Breach the strata.

The concept of simplicity is a universal translator for all concepts, theories, and ideologies. The Universe is a ridiculously complicated mechanism, a complexity infinitely wider than the maximum girth a human intellect can wrap itself around. This is a universal facet of all sentient life in existence.

The Universe itself understands its own inner workings no better than we do; after all, do we truly understand our own inner workings? Do we have a grasp on the meaning of life, or the substructure of an atom? The Universe moves amongst other Universes and exacts its own science upon its own scale, and the complexity of that much larger existence is very much the same. Life, after all, scales infinitely in either direction, and there is no way within reason for most of us to understand it.

Some of us are, for whatever reason, seen fit to know. We are granted a torturous bane of an existence where we understand the true scale of all things. It is breathtaking and it is terrifying and it drives most of us mad. The rest stay quiet, and composed, and calculative. We live out our days unable to share the truth with the human world, since the burden of proof is impossible to bear.

We watch as our race simplifies the inner workings of everything to better understand them. Abstraction is an ideal for sentient life, but arrogance comes along with it - humans see their sentience as a step up from other creatures, but they cannot consider that other levels of awareness exist above it. Indeed, the human race comprises multiple stratifications of sentience in and of itself.

The vast fields of chemical reaction that form consciousness and memory are reduced to subsets of classifications in textbooks. The imagery that flows from those fields onto a page or canvas is picked apart by the words of those who cannot understand their creation. The most fleeting and impossible to contain of human emotions are assigned a few mere letters for their common conveyance.

Simplicity. It speaks to the human neuron. A common language for a common level, one to be used by us and observed by the invisible ones.

If only the planet had a neighbor with a cure

Pond scum is a common analogy for the lowest classes of Americans. Perhaps it's best taken as part of a broader symbol - human society as a pool teeming with life. There's the scum at the bottom, the tadpoles feeding on it, the lily pads floating on the surface, the flowers grasping desperately skyward, and so many other layers.

You wait in line at the supermarket. It's nine at night, and you're a lone warrior, collecting an array of drinks to refresh the supply at a gathering. Your gathering. You arranged it, and you did the leg work, and therefore the mindshare taking place is your property. There is one express lane open, it being so late at night, and you mingle amongst bachelors in its cue.

A couple has dammed it, though, with their girth and their slow minds and their glut of products that clearly violates the twelve-item limit. Why doesn't anyone enforce these things? Why are these pustules allowed to breach the terms of the honor system? As if they have any honor anyway.

They buy cat food, and diapers, and Hot Pockets, and beer. They have a packet of food stamps and coupons with which to obtain all of this material at an immaterial cost to them. Meanwhile, your personal mindshare, which you spent so much time and money meticulously organizing, is fluttering away back home. The bachelors stare and mutter. The blockage is aware of what it is doing, but it doesn't care. How dare this pond scum break the rules in such a vile manner?

This system works better than you might perceive with your feeble, selfish mind. There is no pond scum, there is only a disease, but not a disease upon you or upon society, but a disease upon the Earth. We are the natural order, but in the same sense of a pox.

What if we all experience time in the same chronology?

Meat. Naught but meat. Gazelles who turn around themselves searching for a purpose that isn't there. They spend their days obsessing over themselves, for they are their own perceived world. They sense the lion - an intruder in their conscious environ - and they escape into the dunes that envelop the oasis.

The lion simply waits, taking the chance that his meat may reason that it will die out in the dry sands if it does not return for the precious water and vegetation - the meat of the meat - that it needs to live.

Ice cold wind, one pure adjective of this desert, does not provide relief, or shelter, or sustenance. The meat performs some sickening form of cryptozoology upon the ragged, fiery dunes. It discovers that which it did not believe could truly exist: A way of sustaining life on a long, dry journey through this arid world. A thing of legend living beneath the sands. The meat creates a way to fashion itself shelter from this wicked environ. The meat lives on.

Meat of the meat is not enough for the lion. It is one link in the chain, and it cannot skip the next step down. The vegetation can sustain the meat, and the meat can sustain the lion, but the vegetation does nothing for the lion. A simple, efficient machine would have been impossible to build in this existence, and instead, complexity reigns. One piece of the chain falls, and the rest must adapt. If too many pieces fall, the machine chokes, sputters, and dies, and life ends.

The lion ends. The meat finds a place in another chain. One machine traded for another.

Most of us resent our own trait of neglecting the future for the sake of impulse, but it is what makes us beautiful.

The idea of the end of the world pervades our collective consciousness thoroughly. As a self-centered species, the concept of individual death is already at the forefront of our thoughts; naturally, this lends itself well to how seriously the concept of large-scale death is taken. The thought of our species ending is tragic to us, and we never stop to take in our culture's meager window of existence the way we take in a compelling novel or a film: There is a beginning, and there is a middle, and there is an end. It's not tragic - rather, it's perfection of the flow of time through existence as creation's art.

Human beings worry that the world will end during their lifetimes. Sometimes they worry about a meteorite striking the Earth and vaporizing us all back into whatever cosmic ether we came from, and sometimes they worry that our governments will flip an array of switches and burn society from the surface of the world in mass atomic fire.

Any concern that nature (nature, of course, including cosmic forces) will intervene in our individual lives is purely self-centered because, as individual beings, we are absolutely nothing. Indeed, as a species, we are nothing, and as a planet, we are nothing. The Universe is vast and complex beyond the ability of a Human mind to comprehend, and its workings do not pay us any mind. We do not exist just because of it, but also in spite of it, which lends our existence an exquisite dichotomy.

Given the exponential expansion of our biomass across the world, we are far more likely to see our own growth kill us than any external force could. Those of us lucky enough to witness the end of Humanity should, perhaps, be grateful for it. Who, after all, enjoys tuning into a movie part of the way through and then turning it off before the climax?

Like a torrent into a funnel

This is not your perfect life, this is not your American Dream, this is your American life. This is your dystopia, a grizzly future world where technology reigns over ever-deepening chaos and society shrinks and grows in unison, medievally bifurcated. They dreamt it, you consider it, you feign an interest in it... you never realize that you're living it.

You find your small miseries in between the near-magic you take for granted, and you focus on them as if they define you. You cope with a heavy heart, never forgetting or ignoring that you are forced to cope, because that's the human condition - at least, it's the human condition as you've been conditioned to interpret it. You recognize that you don't have it so bad compared to the atrocities you're aware of in distant and unfamiliar places, but that doesn't prevent you from suffering from the poisons life throws at you.

Misery finds a way. As long as it's left the slightest opening, it will reach you. Build a levee.

Stubbed thumbs of the cycle

Everyone's hair is short here. They buzz it, all of them. Some of them let it grow out to a few inches before they reap it again, but most just eliminate the crop as soon as it becomes the slightest bit unwieldy. Sometimes it makes it difficult to immediately tell men from women, sometimes it doesn't. I guess that doesn't matter as much in this place.

My fingers hurt from the machine's constant impacts. Each mistake exacerbates the problem. Bruises, clotting, pressure on tender nerves. Wish I could be more dodgy.

I'm peered at through sunken eyes across the till. The sink's breadth offers them an advantage of anonymous movement, an unfair one, but one earned in decades of toil. They judge, an unfair judgment, and one rarely given and never earned.

Leroy's hand... I can sense it here.

From a reign of suffering comes another age

The flower. The symbol of love, adoration, beauty, friendship. Part of the cycle... death begetting life. The murder of one granular instance of plant life on Earth, the portrayal of one person's feelings for another. It is a simple transaction that may not seem balanced - a number of living cells dying for the sake of another being's simple gesture - but in the grand scheme, life is purely balance.

You talk about the tragedies of man and woman, the travesties he and she commit. Injustice, war, pain, death of the sentient. Atrocities committed between people, and between cultures, and between societies. We wage war on one another while our nations do the same, and the past wages war on us through its lessons of sustainability. We wage war on our Earth, as some say - but, to be sure, it wages war back.

Molecular balance is key. Energetic balance is key. The balance in your mind - the scales that tip between joy, pain, hatred, ecstasy - is not key. It is the imbalance that exists in another dimension, the dimension of human thought. Perhaps our race as a whole, in the end, when pooled and averaged, does balance out... but perhaps not.

The flower becomes love, the love becomes life. The flower itself, while dead, continues to offer its gift from beyond the grave in its physical husk. The chain continues, and human life marches along, blissfully unaware of the monstrous gods that act as puppets in our lives as we do in the flower's. We understand them as well as the flower understands us.

My blue is your yellow, but they bleed the same

Sawyer should have more carefully considered the destination of his vacation. This is a beautifully diverse city, but the resultant progressive nature can be retching for someone of his background. He tries to be tolerant, and part of him doesn't understand why the hatred swells, but it's still there, festering, an incurable disease of the soul.

The transit here is wonderful and terrible at the same time. Buses are ubiquitous, running down almost every large street, aside from the more intraversable hills. The schedules can be a bit mish-mash. LED arrival countdowns illuminate some stops with an informative red light, while other stops are little but a bare street corner with a route number stenciled somewhere.

The plastic bus seats are set up to strategically force you into avoiding eye contact with other people. If people didn't keep to themselves so deliberately, this setup might be a very functional social outlet. Instead, there is an impenetrable, yet invisible, wall in front of almost every human face. Most of the humans who attempt to break these walls are, to some degree, mentally ill. Or they're from a place that does things differently. Sawyer quickly realizes that he's from a place that does things differently. Who can say why all these people waste this portion of their lives on iPods, crosswords, and staring off into space at the same passing landmarks they see every working day of their lives?

Despite it lacking in courtesy, Sawyer watches the strangely beautiful, seventeen-year-old lesbian sitting across from him - the one wearing the tattered Muse hoodie and a vintage skeleton key on a worn, neon lanyard around her neck. She made the lanyard in camp nine years ago. The tied key opened every last door in her old childhood home - a home that has not existed for years. It's a nostalgic charm with no practical reason to exist anymore. Her forehead slope is slightly reversed in an oddly intriguing way.

A foreign arm is draped casually around the back of her seat, an inoffensive signal of human intimacy from her companion. This other girl has a curved, red scar on her jawline that she received in a fall during a badminton game in tenth grade, when she lived back in Columbus. She hated the boy who caused the accident for all of three months, until he was killed during a river rafting trip. For no particular purpose, the boy's name is written on a piece of paper that she keeps in her wallet as a memorial.

Sawyer is mentally pawing at his situation the way he would poke at a torn cuticle. Stop upsetting yourself, Sawyer.