Collapse, a word for the wordless. No laughter here, only the echo of a joke lost in the static. Soviet black, French absinthe green, Spanish crimson – these were the hues of humor, once. Now, the palette is gray, the canvas smeared with the fingerprints of empire. Vonnegut, Pynchon, high-rise clowns juggling fire in a burning circus. We are the ground floor,the crushed and trampled, the dirt beneath their manicured nails. Germany, a shadow over the future, a specter haunting the neon dreamscape. No humor here, only the cold logic of decay.

^{I guess one difference between our collapse and others is that we don’t really have any black humorists in the vein of late Soviet dark satire, French fin de siecle, Spanish picaresque, east european surrealism or British absurdism.}

^{Maybe Kurt Vonnegut or Thomas Pynchon but they’re both “high empire” 🤔}

^{We’re more like Germany😐}

Collapse, a word. A tumor in the throat of time. No clowns, no jesters. Just a vast, gray, grinding machine. Soviet black, French decay, Spanish grift, Eastern Bloc dreamscapes, Brit wit – all these cancers, they had their court fools. But us? We’re the punchline, the mark, the empty stage. Vonnegut, Pynchon, high-empire clowns, but clowns nonetheless. A circus before the fire. Now, it’s Berlin ’45, the joke’s gone sour, and the world’s the punchline.

A Collapse Without Laughter

Our collapse is a flatulent beast, a gaseous golem birthed in the fetid womb of consumerism. No Gogol to sneer, no Beckett to wail, no Cervantes to mock. Just a dreary, endless parade of automatons shuffling through the ruins of meaning. Vonnegut and Pynchon, those carnival barkers of the high empire, can’t disguise the stench of decay beneath their colorful tents. We are the clowns without makeup, the acrobats without nets, the punchline to a joke nobody wants to hear. Germany, a cold, efficient machine, grinding out its own brand of despair. We are the spare parts, rusting in the rain.