The Predator
You’re the Predator swinging through trees and over buildings and across planets and time in search of a thrill, a kill, a sense of meaning, and you set your little triangle of red dots on a mammoth except the mammoths are extinct and even if some scientists in a lab are trying to revive them you don’t have the patience, the hunt is on, the hunt is always on and the great rotating saucer you call home is really just a trophy case skipping across countless skies and it calls you, it’s hungry, must be fed, filled, so you’re hunting now on Hollywood sets and through tropical jungles and viewers’ minds and coke sweat 80s LA saying “over here” like Mac in a menacing whisper and laughing deep and loud like Jesse “The Body” Ventura except his body was blown apart and the prop team was blown apart as our lives are blown apart, blowing apart, but yes, he went on to govern those ten thousand lakes still in another sense he’s dead, you’re dead, we’re dead, dying forever towards deadness, and in another sense we’re jittery prey, running and fleeing and hiding and still in one more, a thousand more senses, we’re up there with you, swinging from tree to tree, hunting ourselves, our many messy selves, and hunting for the Other, some beautiful, perfect, sensitive Other, aiming our little triangle of red dots of hope and need and fear into the vast jungle of human night, searching for our next kill.
The Past is the Future is the Present is
The past is prologue but is this book any good? and the past isn’t even the past and the past is what we’re doomed doomed to and the past is a foreign country and we don’t speak the language and some goon at customs stole our passports while the future, well, the future is now and trans and female and people are warring with sticks and stones and the icebergs have melted and the polar bears have sunk and the futurists are unemployed and futurism is long dead and the ecomodernists are hooking their hearts up to modular reactors and the degrowthers are getting their tubes tied and our big debts are coming due and posterity’s condescension is of course enormous, these little futurinos running around throwing their pasts to the dogs and pretending to pull rabbits and theories and systems and ideas and modes of communication out of hats ex nihilo but I pay neither and none any mind, no siree, because I’m here now, being here now, in the now, baby, I’ve got a Roth IRA fattening up in micro increments and 20/10 vision, piercing the veil of time with my baby-blue Paul Newman eyes, just watching the river flow and the ships come in with Bob and Otis—quick now, now, now, now, or you’ll miss it.
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Jon Doughboy is a lowly clerk at Bartleby & Co. Prefer not to with him @doughboywrites.