TEMPLE HQ

THIS DREAM AGAIN, DEJA VU!

---

New Year's Eve, 2019

We all sit together in our high-rise apartment on the edge of the world, watching the new year count down. It’s still several timezones away. The lights have already gone out across Europe and Asia. It’s unknown where they went, if they went anywhere at all. On the television a woman dances in New Orleans, in dark night before a crowd, firing off lights and sound and singing in 2019. Someone says she’s an illusion. She’s there to welcome it as it overcomes us, a smiling, laughing face to bid us good tidings while we grapple for some sense of voyage or passage in our slow grinding fall to the inevitable, last gasps of our dying lights, preserved in the final standing bastions of it here in Honoloulou, ocean waves lapping against universities holding the writings and sacrifices of countless lives clutching each other helpless and pitiable before what’s coming across the ocean. The first, the last, the old, the young. Death comes one at a time, with justice. The future comes from beyond an event horizon, an indifference worse than any fate we could inflict on ourselves.

We only have a few hours to make our peace. The television goes black as New Orleans falls into it too. For the last time, we raise our glass to the moment, that Now we clutch so desperately as we change the channel to LA. For auld lang syne my dear, for auld lang syne.

This was the first thing I ever published online. Interesting? I'm preserving this as an artefact. Most of my work from this time is BAD BAD BAD, though what I wrote before this is even worse!