Tea for the end times
I wrote this as a substack Note in the airport a month or two ago. I’m archiving it as an essay / post here since I don’t see it in Notes anymore.
I’ve gone and spilled decaf black tea all over the pink book where I secret my thoughts these days. Multitasking generally leads to more tasks being undone than done for me. The words of prior essays, letters, and vignettes have bled off of pages, through pages, and onto other pages. That was yesterday, but the pages are still a bit sodden even now as I try a new ballpoint pen on them between bites of an airport lunch. Prepackaged vegan soba with an almond ginger sauce, and a compostable clamshell. What an age in which to live. The end times are full of signs and wonders. I doubt by the way the compostability of this packaging, other than in some extreme heat and pressure situation in which you might call any plastic compostable. Misleading, some of these end times signs.
Maybe on the flight to Paris I’ll see about reassembling some of the mottled thoughts, or seeing how they might fit better in their new forms, or formlessnesses, as the case may be. Assuming the jet comes apart over the north-Atlantic as one in three flights from SFO to Paris is known to do, the pink book will end up in the ocean, even more sodden, and all the words are soon to be intermingled anyway. The blur on the pages then might be a better reflection of my mind TBH. To take it in and understand it best at that point, assuming it’s found floating in a slick of plane rubble or washed ashore on some far-flung land, the best course of action will be to paper-shred all the pages, then coffee-grind the shreds, then steep the resulting tatters in 190°F water for a couple of minutes.
Enjoy the inky, woody, salty, decaf black tea (residual from my previous spill) flavored beverage you’ve just made. From the pulp of lignin and cellulose maybe you’ll also extract a few sugars to sustain you, along with whatever of my earthly thoughts have slunk into your body and passed through your blood brain barrier. Nourish as nourish can in these end times when all you have is inky salty tea to fill your belly. Perhaps the psychoactivity induced by the warm drink will offer some nice relief too. Enjoy my memories, my ecstasies, and my anguishes as little distractions and curiosities to take your mind off of the roving blood cults coming for your possessions, your tribe members if you have any, and ultimately your life. Put up a good fight! For yourself, and for what’s left of me – all that is left of me – inside of you now.
The joke is on them in the end anyway. In their cannibal practices, they will break you like bread and swallow you – and thus me – most likely without the ceremony befitting such as sacrament. But you and me will transubstantiate like the good host we have become. Oh wait, no need! You’re already flesh… My bad. But a card laid is a card played, so it’s bread that we become instead. Reverse transubstantiation... Oh well, we can salvage this! Not just any bread do we become but bread of rotten grain (its the end times after all), shot through with ergot, that european fungal miracle. Madness will be their last supper. Possession becomes these filthy creatures, convulsing out on the beach like the swine they are. And so in madness will they drive themselves into the sea, drowning. It’s back to the sea for us too then. Back from where we came, and to where we ultimately belong.
