Aw 🤍I would tie your shoes too esp if your hands were full of groceries and your laces were untied. I would say “you are my friend, why would I want you to fall?” And i would tie your shoes. This story would carry a lot of metaphorical weight in my personal bible. Im picturing a kind of fat, bored priest mindlessly reciting this story in a church shaped like a giant bird cathedral that’s full of really fucking old people who smell like beans and shoe polish, who are nodding their heads pretending g to get it. The priest has a coffee stain on his robe. He’s thinking about a sandwich. “And lo, she tied his shoes,” he says, pausing for effect that never comes, “because that’s what friends do.” The old people nod harder. One of them says “Amen” at the wrong time.
The year is 2666. The old people are just holograms. This moment was programmed thousands of years before the shadow of the idea happened in a living mind for th first time. Of course, there are a lot of cockroaches, but they are polite and they wear top hats and tiny danish clogs.
It turns out that in 2666, humans aren’t eating bug protein for sustenance. The bugs are eating human protein for sustenance. This is just how it worked out. Nobody made a big deal about it. There was no war, no apocalyptic revolution. Humans just kind of petered out and the bugs were like, “ok sure. We will eat you too.” The cockroaches are actually very respectful about it. The Danish clogs make little clicking sounds on the marble floors of the bird cathedral. They click like a thousand tiny metronomes counting the seconds until the last hologram flickers out and there’s finally no one left who remembers what it felt like to be lonely, which was the only thing humans ever really experienced with any consistency. Not love or joy or transcendence, just that crushing awareness that you were alone inside your own head while surrounded by other people who were alone inside theirs, all of you pretending the loneliness meant something, when really you were just killing time until you died and the relief of it was the only honest thing about being alive.
The bird cathedral is the last standing relic of human civilization. Of humans at all, really. Now all that’s left are hyper intelligent bugs with 25 hour lifespans. These bugs have no civilizational continuity. No culture survives them. Every day is year zero. Every revolution resets. The cockroaches have discovered a billion different kinds of math and they are all totally fucked up. They carve these theorems into the walls and then die before they can do anything with them. and the next generation reads them and goes “oh, yeah, obviously” and immediately throws it all away to start from scratch.
Cockroaches don’t organize society in ways that are hospitable to human brains. Intellectually, they just kind of vibrate in this sub-zero information state until some idea explodes from the ether and resets the whole world around it. But the bugs don’t mind. By day 25, they’re kind of over it. They’re ready to pack up the show. You have to live hard and fast when you only have 25 days to carve your name into the heavens.
But the old people at church, who are like 65-80, are totally cooked. Most of them just shuffle around with their shoelaces untied, staring off into the middle distance, parroting whatever they last heard that traumatized them most.
Now the bugs just replay holograms from human civilization for entertainment. “How quaint,” they say, as the watch the fat priest recount the shoelace story to 25 old people clapping and pretending to get it. “They don’t get it but they are pretending. For each other. Because not understanding together makes not understanding less painful. How quaint.” Clickety clack clickety clack the bugs dance off on their merry way.
☣︎
perfect