For Fun

Dark ambient music for the anger that rises in silence and finds nowhere to go.

Right now, somewhere, people are tipping thousands of plastic ducks into a living river, for fun. Because they can, because it amuses them, and because no one will stop to ask what it costs. "It will all be collected," we will be assured, as though that undid the energy squandered to make them and ship them, the plastic already in our bodies. You stand at the water's edge and you cannot laugh. What turns the cold in you to something loud is not the act alone: it is the era. Fifty years ago it was ignorance; today, everyone knows. Everyone has been told the living world is dying, and chooses, in the same breath, not to see it, committing the small wreckage anyway, delighted, certain it does not matter.

Here, grief and rage change places again and again; nothing resolves, nothing is soothed, because the question, how dare you, has no answer the laughing crowd could hear. Beneath it all, the water keeps flowing, witness and victim at once. At the very end, a single living bird answers across the silence: one real creature against ten thousand effigies of plastic.

For those who have stood apart from the crowd, clear-eyed and furious, watching people lay waste to a world they swear they love.