Soundtrack of the Slow Collapse

Remember when people used to make mixtapes? And for each other no less? On actual physical cassettes?

I barely do, sadly it was already a dying style by the time I could walk, and by the time I could even freely get my hands on any tech we were already hitting the era of the "MP3" and the YouTube Video.

It feels like something was taken from me.

I would spend my time getting blazed and listening to tunes. Not much else to do as the world outside eroded faster and faster every day, yet still wore the mask of status quo. Endlessly accelerating, yet slower than time itself. There's probably some answer to relativity in there...

I saw it coming through the culture, through the music. They could feel it too, closer to the source, upstream of the cultural decay whirlpool.

All their souls laid bare. A whole generation suffering in their longing of a long dead world, the Empire came and went before they ever got experience it at its peak. They all cried out in unison over long lost or never-had loves. They mourned the future, for it would never come.

They celebrated.

They couldn't have the Un-Utopia that was the Rose-Tinted past.

They wouldn't have the Neo-Dystopia that will be the blood-smeared future.

They'll scream and cheer and dance alone as the slow-burn collapse rolls across the world.

I wasn't the only one who felt it. A friend, a companion to quietly watch the world rot with, a lover in another life, had civilization not spiritually and mentally wounded us all on its way out. We'd get blazed on moonlit porches, listen to music and chat the night away. Share our taste in sound and connect over it. Finally getting to give a pseudo-mixtape to someone like that was pleasant, a ritual of the past getting sent forward. Music tastes would blend into some strange solemn rhythm, mourn-celebrating the End together.

The feeling was something of a Midwest Melancholy gone Global.

There was no 2012-style end, no Day After Tomorrow, not even The Road. It all kind of just fizzled out, with droves of people just checking out of the civilizational-wide masquerade and hitting the road. Some places didn't fare to well of course, always malicious powers trying to make it worse right up to the end. But many others were almost like a precursor to Mad Max 1, people just packing their cars one day and never coming back.

Something about returning to the Steppe-Nomad baseline. The Midwest into the Great Plains were almost perfectly laid out for such a thing. We would do the same eventually, we could finally let go. Wasn't the Hollywoo romance I'd dreamt about my whole life, but it was the best we'd ever get, just a couple bonded people deciding infini-suburbia and concrete brutalism was too much to bare to ever look at again.

We ended up burning down an entire abandoned suburb before we left as a final middle finger to the Old World. There was no beauty to be missed, this wasn't centuries old architecture, all less than a decade old, all horrifically ugly and disgusting to look at. Had some very fitting music playing while we did so.

The long playlist had barely just begun as we hit the road and drove off into the sunset with a small handful of our personal belongings. Watching plumes of smoke and fireworks lining the horizon.

Felt like a dream.