A monarch on a dying planet.

The impermanence of culture on the internet.

A neighbor’s dog in a dying body.

The impermanence of one’s own memory on the internet.

A fleeting thought connecting all of these on a dying strand of consciousness.

There was a column I had intended on writing that would tie together these disparate thoughts. In fact, I had intended to string them along clumsily in this week’s Monday Morning Commute. Heavy-handedly sort them into an array, sewn together with some half-baked idea about living under the Sword of Damocles. The monarch blooming in our garden, despite things in motion to ensure its extinction. Contemplating the existence of OL, amid the slow heat death of blogs and websites. My neighbor’s dog happily looking to me for affection, unknowing of its own body harboring cancer. Myself trying to understand my own evolution through the rummaging of posts here, not wanting to relinquish my own Archive in order to transition to a different medium.

But clearly, I didn’t. But clearly, I haven’t. Not outside of some sort of meta-reflection on their potential connections.

Sometimes the words don’t come. Sometimes the words come but you don’t want to utter them. To cast them into the Ether, for judgment, for evaluation, for to speak them makes them real. To comment on the butterfly, or the dog, or my own history is to ensure their reality. Their death sentence.

Sometimes it’s just too much, and that’s okay.

Tangentially, it reminds me of PKD’s quote about the sentence that can destroy you. About the certainty that you will hear it, but also the fact that another “sentence exists, another series of words, that could heal you” and maybe this week let’s just focus on that.

Be that sentence to someone this week. There is this notion that kindness is weakness, that softness is frailty. However, I think there’s strength in the move that opens up your own heart to someone. To speak the second sentence, you must accept the vulnerability that comes from uttering the kindness. Paradoxically, the softness at your center is only expressed through strength.

Destruction is easy, its as simple as clapping your hands.

Obliteration is easy, its as simple as closing your eyes and swinging.

It requires only the reptile at the core of your meat-processor to gnash alive.

For this week let’s admire the monarch. Let’s pet the dog. Let’s simply accept the waves of entropy and times that usher us along. Let’s deal with it by sharing the second sentence.

This is Monday Morning Commute.

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What’s up, my friends? I must confess I’ve been staring at an empty text box for the past ten minutes. Trying to come up with something more gripping than “what’s up friends?” – but here we are. Just a poorly caffeinated dude (way below my usual levels, but I’m working on it), wanting to hang out. With ya’ll! The fellow occupants of the sovereign state known as Space-ship Omega!

We’re into the second actual, full, meaty week of the year. The holidays receding into memory, though not without subtle reminders. For me? The tightness in my waistbands, the billing statements stacking up. And with that infinite recession comes the reality that, oh fuck, there ain’t any respite arriving any time soon.

However! That’s what we have the art & farts & sharts for! To serve as a balm for the existential soul, helping us to get through the grind. And, wouldn’t you fucking know it! This here Monday Morning Commute serves as a community to communicate the various things we’re enjoying, and looking forward to, in a given week.

I’ll go first! ‘Cause, you know, I’m writing the motherfucking thing.

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