FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Pelt frizzed from sleepless, thrashing nights and lack of self-care, you’re a mess. Your brush moves through your fur like Jackie’s hands, desperate but incapable of undoing what’s been done. Entropy increasing forevermore, the laws of thermodynamics have won. Nothing can lift the growing weight from your shoulders, the one that mats your fur and makes your back ache when you think of the world. Your tail is stiff on every commute to work, your eyes wide and unseeing, your mind like blown-out brains: a gory vision of the end and what else? Your ears flatten, your shoulders slump, as you shuffle inside and get ready to smile or be told to. What else? The big dog in charge barks his orders, bites your heels, tells you how you’ve been missing the ever-increasing KPIs. Don’t forget you’re supposed to smile. Is it you who’s the mannequin or is it the cats by the cooler? Their vapid small-talk makes your whiskers twitch, you don’t know what to do so you reciprocate but the hollowness persists. It always does. How can they be talking weather at a time like this? Last week you brought up the concentration camps filled with kids and they just said: [i]What? Really​? That’s crazy[/i]. You heard the other day somebody calling war in the Middle East [i]High-T[/i]. One must grieve for reality, even as it slips from us. You can’t help but bare your fangs at the topic of chat-bots. Your younger cousin said he doesn’t know how he would get through college without them. Generations teaching themselves to stop thinking, to stop making, to stop caring. Another snowstorm in March, another blaze in LA, another data center opened today. Your supervisor finds you with your head in your paws and tells you to stop slacking off. You start crying, get pulled into the office. They ask you what’s wrong. What’s wrong? Where do you start? No, what do you say? What [i]is[/i] wrong? The world, certainly. The way of things. Our leaders and our technologies and our ignorance and our inability to care enough to actually do something about it all. But what does any of that have to do with you, really, pup? You’ve got a job, somewhere to stay, a sister you can talk to and a couple friends. Stop whining so much. But isn’t that exactly why we’re fucked? Complacency, a lack of empathy, not quite enough time, energy or money to actually do anything. A scope too small, convictions too fickle. So that’s it, there’s your answer: you have to do something. Maybe nothing will be enough but it has to be worse to soldier on until you’re battered and old, fur patchy with an overbite and an ever-limp tail, utterly resigned to the fate of both yourself and the world. Instead you could make calls, push back on dangerous talk, show up at rallies or organize more. You could become part of a wave and help it build to a tsunami. Every one of us a mere drop of water but, together, an ocean. Wreak havoc on those who have and believe we should not. It’s a race now. Nuclear devastation or climate erosion, doesn’t matter, each a ticking clock. The condition of loss was set long ago, and it’s everything gone to rubble, death counted in billions. What’s wrong? Fuck that. Quit your job, join a co-op and when the agents of the state raise their arms know at least you lived right, your eyes once glazed-over shining bright even in your throes. Body surrounded by grass your fur, still wild, at last in harmony with your surrounds. The sky above blue and gold, so beautiful you smile one last time, trace the path of clouds like the course of bullets that change history. Your final breath a secular prayer to the future: May the right bodies fall to earth in your wake. May vines climb our skyscrapers and tear them down to naught. May paws make contact with earth and feel only love.