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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Jupiter’s Moon Europa got that salty water underneath its surface. Which, apparently, is the right kind of water to support life. Like, nice! Now, let’s see if it actually has it.

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This is a bit out there, but hey what the fuck can you do. I was bombing through Warren Ellis and John Cassaday’s Planetary last night when there was a segment about the explosion that wiped out the dinosaurs. As I am wont to be, I got a bit curious and began wondering: just how long enough was this shit?, what were we up to?, and perhaps more vacuously: could people have come to Earth (people being a rather homosapien-heavy filtering of the notion of intelligent life, a concept perhaps even beyond our simian brains to comprehend outside of limited parameters) and I came across a pretty awesome way of looking at Dinosaurs, Us, and How Long We’ve Been Here.

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Welcome back to MONDAY MORNING COMMUTE! By the time you read this, you’ll most likely have completed your first day of the workweek and will be primed for some solid entertainment. But not if you work the graveyard shift. Which is a bummer, unless you actually work at the graveyard, `cause then you get to meet zombies and mad scientists and packs of goth kids playing Ouija!

In any case, I’m going to give you the rundown on some of the shit that’ll be keeping my spirits high over the course of the next week. Your mission – should you choose to accept it – is to hit up the comments and show which sidearms you’ll be using in this workweek showdown.

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