Rat King

Being alive is uncomfortable. Skin stretched over bone, blood pressing through veins and arteries. Thoughts, emotions, ideas that are incomprehensible even by the sharpest minds of the human race. 

We all occasionally feel that deep indescribable ache of everything, suddenly, at once, boxing us in all the while setting us free. A dampened sidewalk glowing with streetlight, the blur of strangers’ faces, empathy for one’s mother and father and their mothers and fathers before them. Something like an ancestral soul tie that stretches through time and hums inside everyone on a plane that exists outside of chronology. Evil and righteousness being so extensively intertwined, moral colors fading into each other, confusion, humankind’s most deadly contagion.

Could it be that the more human society progresses, the more uncomfortable it feels to be alive? Millions more souls created and sustained by complex systems, more material, more genes, more currency, more flesh. Dense, vibrating, tangled, loud, multi-colored mess that intensifies by the milli-second. When will it all crack open like the stomach of a cow with ruminal bloat? Are we clogging Earth? Constipating her with a population of human rat kings? 

Our tails lost within a dense mass of networks and knowledge which keeps us stuck, linked together for eternity. A conceptual hive mind, but not a true one, not by nature at least. No, we’ve made this ourselves. May the knot grow ever larger and tightly woven.