I don’t go out looking for these things, they’re just happening and I figure I oughta point it out. This week, it’s feet — there’s no clearer sign of 
The End Of The World As We Know It (or TEOTWAWKI) than feet washing up all over the world like shoes or those rubber ducks.
More and more surgically amputated feet are washing up on ocean shores around the world, from Michigan to Sweden.
I’m starting to think someone’s got a boat in the middle of the ocean and is using it as a torture ship, chopping off feet. A friend of mine says I should call my blog ‘Things to Worry About’ – it usually takes about four minutes of talking with me, he claims, before he starts wanting to drink in the shower.
On to more of the headlines that caught my eye this week:
Ozark Police Taser Teen with Broken Back 19 Times
Those last two links I ran across via WeirdUniverse.Net, where I saw one of the funniest comments of the week:
Posted by Paul on 08/04 at 07:34 AM
Official Violence against Cyclists
Last week I mentioned the guy who decapitated himself with a chainsaw in the UK, this week there was the guy who decapitated a fellow passenger on a Greyhound bus while other passengers looked on in horror.
Seriously. This week’s links were all grisly, disturbing, violent harbingers of certain doom. The end of the world is upon us! Good timing too, what with FoolishPeople.com doing Terra Extremitas. Several previously unpublished poems from my TEOTWAWKI cycle, as well as a new work, are scheduled to be associated with this event, last I heard. Here’s the track from the album of the same name I composed way back in 2004:
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I will never forget the day I first landed on Ogrish.com (I think it was .com – I haven’t looked back) and got curious whether the videos were real so downloaded one, depicting a scene out of that wonderful place on planet Earth called Chechnya.
There’s a Russian soldier marching a Chechnyan nationalist prisoner (whatever they’re called) or maybe it was a Chechnyan and a Russian prisoner, I couldn’t really tell…and I watched as the soldier motioned him to kneel, which he did, and then shot him in the head and the body just sort of rolls over in limp deadness. The prisoner was wearing jeans and a plaid shirt like five million people all over the world. The guy who shot him mugged for the camera and did the traditional thumbs-up by shoving his goddam gun into the air and the video ends.
The comment of the individual who posted it had said the video was released for propaganda purposes related to the conflict in Chechnya. t seemed real enough to me. First the guy was alive and then he wasn’t.
I really don’t know if I can argue with the people who claim there’s too much violence in the goddamn media any more. That really feels like severe cognitive dissonance territory for me because I’m virulently anti-censorship.
We’re getting a data overload of everything, and the everything includes violence. People didn’t chainsaw heads off bus passengers in the seventies. Something’s gone off the rails.
What’s gone off the rails, though, is partly the very subcultures I tend to associate myself with, namely, ‘Weird Stuff’, horror/sci-fi, subjectivist-nihilist philosophies, and so on. I don’t have the urge to dissociate myself from these fringes.
But…I want to do…something. Something has to change this if we’re going to end up with a better world to live in, and no matter how much of me becomes dark, mindless, scarred-to-it-all-numbed or whatever I came to a point where I had to keep this thought in front of me and everything else behind me.
If we really are living in the end-times, I somehow think going down fighting is necessary, if there’s no real optimism one can wrench out of it all, there’s the nameless sense that maybe there’s no greater meaning to it all, but just not running away from it all in fear is something admirable enough.
I had initially planned to use a picture of an amputated foot, but figured it was in better taste to go with an old self-promotion image. I agree with a lot of what you’ve said, mesila – I think it’s vitally important to have an end to the world as we know it – I don’t think there’s anything that can be done other than to carve out the best possible end.
in the poem cycle of TEOTWAWKI, what I’d tried to get across was that we are meaning – and that meaning itself has lost what it once meant.. thus we are no longer what we were – the word itself is coming to an end.
We become a cipher without a key to unlock it – six billion voynich manuscripts walking around on the planet mewling and bleating nonsense at each other. It’ll be the tower of babel all over again. Maybe I’m just babbling already, it’s pretty hard to tell some times.