About the name of the Blog

At the End of the World is a song that has existed in a few forms for about four years now. It’s a tough one, because it really is about what you’d think- what I’ve referred to for years as the Coming Bad Times. If there is any irony in that ‘concept’- The Coming Bad Times, it is only that the Bad Times have arrived for a large portion of the people and the planet some time ago. It’s really only here in the realms of ever-expanding tract housing and condos that the veneer is still in good shape. In a lot of places, those thin sheets of printed-with-woodgrain mylar & melamine have peeled of completely, exposing the particle board below to the weather. Reality isn’t too pretty below the surface. It’s swollen with pain, disease, and despair like an old desk left out in the yard. Every time it rains it just grows simultaneously weaker and heavier.

There’s a lot of talk these days about going carbon neutral, for and against climate change, for and against globalism and free markets and borders and wars on _____.

The truth of the matter is we are vastly overpopulated, and the nature of economic scale has led to what is functionally a world-wide monoculture problem. We in the west want cheap goods, labor, and entertainment- with the main requirement that we don’t have to look at or think about how we get or got these things. I don’t have a solution for any of this, but I certainly think it’s pretty evident what questions we should be asking of ourselves (not just in the first world, either).

There is a strong tendency to view issues of planetary concern as based on party politics. This is rather amusing, actually, as these should be the issues that are (by their very nature) global. However, what I will call mind-space is at a premium these days. While I choose to opt out of most traditional media (in the sense of not watching television, not reading newspapers, etc…almost all of my media is found online) the bombardment of ‘information’ continues. The hegemony of mainstream media, the pornofying of ‘news’ and ‘reality’, by which I mean that the relevance of ‘reality TV’ is exactly that of ‘pornography’…yes, people are physically having sex, but it isn’t REAL- it is unrelated to the sex one has removed from the realms of monetary/social transaction. Social transaction in this case means you may choose to do what you do with cameras present, not for money but for exposure…exposure equals fame. Celebrity as the ideal state. All lead deeper into a crass state of not believing in anything. We sell despair, nihilism, self doubt, and an internal vacuum and call it ‘success’.

The reality of deprivation and depravity worldwide has to effect all of us. We live in a culture of death, and claim that those who hate us (and the very real effects of what we do) do it out of jealously. I believe they do it out of disgust. They do it out of a very real fear that we will overrun their culture with ours, debase them, take their natural and human resources, and sell them a factory farmed cheeseburger and a Lindsay Lohan video in return. This is the modern history of subjugation and cultural destruction at the hands of the West. This is what we do, what we have always done. This is America.


At the End of the World
I've got me a pickup truck
And a pretty girl
Gonna sit right here and watch
the Apocalypse unfurl
You can see forever
At the End of the World.