Two weeks ago some asshole piloted a homemade steam-powered rocket into the compacted talc of the Mojave desert on some half-baked publicity stunt to prove that the Earth is flat. It killed him. Ends being what they are, I suppose it’s beyond the pale of meaningless for his journey to note that NASA has been mapping the Earth’s gravity from outer space for almost two decades. Their findings? Gravitational forces are greater in places where there is more mass underfoot. In other words, an asshole over the Mojave weighs a little less than an asshole over the Himalayas.
Today, satellites passing through the outer dark of earth’s atmosphere photographed trenches being dug to dispose of Iran’s coronavirus casualties. The global economy has ground to a halt, spare whatever profit can be wrung from toilet paper sales. There hasn’t been a second of this crisis where I haven’t been haunted a vision of miles and miles of suburban apartments stuffed to the hilt with cases of Charmin. Inside, puffy corpses are sprawled about in matching track suits and Nike sneakers, applesauce all over their pale faces. I imagine their gradual liquefaction into the beige medium pile carpet like some sped-up claymation video set to the tune of Hank Williams Jr’s ‘A County Boy Can Survive.’
The capital D Dildo that occupies the Oval Office has tried every last piece of my patience in recent weeks, decorating his own dumbass Mojave steam rockets with just the right amount of flags to inspire a chorus of unexamined idiocy. Yesterday, I called my septuagenarian parents to tell them that I felt that circumstances made it incumbent upon me to let them know that I wanted them to live long enough to die from cancer, heart failure, shingles, or gangrene —anything but this completely preventable steaming pile that has been gifted to us by the inaction and apathy of the moron piloting our collective steam-powered rocket.
Years ago, I photographed a program in central Wyoming where prisoners trained wild mustangs as an accessory to their sentence. The prisoners who were there —human beings like you and I —had been sent away for their transgressions against other people. In my first moments there, I watched as a middle-aged prisoner worked 800 pounds of electric sinew and muscle in the confines of a round pen, pressuring the mustang when it wasn’t compliant and easing off when it was. The man was outmatched. The horse was four times his size, lean, wild. As I calculated the unlikeliness of the mismatch, I realized the rehabilitative value of the horse in this setting: when something is beyond your control and capable of destroying you, neither lies, force, nor cheating will do you any good. You are left with only honesty and what you can make of it. It’s a round fucking Earth, folks.