This too shall pass.

As I wrapped up "Dialing In" I felt the melancholy that had spurred me into writing "Peg's Dream", but this time it felt deeper-rooted and harder to grasp.

In 2025 I found myself thinking about the end of the world, maybe because on the internet images abound of other real people's own personal worlds ending right now under a rain of bombs. I thought about the insurmountable task of mourning all of it at once. It occurs to me now that David Bowie's classic song "Five Years" is about this:

my brain hurt like a warehouse
it had no room to spare
I had to cram so many things to store
everything in there
and all the fat-skinny people
and all the tall-short people
and all the nobody people
and all the somebody people
never thought I'd need so many people

But I wondered what it might sound like, and this is what I imagined. Some cosmic bugler emerges to pay whatever feeble tribute it can, holding on just a moment after everything else has faded to silence so it can deliver its last wavering note.