Emptiness To The Nth Power

Something about the sorrow and grief of emptiness is the shit hitting the proverbial fan today. I notice myself feeling grief over the craving--that incessant need to consume and swallow and digest and assimilate, day-after-day-after-day, all in order to just maintain a semblance of apparent existence in this-here-world. My personal existence, as a human-being, David Jon Peckinpaugh, requires innumerable sacrifices in order to go on. It is as if my life here in this-world is based upon a fundamental requirement of War and Bloodshed, Carnage and Crucifixion.

In order to have lack adressed and dealt with on a daily basis someone, somewhere (or, check that, many someones in many somewheres) are going to have to suffer on my behalf. The long, sweaty hours in a factory are the toil someone else pays so I can experience a fleeting sense of satisfaction. The gasoline I burn in my car so I can go and amuse myself at a department store comes to me courtesy of blood and death. BP, Shell, Exxon-Mobil, and Chevron have been able to fund bands of mercenaries paid to make the life of certain Indigenous Peoples hell, so that new oil reserves can be dredged up from the ground and shipped to markets in North America where we can all happily speed our way down along the superhighway to nowhere.

So lack, and the dealing with that lack--which is another word for happiness and contentment--tends to require a sacrifice on behalf of someone somewhere else in the world. That is the damned nature of material happiness, of the consumer heaven that surrounds us on all sides, it is steeped deep in the dark underworld of death and devastation. I mean, how the hell else can you get a bargain unless someone else, somewhere along the line of production, was made to suffer a formidable loss. That good deal was, dare I say it, someone else's existence.

And so that is what we do, eh? We ask others to bleed and suffer and die for us. We ask others to become ill, to have their lives become a trainwreck, just so that we can litter our homes with bargains. The whole planet bleeds in the name of lack. For lack's answer is death.