I thought this Guardian article was interesting.

To put it bluntly, the most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.

They think we are literally garbage. They’re burning the dump, fuck the rats.

The average voter is offered only remixes of a bygone past, alongside the sadistic pleasures of dominance over an ever-expanding assemblage of dehumanized others.

This, not some artistic shibboleth, some posture of erudite aestheticism, is why nostalgia and sentimentality are dangerous. They will sell you the remix for the low low price of looking away from the sadism, pretending you didn’t think they meant it or were capable of it.

What are we gonna do, rat brothers and sisters? If you were on the threshold and they gave you a last minute offer, would you take it? Would you be able to see if that’s what you were doing? Are you doing it already? Who will be by your side when the offer is rescinded?

Who’ll be the goodguys and who the villains among the left behind?

Scorched earth? Blank slate? Do you look forward to testing the practical integration of your cooperative philosophies?

Anyway, so all this is going on; meanwhile some of my daughter’s friends at school have guns and gang affiliations, and she has the benefit of common sense, but common sense ain’t bulletproof. Practically everybody’s on some kind of drugs. There’s all manner of old-school, pre-Disneywashed fairy-tale grim death out there, awaiting the unwary. Or the wary, what's the difference? The veil is thin.

Nevertheless here I go, getting ready to draw tonight’s randomly selected pigeon. Sometimes my little memories seem so tame and unimportant. I’m going to keep going with this little project, though. Maybe at some point I’ll start to understand why, or how it might be connected to something — anything — vital or consequential. If not, no harm done I guess.

pigeon

Dad cutting the fire ant in half

It was blazing, audacious, fire-engine red! It strutted around, defying the humble browns and tans of the surrounding rocks and dirt. A valiant warrior with a proud coat of arms. It was tiny but scary. It commanded respect.

My dad cut it in half with a pocket knife.

Once again, memory is problematic. It probably wasn’t a fire ant. I looked it up just now, and that’s not what I remember it looking like. It might have been a velvet ant. Or something completely different. It might not even have looked like how I remember it. Maybe it was a fire ant. I guess it doesn’t matter.

We had parked the truck and were on our way down the railroad-tie-terraced path towards the bluffs, high above the Mississippi, at Trail of Tears State Park.

“What’s that!?” I yelled when the bug caught my eye, because there was no way this bug couldn’t catch your eye.

“Watch out, it’s a fire ant,” Dad (maybe) said. “They bite, and it’ll hurt like hell!”

Then I guess he had a scientific impulse. “They’re so tough, if they get cut in half, the two halves will get up and walk away.”

“No way. Really!?”

“Yeah, watch this!” My brother and stepmother and I all squatted down to observe the operation.

No lie — the two halves walked away from each other.

There was never even a pause in the ceaseless wandering walk. But what had been resplendent, now became ridiculous. Where’s your shield now, bold knight? So brave, and yet to what avail? Rent asunder from yourself — your destination previously a secret kept from us, now doubly so, and from yourself as well. When will you two meet again?

How then should we mourn our severed selves? The pomp, the flash, defenses, daily plans, the striking out, the seeking and the gathering, all for this: our visceral existence bifurcated, grotesquely juxtaposing two realities, neither of them whole. This is what our mindless lives lead up to.

I felt bad. It was so pathetic, and there was no way to take it back, go back to how it was before. I didn’t fully have permission to feel bad, I could sense that, though not because of anything overt. This would be one of the quiet feelings, the shaded ones, to set aside and ponder later. I felt bad, but all I could do was exactly what those two ant halves had had no other recourse but to do: get up and walk away. So that’s what I did. We all did. We all do.

The river awaited! Endless trails! Grandiose oaks! The deep green mystery of the quarry lake! Smash a penny on the railroad tracks! I was young, we were strong. The day stretched out before us, longer than the summer. We had a plan, we had provisions, we had each other. We were whole. There was nothing but the sun and benevolent wispy clouds in the sky, hovering above us.