Status Updates From Sad Planets

If the world is sad - and I think we have established by now that it very definitely is, no thanks to us - then it is only our continued belligerence that prevents us from receiving the dispatches and logbooks of its countless constituents, pleading with us to cease our reckless and abusive behavior.

But weakness or fragility, as enacted by the dispossessed and marginalized, is a double-baked sin. The people in power don't want to be reminded of the historical violence underlying their position; nor do they want to be confronted with its palpable effects (especially when these manifest as affects).

Human sadness as material excretion, manifest in our poetry as much as in our plastic, and in our sparkling new mega-churches or supermarkets as much as in our ruins. This heavy psychic, or even spiritual, baggage marks our species in sharp contrast to all the other creatures, who flow through life "like water in water," and who only know sadness when humanity introduces it to them.

Necrobiome

“Necrobiome” is the name given to that community of critters which come together in the shared mission of metabolizing a corpse. When an organism dies, uninvited survivors descend on the unplanned wake and feast on the remains: everything from lions, vultures, crows – down the chain of complexity – to worms, beetles, fungi, and “waves of bacteria.” The necrobiome is thus a temporary society....

....it’s tempting to think regretfully of our fellow humans as stars in this sense. Even as someone nods hello – or simply saunters by in the street, without noticing us at all, like a shooting star – we have the morbid feeling that they are already deceased, and we are just seeing the belated signals of their fleeting existence.

A wonderfully lachrymous series of mini-essays about the end of the world.

“There is no Planet B,” insist the ecological activists. And of course they are right. But the pedantic astronomers will remind us that there is Planet 442b, which enjoys the right conditions to sustain liquid water and is even one-and-ahalf billion years younger. No matter that we will never be able to figure out how to travel....