I live in a "humanated" valley in the central region of Scotland. Every night, when it gets dark, the streetlights come on. And that's just the start of it. The houses light up, the cars light up, the petrochemical refinery sends flares from the giant chimneys, fifty feet in the air. Some nights it creates an orange pulsing, throbbing undertone to the whole sky.
This is how we cram a couple of million stinking monkeys into a space this big and this is how we keep them alive and feed them and clothe them and this is the fucking mess we make of our cage and I could almost fucking live with that. There's perks. You live longer, you don't have to hunt for food, there's MTV and Nintendo and microwave ready meals. I agree - that shit is quite nice but I've seen what it's supposed to look like, without so much "us" I've seen the motherfucking stars!
The thing is, you don't see the stars in towns and cities and most folks don't go where you can see them because, if they did, then
those places would be towns and cities. That's sort of how it works. City slickers and townies see some of the bright ones, yeah, the ones from the horoscopes and whatnot but they don't see the rest of them. They've seen a few little points of light shining at them from the general direction of up but what they haven't seen is the couple of thousand other ones that convey the shape, the scale, the sheer holyfuckness of where they're standing and how fucking insignificant and fragile their whole world is, in the grand scheme of things.
I spend most of my time in this shithole and as much as I can find, as far away from it as I can get. I could tell you exactly how good any given year of my life has been by counting the number of nights I looked up and saw the stars.
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