The blood currently flowing through your circulatory system is a river. The capillaries, a stream. Your heart has tides, each ventricle pumping an ocean of blood. Earthquakes in California readjust a pulled muscle. And gases, animals, plants, bacteria, wind, color, social groups, landslides all cycle life throughout this earthly organism. Broaden your vision beyond the comfort of your physical plant installed safety screen, or the bottom of the next jack and coke or even that hot piece of genital in front of you, and see the truth of the larger whole here. Could the earth actually be a plantlike oaf of an organism? Now we’ll come back to this.
Remember the day that D.A.R.E. came to your 1st grade class and showed you an 8ball of coke? Or an unusually large bag of whatever the current drug given the elusive and over-prescribed label of dope? And at that point you’d never fuck with that, right?
Intentionally harm your own body? Most first graders would say “never.” But how about fourteen years later? Still a clean slate? Probably not, and we do so with complete disregard to the fact that we all know our body is like, “Fuck off, man. You have fun looking cool until I throw your self-inflicted pimply face over the toilet bowl for 3 hours reminding you that the reason you felt so funny is due to the fact that the mushrooms were trying really hard to kill you.” Basically, it’s somewhere in us to play with self-destruction or at least disregard. But for how many will actually be addicted to disregarding their own health for life, the majority will grow out of it, at least past the days of not remembering why there are footprints on your own ceiling. So, what now, how do you stop? Should you try? (If you answer no, you can stop reading here and start your cool, nihilist response).
So first of all, it’s okay that humans have done this to earth. Maybe not okay, but understandable. But it’s getting past the point of fun, something that we used to never have to consider as a real danger (actually a great provider) is now potentially going to be the cause for our extinction (thanks to us). The thought of earth as an organism—one that can provide for life, show signs of its own livelihood, and revoke life—makes me worry about its phase in its own bodily toxicity. I’m not sure, because I am not there yet with my own indulgence, but maybe we should consider an intervention at this point. I’m talking serious cold turkey rehab, because (even though the earth didn’t directly do it to itself unless you really consider the entire universe as a single functioning organism, humans being merely a part) our disregard for the earth’s health and half-assed attempts to save it do not work. Agreed, withdrawal will be rough, parts of the earth (or its inhabitants) may have to be sacrificed, but for the more sustainable good of the organism’s rehabilitation. We got stuck with the brunt of this ongoing destruction, but it’s here regardless of whose fault. We can always ignore the fact that the earth’s health is finite by living by the distraction of convenience, but just as we can live as ‘careless college students’ for now, we should quit smoking and fucking think about our health.
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