“Eye of a hurricane, listen to yourself churn
world serves its own needs, regardless of your own needs.
Feed it up a knock, speed, grunt no, strength no.
Ladder structure clatter with fear of height, down height.
Wire in a fire, represent the seven games in a government for hire and a combat site.
Left her, wasn’t coming in a hurry with the furies breathing down your neck.
Team by team reporters baffled, trump, tethered crop.
Look at that low plane! Fine then.
Uh oh, overflow, population, common group, but it’ll do.
Save yourself, serve yourself. World serves its own needs,
listen to your heart bleed.
Tell me with the rapture and the reverent in the right – right.
You vitriolic, patriotic, slam, fight, bright light, feeling pretty psyched.

It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.”
-R.E.M., “It’s the End of the World as We Know It”

Even the four horsemen have to take a breather now and then.

Today was a waste of a day, a day spent in purgatory, a day that was just like September, except the direction is already well established. It’s almost like everyone forgot what was happening, wanted to pretend otherwise, wanted to return to business as usual.

But Monday looms like a towering monolith in the distance. And everyone with a job knows that Sunday night can be worse than Monday morning.

Of course, much of America won’t be working on Monday. The literal markets will be open, but the proverbial markets may be closed. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. The only reason the market didn’t lose 1,000 points on Friday was the rumor of a weekend retreat by the G-7 financial leaders being sure to yield results.

Today, the managing director of the IMF announced that the last couple weeks “had pushed the global financial system to the brink of systemic meltdown.”

Sounds like you should just keep holding on to your 401k and hope for the best, just like the media tells you.

There is no news, there is no progress, there are no ideas. Capitalism is broken and no amount of fooling seems to be able to fix it, in no small part because people are starting to realize just how transparently empty the whole thing is. Money is just an idea that we all agree to. Once we stop agreeing, the idea seems pretty silly, doesn’t it?

I mean, think about it. Think how ridiculous it is that financial booms and crises exist. How utterly absurd. It’s not because people have more things or fewer. It’s not because there are wars and plagues or an absence thereof. It’s because of machinations in this fabricated concept of money that declare that some people own things and others don’t, that some people can hold sway over thousands of others and others cannot.

It’s laughable. Sit down and contemplate this idea in your own words and thoughts for twenty minutes… you’ll be mindblown after ten. People talk about financial crises like hurricanes that can’t be predicted, like pestilence that can’t be cured. It’s all in your mind. Or in six billion minds.

Which makes it all the more silly when the media comes back and tries to say that irrationality is overfeeding the panic or back when Greenspan chided the market for “irrational exuberance” in the dot-com bubble. As though made-up money had something other than irrational collective action to it. As though it’s perfectly rational to stand at the altar of small green pieces of paper and commit your whole life to their acquisition. As though it makes all the sense in the world that everything can be built or destroyed on the back of such little pieces of paper (or promises to send you such pieces, or electronic records thereof).

For a world that believes so fervently in science, it seems like an awful lot of blind faith to me.

Which is why, I suppose, I don’t fear that the end of the world will come with the end of capitalism. Which is why I’m so convinced that people will just look back and shake their heads that such media of exchange were so dominant for such a long period of time. It will have the same nostalgic tinge as Norse gods or the Greco-Roman pantheon. Couldn’t they see the seepage of their own individual human flaws into this godlike attribution? Couldn’t the realize they were merely playing their own fears out and calling them holy?

It’s hard to know what to do in the eye of the storm. The calm is unnerving, the quiet disquieting. The air doesn’t feel like truly undisturbed air. It carries an electrical charge, a current, it’s aswirl with its storm-tossed past and future. It knows what’s in store and it whispers like a warning that this is mere deception.

Does one give into the temptation to come up above ground, furiously batten the hatches, recognizing that any second the second half of the maelstrom could hit? Does one hang tight in the basement, ignoring the opportunity on the surface, insisting on playing it safest?

Weekends are just another idea we humans have created and agreed to. Most times, they make a lot more sense than money. But this time ’round, it just feels like over-simulation of a hurricane. I’m ready to get the storm over with already. There’s a new world to build on the other side.