What in the world is going on in this world? While it spins around without much sign of slowing down, the little self-appointed beings it spawned from a soup of mitochondrial DNA in some primordial rock pool gear up for the end of days in a dizzying headf**k of joyless Jihadism, treeless technoscape and future uncertain.

How did we come to be in the state we are in today? They say that when the Lake Toba supervolcano erupted on the island of Sumatra 76,000 years ago, our numbers crashed to a mere handful. Those few good men and women, hardy hunter-gatherers in tribes unswayed by a little thing called disaster, survived a die back under epic skies choked with a change in chemistry. So how did we go from a few thousand living under the ward rules of Matron Nature – she of the curfew who ordered ‘Lights off ’ by 7pm – to fourteen billion feet and galloping? To use the parlance of the new age: W.T.F.?

It’s all down to the night lights. You cannot go practically overnight from tallow candles and oil lamps that barely bite into the darkness to an interconnected grid that delivers so much generated light to so many planetary places that the earth is inviting an invasion of the body snatchers. We are sleepless in everywhere but Seattle. Hello, universe? Can you see me now?

The lights are on, alright, but nobody upon nobody is home. Well, actually, there are so many of us home we’re positively busting down the door. In those hearts that self-combust in a mass suicide pyre, that’s where we are. It’s the absence of mind that is cause for concern. Social and political psychiatrists prepare to deploy….

Brussels bombed under the watchful nose of the EU/UN/NATO and any other shady acronym you can fit together. Does this bring new gag fodder to a generation of comedians hungry for explosive material? Three men walk into an airport…. Boom, boom. The time bomb is ticking until another atrocity is committed by young radicals seeking redemption, but not the kind that either Jesus or Bob Marley advocated. Dressed for dystopia like the Village People in the their figure-hugging vests, when it goes off – and you’ll know about it when it does – their redemption will send shock waves through the immediate vicinity. When the pieces are gathered up for a religious burial, the flesh&bone collectors will know at least they’ve been honest in their cause, for those martyrs will be wearing their hearts quite literally on their sleeves. Not that their sleeves will be attached at the elbow.

Why did the Toba supervolcano leave a few of us as a human seed bank? It’s all wrong. Since when did martyrs feel the need to make martyrs of those standing next to them when they never even stopped first to introduce themselves? And to call them nihilists. At least if they believed in nothing, as true nihilists do, they wouldn’t bother getting out of bed to take up arms and bomb belts in the cause of making a good impression on God (like He hasn’t enough sorting to do as it is).

A black man about to leave a White House who has done more to decorate the walls wise than any other since the president in the wheelchair who taught the world to get on its feet again. Oh, yes, that White House, HQ of our last, best hope. Its Oval Office draws all manner of term-appointed residents, from the sublime to the ridiculous. Any schmuck with money  can run for the Oval Office but it takes a special kind of schmuck to throw his hat into the Republican Party ring, thus leaving the hair on his head quite as ridiculous as the man himself. With Obama exiting stage left, the next to enter stage right might be a different kind of player, specifically the type that would mate with his offspring if only she wasn’t so inconveniently chipped off the old block. Then again, America can’t have lost the plot to the extent of letting in a juggler-cum-clown with incest in his balls, surely?

Brexit, schmexit. Dominoes topple, Brexit onto Frexit, Frexit onto Tragix. Rome sacked by itself. When finally we Europeans, for the most part, are getting along like a tribe on fire, we toy with the idea of tearing apart the family. And why? Because, Daddy EU Commissioner, you’re cramping my style. We’re through. I need to find myself, my lost identity. Deep down I’ve always hated you. With you bearing down my neck I’ll never achieve the…self-actualization…I so deserve. I’ll expect a favourable settlement, of course. Forget Tolstoy. He can’t help you now. It’s Freud’s narcissism of minor differences we need turn to, all over again. That’s what’s fuelling it. Narcissism, and history’s habit of repeating on itself. 476AD, 1618AD, 1914AD, 2016AD, 1812 Overture. Those among us who don’t think a well-timed terrorist atrocity won’t be the tail that wags the dog in the referendum stakes. Lest we forget, lest we forget.

History repeating itself first as tragedy, second as farce. It really is. If it wasn’t so farcical it would be tragic. Humanity busy making mountains of PVC garbage out of molehills of common sense, common sense that reads: you cannot keep trashing the house and still expect the landlord to renew your lease. Baby green turtles garrotted by a plastic ring from a six-pack tossed away in Botany Bay, washed up in Valparaiso, Chile. 100,000,000 sea creatures killed by plastic and chemical effluent each year. Primary forest culled to make way for palm oil to make the food that makes industry penny-wise and fat consumers pound foolish.

There’s one born every minute, but is this the best moment in history to be living? You cannot be looking up at the stars in the galactic medium when half the world is nose down in Samsung’s Galaxy at the stars of the social medium. We’re looking at someone else looking at someone else looking at someone else; mocking, pitying, ridiculing them, never a kind word spoken in jest. There are more filmmakers than there are films worth filming. There is real loving to be had but it’s always the guy next door who’s the one getting it. At least the Band plays on with Bob Dylan doing the freewheelin’. There has to be some redemption in that, still none that our Jihadi Joes would ever appreciate.

What in the world is going on in a world going off? And what would our proto-parents, who survived the Toba supervolcano of 76,000BC, make of it?