Peeping Tom Techie with X-Ray Eyes

I've got some prospects. Read that however you want.

One sentence later seems a pretty short period of time to immediately walk a statement back, but let me just maybe qualify: you can't really read it however you want and still have it be credible. For example I don't have any prospects in the same sense as the prospector played by Tom Waits in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs had prospects. That would be taking the idea of "prospect" so literally that it would almost have to be sarcastic, wouldn't it? Yeah, I wouldn't put it past you. Can't just let a thing lie, can you? God, this is just like Christmas '91 all over again when you wouldn't shut up about the fucking Jello mold nativity scene. Just before mom moved out and then dad made us all live on that boat for seven months and he got that girlfriend with the tarot cards and the bleeding eczema on her feet. Fucking typical, man.

All I'm trying to say is that, while maybe universe is expanding at an accelerating but predictable and measurable rate, the course of a human life is one of flux and wobbles, marked by cycles of growth and contraction, ebb and flow, profit and loss, Seacrest and Dunkleman. Although I guess the last example pair isn't exactly fair or kind, as it makes a joke of one person's struggles while also being fate-locked in the cruelest case of nominative determinism ever. That situation was only ever going to turn out one way.

As the course of a human life plays out, wheezing like Destiny's Accordion with every squeeze or stretch, it's as possible as anything to get stuck (genetically or situationally) being unable to recognize the patterns as patterns; as the undertones or back-harmonies to a melody still-to-be-improvised in bars and measures to come. The hyper-focus manifests as anxiety or depression, feeding on itself until it falls into a discordant two-or-three note cacophony drowning out all else, even erasing the idea of music qua music from your traumatized mind. Essentially I'm saying clinical depression and Smashing Pumpkins music are the same thing. Except, I guess if I'm playing the metaphor all the way out, a Smashing Pumpkins song with an accordion? I just want to be DEADLY CLEAR here, however, that if such a thing exists, I MOST CERTAINLY NEED NEVER KNOW ABOUT IT.

Things are unsettled, to be sure. We're entering into fire season here in SoCal, but these days there's no such thing any more as "non-fire season" any more than there's a non-earthquake season, so you know, no big whoop really. And we're still stuck being governed by someone so odious, even Republicans aren't sure about him anymore, the same fuckers who voted for the Torture Bros twice. So that's still a thing.

But I've got some prospects. Some are professional, some are personal, some intensely so. And some of them aren't even all that great, like for example the prospect of all my goddamned children moving out and figuring out how to be happy without me around. I mean, that stings a bit, sure. But it's still a future I get to live in, Jeebus-willing. It might have drowning cities and a President Mike Pence, which, you know, barf. But it'll also have Greta Thunberg and Bake Off and that new Star Wars ride and Mike Trout and Australian-style soft-eating black licorice and the Artemis program and functioning democracy and superblooms...

Gainful employment. The business end of a loving gaze. I've got some prospects.