and I’ll bring some pillows.”
After a few minutes of feeling around her aura, Chad says, “well the problem is actually in your sacral chakra, there’s a blockage in your womb that’s causing pain when you root.”
Barbara asks, “so what do I do about it? It really hurts bad sometimes.”
Chad thinks about it. “Loosening up your hips will help, so try to wiggle them around a little when you stretch, when you dance and stuff like that. We’ll practice before you go.” He thinks a little more. “And since it’s in your womb, I think getting in touch with the Mother Goddess will help as well. Have you ever practiced womb healing and energetically giving birth?”
Barbara is excited, “Ooh, that sounds fun actually, I should try that.”
There’s a strange energetic shift when she says that and a subconscious fear tightens her root chakra. Chad asks, “Do you think maybe you’re afraid that giving birth would hurt too much?”
Barbara looks offended. “The perception that giving birth hurts is very patriarchal, giving birth is a beautiful thing.”
Chad nods. “I agree, it is beautiful. So you’re saying that men teach women to see it as painful?”
Barbara is extremely triggered by this. “Yes! You want us to be in fear of owning our power as a creator of life.” She stands up, shoving him aside and ignoring the apologetic look on his face. “Fucking patriarchy is always forcing us to doubt our divine beauty.”
She storms out, leaving Chad with a deep sense of shame and guilt. He’s afraid he’ll never be seen as a good man. He tries so hard but he always seems to mess things up. No wonder women hate men so much.

Meanwhile, Phil is on his knees in a large, foresty park on the edge of downtown where residences become more common. He’s on the verge of tears, apologizing to the living heart of Mother Gaia, Pachamama, for the damage done by humans to the natural world, promising her that things will get better.
This area was used as a chemical testing site decades ago. The city granted permission for a team of scientists to dump large amounts of toxins in the soil, to observe the longterm effects of poisoning nature.
Bureaucracies have no sense of farcical tragedy.
He looks up at the trees, covered in tumorous growths that are a very obvious sign of unbelievably contaminated soil. There are no bugs here, no birds or squirrels, not even moss. Just cancerous trees doing their best to survive these harsh conditions.
He sighs and repeats, “I promise you, everything will get better.”
As he keeps walking he passes by a circle of mushrooms. His ex used to call these faery circles, saying they held meetings here and decided how to help nature grow. He wondered what they would be discussing in a place like this. “Probably planning a revolution.”
He read an article about how mushrooms and certain trees help absorb poison from soil and eventually process it into something less harmful. He wonders how toxic those mushrooms are right now. “Probably die on the spot for touching them.”
He reaches a paved road moving through the trees. People jog down this road as drivers speed through to the parking lot up ahead.
He looks up at the sky and sees a network of chem trails pouring down toxins, filling the city’s ever-present cloud of polluted smog with yet more chemicals sprayed out the back of jets.
He was once called a crazy conspiracy theorist for saying these fumes keep people sedated. He’d been trying to explain that they’re known to have severe long-term neurological effects, and that the only ‘theory’ part of it is the idea that it’s done on purpose.
He didn’t care who was ‘responsible’ for this or why they did it. We all do this, we all consent and support the propagation of these problems, every day. The ‘why’ just isn’t that relevant. Whether it’s done on purpose is completely beside the point.
We all consent, every day, to the massive pollution of the planetary biosphere.
He passes a group of college students drinking beer. One of them throws a bottle through the trees into a bush.
Phil screams, “hey man! Why would you do that with a garbage can right there! You’re old enough to know better.” Being ‘too young to care’ is an outdated excuse, it was never that funny to begin with.
The blank look in their faces tells him volumes about their complete disregard for the sanctity of life. One of them says, “hey man, stop trauma-dumping us.”
Phil is outraged. “Trauma dumping is when you pour your own pain into someone else, that’s literally what you just did to nature!”
The guy shrugs, “whatever man,” and they all turn and keep walking, joking about how crazy Phil is and how ridiculous it is to expect them to use a garbage can. It’s less than 10 feet from them.
Phil’s sigh comes out as an agitated grunt. He walks into the bushes and pulls out the bottle, along with an empty cigarette pack and two disposable masks. The number of masks that have found their way into bushes since 2020 is nauseating.
He remembers during the pandemic, people said things like, “we’re the virus,” predicting that nature would heal while everyone was hiding. The amount of extra pollution caused during that time has never really been recognized, because everyone is too busy throwing their amazon boxes in landfills while uber delivers mcdonalds to their door.
As he’s carrying other people’s trash back to the garbage can, a woman stops walking to answer her phone. She pulls off her covid mask and it falls on the ground. She eyes it with a look of disgust, like it’s somehow contaminated because it touched the ground.
Phil picks it up as he passes, knowing she has no interest in picking up her own waste.
She looks at him like he’s insane. “That’s disgusting.”
Phil screams, “you’re disgusting! Just because you’re choosing to live in fear that doesn’t give you the right to poison this beautiful planet with your fucking nonsense!” He’s about to cry and he hopes the fire he feels in his heart boils her blood.
Deep inside him a furious roar rises, barely a whisper, “get off my fucking planet!”

And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill, and their hearts but once heaved and forever grew still - Lord Byron

Chad has closed his studio and is in his bedroom on the upper level, crying before an idol of his matron goddess Durga and begging her forgiveness for triggering Barbara. He was only trying to help.
He takes a deep breath and calms down, settling into full lotus asana. He can feel Durga’s love pouring over him, bathing his sorrows with compassion. He’s so angry at himself, he can’t believe he would hurt someone like that.
As the tempers of the moment abate, he remembers how one of his girlfriends in college sexually harassed him in public, claiming he was a terrible person and a weak man, unworthy of her affection. The sad part is, he still wanted to marry her after that. They never spoke again.
Trauma dumping is how cycles of abuse perpetuate themselves. Because we’re in pain that we don’t know how to handle appropriately, it ends up exploding and we dump it inside the people around us. Eventually they do the same, if they don’t find ways to purge their suffering.
The human body is a wasteland of emotional pollution and fear-based belief systems we’re all shamed into holding as more important than our own well-being. This will go away when we learn how to respond to our emotions appropriately. The first step is to stop dumping them into others.
When he’s calm enough to think, he remembers he has a class in an hour. He stands up and bows, “thank you Mother Durga,” and goes to eat a light lunch.
He follows the streams of qi into his kitchen. He feels the blockages in his body and wonders how he could have gotten so tight-wound from just one person.
He reaches for a guava but then decides he’d rather have a cookie. It feels warm inside to eat something comforting once in a while, without worrying about what’s healthy.
He’s halfway through the cookie when he remembers a documentary he watched recently about the gut biome. Everyone’s intestines are filled with other life forms that help us process our food. Except that most people eat so much trash that their internal biosphere is polluted and unhealthy, leaving their bodies unable to process things properly.
Yet another form of trauma dumping.
He wonders whether that’s why we see no problem with polluting the environment, a kind of ‘well if it’s happening to me then screw you too,’ sorta thing, or maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe the gods are punishing us into poisoning ourselves, hoping we’ll realize how much damage we do to others. “Or maybe reptilians are deceiving us.”
In fact, it’s something we all need to recognize as a global and system-wide problem we allow to occur inside ourselves for reasons we’re unwilling to look at.
He knows one thing, people have to start taking better care of themselves. He reaches for the guava he wanted in the first place, feeling sad about his lost moment of joy with his cookie.
He follows the qi streams to the window and looks at the chem trails. He wonders if people will ever really see what’s wrong with their disregard for the beauty of this planet and the life we share it with. The most healthy spiritual practice he’s found yet is just being present with other lifeforms. Meditation and yoga are great, but the whole point of being alive is to share the experience with other life.

Phil is dumb-founded. He’s made his way to a river surrounded by willows, which supposedly are good at absorbing toxins. There’s a big, beautiful willow whose entire base is one enormous series of tumors.
If his pagan values were as vicious as those of the average christian, he’d be on a killing spree right now.
“Ok,” he says to himself, “so if those fucking toxins were put in the soil to see their effect... well here’s the fucking effect. Research completed. What are you going to do with these results, you fucking dipshits!”
Pesticides are sprayed in soil all over the planet. Groundwater leeches these toxins into rivers, lakes, oceans. Every single lifeform in this planet is being exposed to the toxins we use to ensure crops are successful.
The amount of food that gets thrown out at grocery stores would feed countries. They’re not allowed to give that food to the homeless, and taking edible food from their garbage cans is illegal.
The government gives farmers money to not plant crops, because we have so much excess food. Meanwhile, other farmers are making sure they get as much as they possibly can, just to feed their families.
Farms focus their entire effort on a small number of species, rather than the vast diversity of a natural ecosystem, which leads to soil depletion that’s made up for using massive amounts of fertilizer, containing pesticides, which leeches excess nitrogen into the water, leading to large amounts of algae that suffocates the life in our lakes and rivers.
Meanwhile, corporations like Mon Santo are deliberately disrupting the natural balance and replacing thriving forests with artificial, corporate-owned lifeforms. They ignore their effect on the ecosystem, while claiming it couldn’t possibly be harmful to humans. Testing the effects of these changes with scientifically valid methods takes decades, meaning they couldn’t possibly test it prior to marketing their products. We are the test subjects.
Phil is still standing, staring at the willow tree with its enormous clusters of tumors. His stomach hurts just looking at it. He repeats. “Your research results are in. What are you going to do about it?”
Probably nothing.