He thought, If I take a break from looking at it all, from reading about it... it will all still be falling apart when I come back to it. Ha, ha! I won’t have missed anything! Still the eruptions of madness in mini-malls and on highways. Still the skies troubled by helicopter blades and screaming military jets. Still the seas seeking some way to sink the boats trolling their bellies and the submarines blasting away at the eardrums of their most magnificent beasts. Still the alligators floating closer to the edges of the lagoons found across from the convenience stores and shady backyards.
Did other species elaborately pursue their own demise? First, dramatically and with great flourish -- military drumbeats ricocheting off of walls, banners riffling in the salty breeze, leaders carried around on grand palanquins -- and later, enacted by ungainly fools bounding around golf courses, displaying their idiocy as in a slapstick revue?
He concluded that it was only humans who did this and he concluded that, as improbable as it seemed, he was born into a generation that was witnessing the last collapse of this particular cycle. There are five generations to each century. If this ring of history for his species began 10,000 years ago, when people along the Tigris & Euphrates Rivers decided that they wanted to plant seeds annually to cultivate, harvest and eat, instead of foraging and tracking their food (nomadic children of a Wandering God, as Morris Berman put it), then that makes 500 generations until his own. Well, 499 generations until his Generation X. There they go again, those damn Millennials stealing the lead role! Ha, ha. His situation was improbable; it left him incredulous at first. But he was starting to acclimate himself to the idea and to join others in seeking to reclaim the old stories. And he sensed the grief and the impatience of the other animals, evolving new instincts to confront the rogue species of which he was a member.
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