Blue Rain Abstract by Darren Hester

There was an idea once. No one remembers it because it has changed a whole lot since it first came to be. Not recently though. It started out as a very adaptive idea, but once it had found a good basic form it grew and grew and grew. The bigger it became the more rigid it turned. Change took a long time, if it ever happened at all. It started forming even more complex structures by integrating various other ideas. Then, somewhere along the way, it crystallized. Turned into a solid thing that you could almost hold in your hand. It was too big to actually perceive all at once of course, but that’s a problem with many things these days. A complex painting might be one; a vast nameless city might be another. This one is a religion. It’s a big one no doubt, but it used to be bigger. When it became too set in stone, it lost some of its appeal. Of course, a lot of its power comes from the fact that is seems to have all the answers. Like Nostradamus can be made to predict anything if you want him to, so can the scripture. That’s one of its strengths, but nowadays that doesn’t quite cut it.

No, today’s religions don’t even try to give people all the answers, they just give them a framework. Take the Church of the Great Spirit for instance. It started a long time ago with the tale of the earth as the ultimate creator. The great enabler of life and culture. Where it started is lost in time. Some say it came from African tribes, some the natives of Australia, and some like to think the Indian tribes that once inhibited the great forests of the American continent are its creators. One of the smaller sects that broke of from the church hold for true that the spirit posses certain people throughout time. They say that C.S. Lewis was one of them. After him it split and possessed Hunter S. Thompson and Philip K. Dick. It apparently cranked their brains into overdrive while filtrating all cultural possibilities trough their brains. This is the Cult of the Drunken Spirits ultimate goal. Their nirvana, if you so wish. But why is it called a cult then, you might wonder? Well, it simply has to do with the increased likelihood of it turning you insane. You see, when it really comes down to it the Cult of the Drunken Spirit consists mainly of verbal tradition. Hence the connection to ancient tribes and the likes. This also makes it hard for members to keep up to date with changes in the scriptures and stories. Things never really get a solid form. Their scripture is, for lack of a better word, smoke. But like I’ve mentioned, this also makes it a lot more flexible than more traditional religions.

This is just one of the reasons why the streets are full with crazy people rambling about the popular culture of the past, dressed in something vaguely describable as clothes, with colors that don’t even have names yet. And this is just a tiny speck of dust in the cultural maelstrom that this city forms. There are of course others just like it scattered across the continents of the world. Their movement making the others shift, like pearls on a string. Maybe it’s that movement that makes me type this? I guess we’ll see, won’t we?

Written by Emil Segerstav in an unspecified location, at the 12^th of August 2032.