Blackout Beach - "Astoria, Menthol Lite, Hilltop, Wave of Evil 1982"

In wave one of the new regime, houses and buildings and services and plumbing and volunteers and young professionals and condos and roadways and front lawns will all swarm around individuals like a cloud of black flies, like the center of a slow and gentle hurricane, a movable and unstoppable city.

In wave two of the new regime, smoking will be a kind of poetry, a performance reserved only for the most daring, the truly courageous among us. There will be a new culture of smoking, filters sharpened in pencil sharpeners, saving exhales in separate jars, tumors bronzed and placed in places of high note.

In wave three of the new regime, grass will be best left unseen. An "Earth Shave" will occur, almost on its own, partly because of a kind of muscle memory enacted to replace the empty silos, long emptied of the wind ravaged grain, and partly for aesthetic reasons, a desire to change the look of the pictures that satellites take. This will be a highly advanced wave; many will die.

In wave four of the new regime, a year will be chosen when all the children born during that year will be cursed, and there will be charlatans, warmongers and peaceniks among them, but cursed charlatans, peaceniks and warmongers all. I believe, and this is just my personal belief, that they will choose early on to lie both on their driver's license and to themselves, in an attempt to escape their own curse. But they need only to find their fellow cursed, like a diseased tree trying to spot another diseased tree, I believe they could be happy together.

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(drawing by Nick Howard)