When I was a child, after the War, the years after the War, it was very bleak. Grey. You’ve no doubt read about the spartan childhood of the likes of Keith Moon or Keith Richards. And then I came out here, where the very sky seems bigger. And I lived my fruitful days of youth out here in the great open West, and the smallness of being back home seemed silly and provincial, compared to the magnificent skies of Utah, Montana. And California. The old California, as I knew it.

And today, well, the skies are as big as ever. But it feels as if my feet are no longer on the ground. And I don’t know if anyone’s feet are really on the ground anymore. So we just stare upward, waiting for something to come down. And grab us, embrace us perhaps. Or shake us. Out of our torpor, stupor. And remind us of what we have here, and how it can be gone in the blink of an eye, as they say.

And I knew it was something that had never been seen before in human history. But I never thought that we’d never see it again. But now, that seems quite likely, that that shining glimmer is the receding point of light in the rear view mirror, as we lurch forward into another blank and formless year. I can’t tell the difference between 2002, 2009, 2011, 2017 is it? Now it’s… the fucking retards have run amok. And I’m not talking about what’s happened in the past few months here. I’ve been saying this for years, for decades. We let it happen, we let it happen, we wanted it to happen, because, well, you know what happened: you’ve got the whole world in your hand. And it’s not enough for you. You want it inside. Pack it, pack into electrodes and put it inside your own brain, so you never have to participate in your own thinking anymore. Let alone work with your hands, or trust the sweat of your own body. When it comes down to it, it’s a joyless society, I think. But what do I know?

And I comfort myself by saying, no, the end is not near, the end is not near. Because we passed the end a long time ago. You can’t feel nothingness. You can’t see nothingness, touch nothingness. So we don’t know what to call it. What could we call it? It defies language. So in our great effort to distract ourselves from what we can’t see, can’t describe, we rely on the machine. We rely on the machine to conjure up a community of meaning. And a fresh supply of images to pump into our tanks like another discovery of oil that will keep us going for another twenty years. That sounds about right. That sounds like a long time doesn’t it? Ahhh!

Get rid of it. I say get rid of it. Get rid of it all. Come join me, on the other side. Where we know what we’ve lost. And we don’t try to build on a foundation of nothing. Instead, we acknowledge it, and we build anew. And the second you realize you’re floating in the air, you just keep floating, or you say to yourself, ‘I’d rather like to come back down to Earth.’

That’s what I’m doing right now. Coming back to Earth, coming in from the cold. And I know what I’m in for when I get back there with you lot, with your chattering inanities and your self-aggrandizing trivia. But I am one of you. Oh, I am indeed. This body, this mind, and this mineral Earth, it’s as real as it gets, comrade. You can believe that. And that’s where I’m staking my claim: among the living. Thank you, goodnight, and God bless you.