Pre-death throes of earth

Ghosts are the best guests. They are good company. I enjoy talking to them because they know the secrets of death. And they’re no trouble. I would be more than happy to lay out snacks for them, hors d’oeuvres, entire food plates, whatever they’d like but they don’t eat. And certainly my well-stocked liquor cabinet is always open to them but they themselves are spirits imbued to the brim.

My liquor cabinet, by the way, is open to anyone who cares to drop by my lowly bungalow which for the past four years of solitude has been maybe six or seven people. So be it, I am an old recluse in an old house in the pre-death throes of planet earth that is as sure as shootin’ rockets red glare in the twilight’s last gleaming and the rest of all that sad doomed patriotic American lost love on a fast track to destruction — not at the weathered hands of Mother Nature vis-a-vis climate mayhem and natural disasters as per the Big One or tsunamis or good old Biblical standbys pestilence plague and a pox on the house of lords — no no no nothing of the sort, but namely at the bloody hands of the egomaniacal pure evil psycho mass murderers who are hellbent on blowing this precious little miraculous once-in-a-lifetime tiny speck of dust in God’s Big Acre into fragments of space debris, shattered meteors of uncivilization annihilated by barbarians of doom who should have taken a few minutes of their godgiven time in their godforsaken lives to read the Sermon on the Mount — or, if they were too busy amassing enough nuclear bombs to blow us all to smithereens a thousand times over, read just these few words: 

“Whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.”

As Kurt Vonnegut wrote: “If it weren’t for the message of mercy and pity in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, I wouldn’t want to be a human being. I would just as soon be a rattlesnake.”

Header art by Zdzisław Beksiński

Brutal death of Zdzislaw Beksiński

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