We are fucked and life is amazing.

[jackshoegazer]

The other day while I was running, I was listening to the audiobook of Breakfast of Champions and I got to the climax of the book, when Dwayne Hoover goes on his rampage and Rabo Karabekian explains his painting to the citizens of Midland City.  He explains that his abstract painting, a single band of color on a dark backdrop is a human soul.  That when you strip away everything else away, when you take away gender and race and class and setting and context, all you have left is a single unwavering band of light.  In his ugly painting, there was beauty if it was but understood.  At this point Dwayne Hoover, who has just learned that people don't have souls, that they are just robots programmed to do whatever they are doing, goes on a rampage and starts to beat people up, because they don't feel anything.  They don't have souls.


The Temptation of St. Anthony

And I was thinking about Bukowski's "60 yard pass" and how he says that without "the possibility of the miracle" (and a miracle is a work of God, something divine, the soul's action on the Earth) that he would "shoot all the lights out of this fucking city."  Bukowski, like Dwayne Hoover, would rampage and destroy everything if it wasn't for the miracle.  Bukowski even refers to people as "malfunctioning," like they are Dwayne's robots.

And I worry that's one of the reasons everything is so fucked.  For so many people, people are robots, they are soulless worthless things.  That nothing is sacred.  The Earth is just a thing and things don't matter.  We have seven billion people on the planet and so many of them are shooting the lights out of the fucking city right now.