I know what you’re thinking already, “Another goddamn collapse piece? This guy is batshit crazy.” I won’t argue with that. I’ve already explained my belief that I think everyone is essentially crazy in their own way, and it’s just a matter of degrees. But anyway, the reason why I like talking about collapse so much has less to do with my insanity level, and owes much more to my sanity level. And the fact that it is undeniably a part of the culture right now. Unless you’re one of the many sheeps and slaves and people who turn their brains off because they realize they are powerless and one person can’t change anything at all (Greta Thunberg is proof of this), which is the norm and very understandable. If you’re some dumb white girl with rich parents, you can afford to go on multiple vacations a year, you have your own apartment and you don’t have to worry about the rent for it, and things are going great for you, you don’t have to worry about collapse as much as the average person at the moment because your life will probably continue to go well for slightly longer before it crashes hard like everyone else’s. But if you’re like me and you’re a real G, you can’t deny that collapse is very real, we’re in the middle of it right now, and everything is coming our way, as Santana would say (bars), haha.
When you become collapse aware, you start to see this system for what it really is: a whole pile of shit built on top of lies and more bullshit. We really built everything over stolen land and wonder why things are going so poorly for us😂. Sometimes I think that, this covid shit was not some guy who ate a bat. That is very funny to say, and in literal terms it might have been, but you want to know why this covid shit’s happening? It’s because, figuratively speaking, we built everything over stolen land and we’re all cursed. Anyone attached to this Babylon system in any way, shape, or form, will have to suffer the consequences, and the more you have at stake in it, the more you will personally have to suffer. I think Covid is a Native American phantom coming to fuck white America up its unnatural asshole for centuries of destruction and propaganda. (I don’t genuinely believe this. Maybe a little bit, but at this point I should probably remind you I’m a comic and it’s funny to me to say things like that). People can extend a meaningless olive tree branch all they want and say shit like, “This building was built on the blahblahblah lands and we are proud to share the territory with the Wasagakgeeee tribes,” but that is too little, too fucking late. It does not negate the fact that people are quite literally standing on dead Native bodies as they say shit like that. There is blood underneath your feet that you are the beneficiary of, any way you slice it.
It is quite sad that all of this must go, and humans are facing extinction, but at the same time: is it really? When you dig deeper and look at what’s really going on you’ll come to the realization that a good, hard collapse is what we all truly deserve. We are practically begging for it. What I find particularly fascinating about this disaster we’re in is how much it permeates our everyday lives: not only did we build over shit we shouldn’t have (effectively cursing ourselves, our children, and their children forever until all the wrongs are karmically restored), we built things incredibly poorly. There are highways in America right now just waiting to fall apart. All it takes is one mistake in this entire system for every single thing to fuck up.
In the mornings when I make my breakfast, I look at my eggs, toast, waffles, and especially my coffee, and I think to myself, “Enjoy it all now, motherfucker, because this is all going the way of the dodo bird.” It is an absolute crime that I have a breakfast like that every morning. It’s wasteful and unnatural, and yet I do it every single morning. I literally drink a litre of coffee everyday, how is that okay? It’s not sustainable, and it’s never been okay, but because of how we built this system we trick ourselves into thinking our way of life is somehow acceptable. “I deserve this and that guy doesn’t, because I work hard and he doesn't!” As if work is somehow natural to what we are as humans and justifies wrongdoing. It’s all lies and bullshit we all fell hard for because we want to believe it’s okay. It’s not. Even if you consider yourself to be a person with integrity and morals, I think the average person is no different than a German just “following orders” and would literally do anything to survive if the conditions they were in were right. Half of those white kids you see with Abolish The Police protest slides on their IG would easily become cops and do the same thing if they were offered enough money. Anyone’s morals can be bought for the right price, people are value hoes. (I am no exception to this either, I’m a false prophet here, because all it would take for me to be bought would be some billionaire Hollywood producer giving me a mansion and a Farrah Fawcett looking broad. I’ve never owned property, so that’s literally all it would take for me to take all of this stuff down and start preaching about the benefits of capitalism all of a sudden).
When I drive my car, I think the same thing to myself, “Enjoy this easy travel now, asshole. Gasoline is on its way out.” If I get laid, I think, “Enjoy this. Could be your last time with a beautiful girl before they lose all their access to all the products they use to look that good. By 2040, hair dye and extensions and stuff like OPI Nail Envy will be fully out of stock and unavailable. Everyone will be equally ugly. Just a bunch of unibrowed cavemen and cavewomen walking around, stinky, hairy as hell, looking like they did in the before times, using their own spit and sweat for lube.” When I’m in nature, I think to myself, “Wow, this place looks nice: better enjoy it before it rapidly deteriorates more than it already has!” (Side note: I’ve made a couple movies about appreciating nature in the face of our decline).
And I don’t really go out to stores and shops and such these days, to tell you the truth, but when I do I think about it there too. If I’m in a French bakery with some smiling pimply teenager charging me 9 million dollars for a chocolate chip cookie, I think to myself, “Enjoy it all, cocksucker, because it’s all about to be taken from you.” All of this is temporary, marked for motherfucking dead, and it’s about to die very soon. When I’m in the world these days I feel the same way I did watching my grandfather with cancer on his last days. I can hold his hand, I can chill with him, we keep each other company, but we both know what’s about to happen.
To give you another big example of how the permeation of collapse is in almost every single thing we do, take a moment to consider the “outrage video.” Awful moments between two or more people, that are being recorded by another person. These types of videos are incredibly popular because I would argue, each one is documenting an aspect of collapse in real time. I’m sure you’re familiar with an outrage video: they are videos that are somehow considered acceptable to watch, even though they are clearly deeply upsetting.
I don’t watch many outrage videos anymore these days, because on some level I feel these things should have no real place in our lives. Your life should just be about your immediate surroundings. And also because since George Floyd’s brutal murder was captured on camera, I feel like that was my limit. I don’t need to see anything else that’s just gonna make me feel upset and ruin my day in the comfort of my own (parents’) home (haha). There’s nothing I can do about conflict happening across the world from me, so it shouldn’t matter to me. The other reason I don’t enjoy these outrageous videos of two random people fighting at a store or whatever is because they sometimes feel like they’re designed to get you to be reactive and angry and locked in the “matrix” (cliche term, I know) of social media, so to speak. It’s a derealization type of thing people seem to have with outrage videos where we seem to watch them and ignore the wider context of what’s going on, and the fact that these are real people and not just people on a screen. It’s not nothing, it’s real life. I mean, I like violence and conflict in art and movies, but when it’s real life I am decidedly not a fan.
That being said, I am of course a man of my times, and just like everyone else; I recently got pulled in and ended up watching one of these outrage videos I couldn’t not watch once I saw the title of. A Merrill Lynch banker by the name of James Iannazzo was caught on camera in some smoothie place being abusive and racist to staff. He later said his poor behaviour was because he felt upset the staff in question gave him a smoothie with peanuts in it, and the smoothie was for his son, who has an allergy. The staff said they were only told not to put peanut butter, but not explicitly told about the overall allergy, so they made it the normal way aside from the one instruction they were given. Anyway, all of this is besides the point (and not surprising: I have already discussed the nature of communication being a faulty mechanism for human beings and how it’s really just a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of what we really mean to say).
My main point in bringing this up is that it’s another clear echo of the collapse we’re all in. What I see is: a bunch of chess pieces, arriving at the end of a game. What the employees see is merely an abusive, shitty man. And what the man sees: employees who should do what he says, and cannot grasp the fact that something went wrong. The man in this scenario is a guy who is used to things going his way under the system of capitalism, he’s doing well financially, and the one time things go wrong for him, he lashes out violently and lets these employees know exactly what he thinks of them when he says things like, “You’re a fucking immigrant loser.” (Ironic, because his last name is Italian and pretty immigrant sounding to me. He’s an immigrant himself but he doesn’t think so because he has just assimilated well, but that’s for another time😂 . Side note: I discussed the hypocrisy of Italian Americans considering themselves superior to other immigrants in my script Street Players).
It’s a great representation of where we are: the man is angry because his poor son suffered a severe life-threatening reaction (who I really feel for, because I have the same allergy and have experienced the same near-death experience multiple times in my life now), he takes his anger out on these poor kids who deserve way more than what the world is giving them right now, these kids are helpless because they’re in a society where a fucking grown man is attacking them verbally and physically. It’s like watching a Jenga tower fall down in this one video.
The whole situation is a goddamn mess, and when I say the phrase, “permeation of collapse,” that’s exactly it. We can all feel it on some level. You can break the tension in the air right now with a nutcracker😂. This entire fucking world is about to topple before us, and things like this are a clear sign to me: when a grown man attacks teenagers, that’s collapse. It should not take that much to make someone snap like that, but if I had to guess I’d say it wasn’t just the peanut. It’s the lockdowns, the rising prices, the virus, the variants, the atmosphere, the vibes of the world now. The guy could not take it. Bukowski once wrote in the poem The Shoelace that, “It’s not the large things that send a man to the madhouse...no, it's the continuing series of small tragedies.” It’s very much like how our infrastructure is crumbling: it’s not one thing that makes a society collapse. It’s the million, everyday things. Things are quite literally getting nuts out there.
Before shit hits the fan completely, I’m looking forward to getting that next nut myself😂, haha.