America is a terrifyingly broken country.
It's like 'every day is backwards day' crossed with an infinitely-recursive manifold.
I saw a headline this morning that hedge fund managers are bullish on diesel. And the logic here seems to check out from what I skimmed. Will be interesting to see how this develops. A consumption downturn might kick the can out further.
I do support the argument that further complexifying essentials before the great decomplexification is a bad idea. However, burning a ton of fossil fuels to build alternative power sources is not a solution unless it is basically free energy - renewable alone is not sufficient justification. We need volitional degrowth. We won't get it, but that's what we need.
If you find a hole hidden under geological eras, and it was made just for you and you knew it... you wouldn't feel tempted at all to just... take a step in... a unique hole unlike any other in the world, this one welcoming you like your own shadow with its depths... and confirm that someone really did carve out your exact silhouette?
It's certainly something I could imagine happening in a dream. Like my recurring dream of driving off of bridges.
There is a Buddhist element of reincarnation going on which might be lost on some foreign audiences, but the feeling it is trying to summon should be familiar - a strange familiarity of something that should be unknown to you, an inexplicable intuition, something that feels like it could be from a past life, a premonition, deja vu.
If none of this is relatable to you, that's okay, but it is relatable to myself and many others. Hopefully you don't have recurring dreams about driving off of bridges, either.
The surreal aspects beg you to drop your hyper-criticism and to look for deeper imagery. I love it. And he can do it in such a short form, while also managing to singularly capture the psychological horror as well as anyone.
Imagine present day Stephen King telling stories through a one-shot manga. The action wouldn't even be started before he ran out of paper! Of course, King has his own masterful way of conveying horror and it works very well, too.