The Dust Journals – Part XVI

Monday, May 16, 2157

Yeah. It’s been over a month. I’m just now settling down to doing this again. I wanted to give myself time and space. I didn’t want to pressure myself. At first I felt the guilt of not updating hard. And it became worse with each passing day, because when you’re stressed out, there’s nothing better than to beat yourself up even more, give yourself more reasons to get upset. So I did this for a while, until finally I said, “Fuck it. I’ll write when I feel like it.” Problem solved.

I spent the last month and a half or so living in the moment, allowing all the feels and emotions to wash over me, allowing myself to get as angry as I wanted, as self-hating as I wanted. Though I did not try to kill myself again, at least not overtly. I figured that eventually, either this thing would sort itself out, in which can I would write about it, or it wouldn’t, and I’d be dead.

Had I died, or became otherwise unable to continue this thing, ending it with the line “Fuck the A-zoners” wouldn’t have been a bad way to check out. I still feel that. A-zoners are a culmination of all the imbalances produced by the sordid history of humanity. Folks during depressions didn’t know for haves and have-nots. Folks during wars didn’t know for haves and have-nots. We have constructed a planet where your survival depends solely on where your parents live when they conceive. If it’s in an A or B Zone, swell. Life’s good. Otherwise, you’re fucked. And there ain’t a goddamn thing you can do about it. This world has no social mobility, not even a hint of it. Arm guards keep you the hell out. And so-called lotteries to let in a trickle at a time don’t.

It used to be that your skin color would determine your fate in the same way. Because we’re all a bunch of mutts now, that legacy has largely (not entirely) passed. Not entirely? Of course not entirely. In A-zones, you’ll see mostly fairer skin, not exclusively, but mostly. Of course the funny irony is that white folks, like they were known a couple of centuries ago, couldn’t survive in this world. They connived and contorted the world to fit their reality, to maintain their majorities, to control the institutions that ruled over everyone, to tilt the game in their favor, but Mother Nature got the last laugh. My great-granddad used to say, frequently, that scientists will figure out a cure from melanoma, as the suns rays became more and more punishing. Like with so many things, he was wrong. So what ended up happening, of course, is what history now calls the Great Merging. Interracial dating and procreating suddenly became patriotic duties, a thing. Darken your color line, but not too much, just enough to keep you from getting sick. I think it was the first President Bush who referred to his grandkids as his “little brown ones” and got into shit about it. My great-granddad referred to me in the same way. Ha. Ha.

Another myth that arose was that a bubble would be created, either in space or terrestrially, that would protect the northern latitudes from the punishing solar rays. Infighting kept that project from getting off the ground, literally and figuratively. So they are frying and getting too hot like the rest of us, but at least they have their desalinated water to keep their whistles wet, to water their plants and pretty lawns, to maintain the fiction that the world still exists. I still say: Fuck ‘em.

So I’m still alive. I’m still writing. To understand where I am and how I got here, I want to take some time to tell. I’m not going to do it all right now. But I’ll get to it.

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