That's… well.. bleak. At BEST 1.5 C uptick by 2040? Am I reading that right? That is really not good. Like, as in, really bad, and that is the most optimistic report they can generate? It’s hard to not feel, well, despair here. First, good on the scientists for keeping up with the reporting and modeling. That’s not an easy job. Second, we all know it matters for fuck all. Donny can hardly twit a full sentence, let alone understand anything in that report. If democracy is running out the clock, then autocracy is gumming the pacifier.

But, I dunno man. It just feels like we’re closing up the house. Maybe it’s because I just moved out of a bad apartment, but I get that feeling here too. Like, the walls were shoddy, the electrical system was haywire, the neighbors were loud and overcrowding the place, the constant noise was too much, and the fights, oh the fights just outside my bedroom window. It was just nutz. But it feels like moving out of that place, like closing down the house of a recently deceased loved one. There is all the history in a place, all these things and pictures that people made and cherished. But there is no-one left to love them anymore. You’re cleaning out your now dead grandma’s stuff, going through photos that you’ve no idea about, if she really thought well of the people or the place in it, those clothes of your long dead grandfather” These were his dress blues from when he just got out” Maybe he’s buried in another set, but only grandma would know and she is gone. And you know it’s important that someone know if Joe is resting in his blues or not, but no-one will know ever again.

That feeling of a deep clouded sea; you know it goes down down down, but you’ve no idea how deep or what leviathans of a life are flitting about in there, and the light is going out and the air is cooling and the fog is rolling in and you have to go back to the docks and you know you’ll never be back out there to that spot of ocean.

It’s that final echoing feeling of that dark, dingy apartment. You had so much emotion there, so much life, not all of it bad. You know the floorboards that creak just so, the time that the garbage company comes in the mornings, how your cat really loves that one warm sport near the equinoxes. But now the musty smell of the shower mixed with the bleach and it’s…. over. The carpets are cleaned and all the fibers lay one way and the other, making dark and light colors from the reflected glow of the blinded window. Somehow the background noise of the crying babies next door is gone, the street murmurs are like ghosts and drum along. You can hear your shoes slap along for the first time ever. All is as you found it, and there is no life you recognize there now. It’s colder on your cheeks.

That’s the feeling that I get with these climate reports. Like I am just supposed to be a person that is destined to clean up the house, move out the stuff, as best I can, quietly, mournfully. Like, I am, just here to witness it all, like the bottom of the 9th when the home team is down by 7 and everyone has already gone home in late September, the pennant race long lost, the hopes of summer gone. The lights are still bright as the dark moves in, illuminating a field that everyone is just out on, doing the motions. Like, just sitting there in the stands, hoping, but knowing the game is over. That my job is just to record the score, for the books, that maybe 10 people will ever look at. Trying to secret away scrolls from the Ostrogoths, for a brighter time. I’m hoping that being a witness means something for the future. That acting like Samuel Pepys will make me the next one, because I know it’s so fantastically unlikely that I will be, but I’ve nothing else to do really. Like walking around empty streets after the bars close and the rain lets up, neon reflecting off the asphalt.

I know the game’s not over, but I can’t help but sigh with each out. I can’t help but linger in the last darkness of the cleaned house, that single light left to turn off. I can help but just wipe my face as the boat hums back into the docks, not knowing if the salt is from the water or a tear.