ceremony

that gesture of the band playing on was either made up or reflective of blind obeisance. the band should have flipped off the conductor, carefully folded its chairs, chucked its instruments into the pitch and found lifeboats.

or: a focus on what tenor and tone are maintained through a downturn like this is like stringing neon lights on a crack house, at some point somebody is going to fall asleep with a lit cigarette in their mouths and burn the place to the ground and we'll be the assholes sleeping off a hard day's work. at some point we have to admit to ourselves that this is triage.

paper today has some crap about wall street wanting to play it responsible now but you know it's always this way, the chastened buccaneers hide their loot and talk about fiscal prudence while the poor chew wistfully on the crumbs of excess. carnegie or ford find Jesus late in the game and start do-gooder foundations to undo 1/10000th of the damage of their ways.

and here we are, zipping frenetically in Brownian motion to assemble a few of those crumbs ourselves, fashion them into a small hill on which to stand to humbly suggest reform efforts to those chastened buccaneers (or better still arachnids). they may pay our ideas lip service best case but in the end the spider doesn't stop eating flies just because the flies have a decent story or yearning for freedom. that moment of apparent multi-stakeholder collaboration is more of an approach trajectory, a kind of yes yes I see presaging mealtime.

my frustration is with those polite to kindly cannibals, of course, but also with you for thinking that if we string up decorations, if we control our own behavior or model a kinder gentler meal the spiders will take heed and start stringing tofu or tempeh in their webs to simulate and mock the thrill of the hunt.

i know that a great deal of this work is noble but futile, that any way you decorate the ceremony it's still bullshit. i'm half satisfied to join you in your building of ecologically sound sandcastles so that we can lose ourselves briefly in their beauty. some days that works for me, some days, not so much.