last night i couldn't sleep and so i finished seven brief lessons on physics. it's a small book full of wonder that ends with the prediction that we are near the end of this civilization if not this human species. 
walking the sea wall i picked up garbage the humans concealed and put it in sight of the clean-up workers on the other side. then i covered a human shit on pebble beach with rocks. the water is so cold in august my chest seizes. we walk along the corps wall and i am stung in the foot and feel small lightning course through my cells and blood which i think heightens my awareness and shows me a long knife-shaped shard of mirror glass in the tall rainsoaked grass. i realized yesterday i sort of walk like a dog now, generally aware of things below the threshold of consciousness that would overwhelm in their profusion.

and i thought how it feels to be alive now, maybe like it always has. i thought of apocalypse as just a term of prediction based on human behavior of the time, which is rather changeless, except for technological advance, and knowledge of physics, which makes the same prediction and which was only ever a matter of time.