When the old gods awake...

If you are a thinking or feeling person you have probably figured it out by now. Maybe you won't grok the more academic aspect of the conundrum, but oh, you just have to know. Or feel it anyway. The human experience, having reached terminal velocity, is now in the side splitting stages of actually turning itself inside out. Think moebius strip. Fasten your seat belts, Ahab. A bunch of engineers thought they could fix things but it was in reality hopeless from the start. It was said in some circles that it was also much too late, by that point anyway, the pocket protectors were said to now just be pissing in the wind.

The first measurements were taken by micrometer and the stellar parallax was observed from either side of the moon and then mathematically corrected and the data is simply unimpeachable. Having despoiled and squandered and made such a general wreck of the place. we humans are about to get spit out of the current movie set like a celestial watermelon seed. Perhaps a few thousand incarnations as a slice of basalt will temper us for our next swing at the piñata, that is if the powers that be find us remotely deserving.

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The initial reports were odd but not overwhelmingly so; cats chasing dogs up trees, little grandmothers lifting heavy trucks off of babies. Fish dropping out of the clouds, owls flying around in broad daylight. CIA officers starting to mutter about the nonhuman bodies in those boxes back at Roswell, square shooting guys who had never touched a drop. We all knew something was up but nobody could get a handle on it, it was simply too big. People talked of feeling general and unease, even dread, but no one could put their finger on the real source of the existential disquiet..

You couldn't really characterize the changes as mutations. In a scientific sense it was more like the last number on the roulette wheel, the one where the ball never, ever stops, suddenly hitting for 24 hours in a row and not ever stopping, the singularity of the slight chance suddenly paying off in spades as the earth primes for its final curtain call. And so we find ourselves moving through the incongruity.

Some said that it was those folks in the white coats up at Cern, when they unleashed the Higg's boson particle they were messing with the very stuff that holds atoms together, tinkering way above their pay grade and that it was no wonder that the edges of reality were starting to pull apart like silly putty. It turns out that the confines of the possible, didn't preclude, or should I say, guaranteed the existence of the alternative, the impossible, and things were pretty much destined to get curiouser and curiouser.

In a truly infinite universe, these things have to happen, it would be impossible if they didn't, but what was the chance that it would all happen at once and shuffle the deck like this? Snake eyes and a one way ticket back to the critical mass and the unparalleled density of the exploded black star. You suddenly find yourself walking on the ceiling in a place where children give birth to their parents and time hurtles backwards and forwards in the same exact instant.

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My first clue that something might be amiss was reading about the colored lobsters. They were once orangey red in our youth but they now were sporting all the  hues of the rainbow. Blue, calico. What kind of inside joke is that anyway? When they discovered that they could talk too, it left the guys at Rocky Flats scratching their heads. Who knew, who ever asked?

The Sioux elders traveled to Goshen, Connecticut this week to celebrate the divinely prophesied birth of the white buffalo calf. One in ten million chance they said. Two of them were born June 16, the other in Oregon. 

Some see the white bison's birth as a fulfillment of the ancient Oglala and Lakota prophecy that the birth of a white bison is a sign from a prophet, the White Buffalo Calf Woman, who helped them endure times of strife and famine. So what's it going to be bartender, doom or redemption? What do you think we have earned?

The Legend of the White Buffalo

One summer a long time ago, the seven sacred council fires of the Lakota Sioux came together and camped. The sun was strong and the people were starving for there was no game.

Two young men went out to hunt. Along the way, the two men met a beautiful young woman dressed in white who floated as she walked. One man had bad desires for the woman and tried to touch her, but was consumed by a cloud and turned into a pile of bones.

The woman spoke to the second young man and said, "Return to your people and tell them I am coming." This holy woman brought a wrapped bundle to the people. She unwrapped the bundle giving to the people a sacred pipe and teaching them how to use it to pray. "With this holy pipe, you will walk like a living prayer," she said. The holy woman told the Sioux about the value of the buffalo, the women and the children. "You are from Mother Earth," she told the women, "What you are doing is as great as the warriors do."

Before she left, she told the people she would return. As she walked away, she rolled over four times, turning into a white female buffalo calf. It is said after that day the Lakota honored their pipe, and buffalo were plentiful. (from John Lame Deer's telling in 1967). 

There are actually citations for 29 of these white bison being born on Wikipedia. My cynical inner mathematician tells me that with these numbers and the total of live bison extant, somebody better refigure the odds but they fit okay in my story so we will leave them alone. 1 in 10 million. World's going to hell or maybe about to get real interesting again.

All hail White Buffalo Calf Woman, may she wrap herself in her divine aspect and fulfill her ancient promise and then hopefully rest again.

I said that I wasn't a believer in theology, you never asked me about magic.