Chuck Perrin

S o m e t i m e s, on those long strange endless winter nights, when I find myself slipping in and out of a relentlessly restless sleep – this feeling of unease creeps across my consciousness like a stray shadow, a black cloud of foreboding. I’m not sure why. It could be that something I had for dinner is acting up – as Ebenezer explains it, “an undigested bit of beef, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato.”
More likely it’s reflux from the load of crap I had to swallow that day, dealing with the runaway “me me me” miasma of modern life in twenty-twelve. It’s like a speed race to nowheresville, the highway to hell – where it seems the only way to stay sane is to continually assure yourself you’re in control, that what you’re doing is meaningful.
But because technology now allows us to manage, even dial in the shade of what we experience, it has become easier and easier to delude ourselves into thinking that our pretend reality is all there is – except in our subconscious . . . can’t fool the id. So I guess it sneaks up and throttles us from time to time to remind us that there are some weird scenes taking place on this bountifully beautiful planet Earth.
Massive groups of people are obsessed with arguing and killing over religious beliefs or lineage – as if either matters at all.
Still others have no problem abusing, misusing, or sucking the marrow and riches out of our planet without any regard to the consequences.
And then there’s the babbling politicos and power brokers, hammering away at whatever will increase their stock.
Sometimes I wonder what the rest of the Universe is thinking about what goes on down here on this teeming pressure cooker of a planet whose inhabitants refer to themselves as intelligent life. They must be shaking their cosmic heads.