The Double Cross.

 

La Vie en Rose-colored Glasses.

A newsroom is like a dream, a truly aspiritual room, where the stagnant atmosphere is deliberately tinted with red white and blue. 

Here the soul takes a bath in black ink, scented with the  debilitating aromatic perfumes of desire and regret. There is something Twilight of the Gods about it; bluish shot through with rose; a voluptuous dream during an eclipse.

Every piece of furniture holds a slouching rounded form, languid and prostrate yet somehow simultaneously attentive and engaged. They seem to be dreaming, their outward movements a manifestation of what it is they dream of; endowed, you could say, with a somnambular existence that resembles that of minerals and vegetables.  The Corporate posters speak the advertisers' language of propagandized vacuity, making of flowers, skies and setting suns little more than balms to lull the senses into accepting as true that which they know to be false.

You will find no artistic abominations on these walls. Definite, positive art is blasphemy compared to dreamy, unanalyzed impressions. Here all is bathed in harmony's own adequate and delicious obscurity.

An infinitesimal scent of the most exquisite choosing, mingled with the merest breath of humidity, floats through this atmosphere where hot-house sensations cradle the drowsy spirit. 

Glowing plastic masses of flatscreens reign over the drawn shades of yesterday's army of Selectric typewriters and cobwebbed fax machines; even at reduced volume the constant hum is like a drone hovering in the air menacing groupthink refugees with imminent dismissal. The News is now the Views, accepted lies having usurped any search for truth, which lies on a bed, the sovereign queen laid to rest, her magic power to excite given over for the quick rush of adrenaline delivered by the unending quest for disaster, quenching the insatiable thirst of polarizing pundits for sensation now superseding the once-hailed plaudit of speaking truth to power, succoring the poor to sucker-punch the comfortable.

At times I see the flames in the queen's eyes quicken, piercing the gloam; those subtle and terrible eyes that I recognize by their dread mockery. They attract, they subjugate, they devour the imprudent gaze. In silent contemplation I have studied them - black eyes compelling curiosity and wonder.

To what demon from hell are we to attribute this all-encompassing atmosphere of collusion, silence, mystery and corruption? What we are wont to call Life has nothing to do with this supreme lie machine which we are now all experiencing, and which sucks more of our sustenance away minute by minute, second by second. Until there are no more minutes. There are no more seconds. Time has disappeared; it is eternity that reigns; an eternity of night where the tattered remnants of surviving tribes wander the earth in search of sustenance, their futures no longer tied to the dictates of the ECB, which is long dead, its leaders guillotined in the dead of winter to avenge the dead of winter. 

A knock is heard on the vault door, an awful, resounding knock that reverberates from the very pit of hell; a  pitchfork being thrust into the sated stomachs of the overweening, ruling class of the Keptocracy.  

Not bothering to await a response from the butler,, a Specter enters. It is a bailiff come to torture the elites in the name of the Law; it is a consumer of mass quantities coming to complain and thereby add the trivialities of her life to the sorrows of their own; it is a messenger boy from a newspaper editor clamoring for the last installment of the final COPout minutes. 

Their paradisiac atmosphere and the slovenly idol, the sovereign of their dreams, their languid lives of languaged lies, the entire enchantment woven so meticulously into a worldwide web of gossamer threads of bright green lies, has vanished at the Specter's brutal knock.  

Pandemic! Who could have seen it coming?  Paradise Lost has thrown mankind into this filthy hole of its own creation, this abode of eternal boredom, this lithium mine. Look at their stupid, dilapidated, dusty abodes; hearths without fire, power plants without fuel, homes without heat, their inhabitants frozen in their beds like Arctic oysters; the sad windows where rain so torrential it has traced furrows through the brick; books stacked on shelves encased in ice, never to be perused again, the spring thaw will turn them to pulp, food for molds; a calendar is the lone wall hanging, it has dates circled that designate appointments that never will be met.

Whence the perfumed propaganda of that lost world which in our state of exquisite boredom we found so intoxicating? Alas ... another odor has taken its place, one of stale tobacco mixed with the nauseating vapor of stale beer and fresh vomit. The rancid smell of desolation now permeates everything.

In this, our brave new narrow world, there is plenty of room for disgust, and it leaves but one object to distract our minds from the knowledge that we lazily left it to corrupt leaders to engineer the machine that is hell-bent on our destruction; that object is the hypodermic needle, its phial of morphine engendering an old and dreadful love; and like all mistresses, it is prolific in empty caresses and rife with incipient betrayals.

C'est-à-dire, Time has reappeared; Time is sovereign ruler again, and with that hideous old man the entire retinue of memories, regrets, spasms, fears, agonies, nightmares, nerves, and rage have all returned.

Each second is now strongly accented, they rush out of the clock screaming, "I am Life: unbearable and implacable Life!"

There is but one second left on the Doomsday Clock in which to bring good news, the good news that causes every one such inexplicable terror.

Yes Time reigns once more; he has resumed his brutal tyranny. And he slashing us with his studded whip as if prodding an exhausted horse. "Hey mule! Wake up Frankenstein! Sweat slave!" Humanity is damned to survive in a world where machines of your own design have destroyed every thing of beauty, shredded every instance of harmony, so creatively.