So Far

I can’t remember tomorrow. What happened to tomorrow? Tomorrow happened tomorrow. Tomorrow wasn’t yesterday. How could it be? Tomorrow happened before yesterday was tomorrow. Yesterday I could see today. It looked vital and cooked. Today I see tomorrow as a potential happening in whatever way people enter into it and make their decisions and start their cars and sweep their kitchen floors and open their refrigerators and take their kids to school and eat breakfast and remember their youth which is a stuff that becomes history one way or another. An important event or an inconsequential sigh. An old man nodding in an armchair as something historical drifts into vagueness in his mind and I forget that the old man is me and when I open my eyes it’s tomorrow. Meaning now. How did that happen?

“Reflecting on the three ‘temporal ecstasies’ that are the past, the present, and the future, Heidegger says that only when we’re paying attention to it does the "being-been" (rather than the "past") come to our mind and allow us to be ‘present’ to the situation. Future, being-been, present: this is the order of ascendancy in our experience. ‘Being-been is born of the future,’ Heidegger insists. Far from being a ‘not yet,’ the future is ‘the decision’ from which the human being comes to himself - and to his memory of being.

From "I Don’t Remember Tomorrow," by Philippe Nassif. “Eight miles high / And when you touch down / You'll find that it's / Stranger than known.” From “Eight Miles High” by The Byrds.

I try not to look into the future. It doesn’t look good. Ugly, in fact. Horrific. Planet Earth is in peril. The Arctic ice may disappear this year. The weather is already crazy. Floods, fires, hurricanes, typhoons, methane plumes, precipitous decline in insects and songbirds. If there are any humans walking around fifty years from now I’d be heartily surprised. Of course, I won’t be here to be surprised.

I’ve had enough of tomorrow. I want the present to be present as a present and not the shadow of a disastrous future.

What is present to me now is a bed, a cat, a magazine, and a radio.

A lamp, a bloodstream, a spread of fingers, two legs, two feet, thinning hair, mirrors, clothing, books, choices, regrets, memories, suitcases, light, delight, various tinctures of THC, emotions, skeleton, vibrations, inundations, batteries, gravity, space, atmosphere.

In 2007, Keith Richards fell out of a tree in Fiji and required surgery in New Zealand, thus causing the A Bigger Bang tour to extend into 2007.

The Big Bang occurred at around 13.8 billion years ago, cooling sufficiently to allow the formation of subatomic particles, atoms, giant clouds of hydrogen and helium, stars and galaxies and The Rolling Stones.

The protagonist here is therapeutic. That would be me. I have to be. I live here.

This is the future. It just arrived. A part of it, anyway. The morning. Pinched, cinched, and wet. It unpacks easily and is wrapped in bubble wrap. The mutations are to be expected. The saffron is long and the theorems are intrepid. The cat is lying on the floor, wondering what’s going on. The future is going on. It seeped into the present and became the past. It wasn’t the future I had in mind but that’s ok. The future is ok. So far.