I'm certain you've had that moment at work when you've said "This is a complete waste of my time." You've said it 10,000 times. I bet you've pondered the 10,000-mile pilgrimage tomatoes make from nursery soils to destination markets. Think of all the fossil gases persons-we-care-about must inhale! Damn you Big Oil!—you say with intended humor. But you're on to something, big.

The inefficiency of every last thing around us utters a simple truth we can all appreciate: that keeping busy is the primary purpose of our toil, not the other stuff. How or where it all went wrong I am not researched enough to answer, but it looks like we got conquered sometime in the past and turned into segregated Worker-Consumers. I formally grant you, wise reader, the right to decorate your cell with as many inspirational posters and wall-doodles as you'd like. Your sentence has begun.

We're farther in the Future than you think.

A horse with a gasmask, first world war, was apocalyptic looking. But a Prius that's been rapid-oxidized and melted into the ground next to an intact tree, that's next level.

Genetic code written on a computer and transcribed by your own mitochondria, that triggers regular creation of a toxic protein in vivo, that's pretty darn novel huh? Or a living virus that does the same?

Rockets landing in reverse? Low-altitude satellite meshwork being put in place above our heads... almost done!

Phones that listen to your ovulation cycle, decipher your words, even by 'accident'—Go away, Siri!

Governments that cycle their predator and prey populations in-and-out with ease and without detection.

Fun Factoid 1: Someone has already sat down and programmed the value of human lives in terms of floating integers, needed for the math done by AI drones in targeting and killing people.

Did You KnOw? Robots will soon metabolize flesh... Tee-hee!

Convinced yet? What do you think comes next? Have our works of art given us any advance preview ...

We are in the future, but it doesn't feel like it. When you open up a window and feel the thousand-year-old air and thousand-year-old sun, it pulls you back to a simpler time. It's an unfortunate trick that lends to the veil.

"History is written by the Victors."

"Everything comes out in the wash."

These two things I was told in Government class. They are incompatible. Catholic school ain't it.

The first statement is true. The second is what slaves say while being tricked into sucking the ass that feeds them.

If you're here, and this mandatory civilian work arrangement persists, then it was probably intended by the most powerful of historical forces, the architects of our archetype, the Victors. This is important. We are here because we are willed to be here, for those with the power and the pen can have it any way they like, and this world is that way.

Doesn't matter the strings of power, not here. We come after the great prophets and their trials of faith, after the dark ages and ensuing rebirths. We come after the great thinkers, who turned the world upside down, and paid with their lives. We come after the rebels, who shouted their shrill cry for freedom, fought hard and fell fast. We come after the great battles, the great ideas, the fantastical show-offs that puttered into obscurity. Truly, hasn't it all been done and written? How many more tragic heroes do you need [to sit down]?

The world we inherited is the one forged after a million reckonings. Whatever it is, whatever its true purpose, its structure has been perfected to stand the test of time, the tests of Men. It survives, and the people it has consumed are forgotten. The drive of their souls become tiring fables. Their purpose washed-out.

We are left with little to do, little to complain about. We are left with things, and work.

I look at my very working-class neighborhood and I see many taking leave of the moral life, patronizing instead the arts of death. I turn on the hypnoscreen and I am told of celebrity sex crimes, suicides, and broken families, where we would never suspect. If both the top and the bottom of the social pyramid are corrupt, then how can we be so sure its middle parts are safe haven?

Can one do a proper accounting of the lethality of our culture en masse? Is there a most-categories death statistic published that lets you risk-assess the tolls of civic participation—stress, toxin, spiritloss? How many people make it comfortably to old age outside captivity? The Amazonian senior in the loin cloth seems rather content, not broken and afraid.

What if everyone's dying? How many of your apparent community would have to pass away before you said "Hey, wait a second. That's a little more than it should be. I need to pay attention to this." How many? Ever thought of the number, or the percent? If 7% of my people disappeared on Year-1, then another 11% on Year-2, then another 12% on Year-3... How long until you can read between the lines? Maybe you'd never notice, especially if endless calamaties cascaded-in during those years, perhaps with overwhelming casualty, perhaps alternated with mind-boggling Newscrap. Or, maybe you never took stock, because it's unusual to do so.

There is an extra-terrestrial element I think, to those that call themselves our masters.

Beyond their endless schemes that ring unearthly, observe firstly the influential imbibing the message to metamorphize their appearances to that of Freakazoid. You say, but Webmaster, this is the stuff of humanity, that in turns that may be measured academically, men and women committ to fighting their nature, markedly after centuries of civic captivity. To that I say, observe secondly, how at the end of Earth's many rainbows there is always a Leprechaun hard at horde, a person you never thought would exist, actually holding down the polar extreme inferred, or if you prefer - a terminus - one the casuals can't stomach and refuse to.

Jeff Epsteen & Friends were doing exactly what you know they were doing on that island. The Inquisition really sat people down on spikes. At the end of Orwell's 1984, (Spoiler Alert!) the main characters are executed. In other strange words: you don't need to just play with the answer like it's a gift of contention, or wait for permission to accept it. Have it. Have the answer like cake. It's yours. It's right in front of you. Say it.

Aliens, nigga.

If you understand how information is handled, you have a really special tool.

Remember the movie Men in Black? Society already hosts countless galactic neighbors right beneath our nose, and the state has been dealing with them ever since at least the ol' discus-crashing days.

Remember the movie Planet of the Apes? Slaved, by a smarter race, ages before now.

How about Contact? That one had Jodie Foster. Earth is beamed blueprints to build a spaceship capable of joining a high-roller time-share presentation but we're a few millions years too late. Damn.

How about that one with Charlie Sheen where martians are greenhousing the Earth hotter while creating clones of dead people? (The Arrival)

Oh yeah, remember Invasion of the Body Snatchers? ...There's a creepy scene where a person is getting jabbed and says 'Why are you doing this to me?'

I could go on and on with great scifi flicks that infer cosmic-grade conspiracy. You can probably name a few. What if all of this is the same narrative, and we convert all perspectives thereof to imitations that invalidate it? Humans constantly project the apparatus they feel strapped upon them, the one covered in slime, oozed by sons of bitches from a fouler planet than mine.

In global faiths is manifested a very old and respected intuition that the social ladder continues up and off this planet and into the Heavens. The Pharaoh was God on Earth, so was Christ, able to enjoy dual-citizenship of the terrestrial and the Extra. Thanks to them we are able to access the Divine, the only sensible place where the social ladder may continue its rungs, bathed in the astronomical powers necessary to facilitate fathers of greater magnitude. It appears to me that only the semantics are fought over here. I suggest that the Earthly majesty of pain and pleasure colors is reflected Above in-scale. Good actors and bad, Drama, leverage of power and exploitation, as an extension of what we experience on soil, natural and logical.

The 'dust-keeping' skills I figure, are at least as brutal as the ones at our scale. I admit I spray indiscriminately at ants with the biggest baddest bottle of bug spray I can find. But ants I'm-a-killin!

Choose your Highers as you will, but no matter where you park your flying car, keep in mind someone made you, someone saved you from the others, and someone gave you a working visa.