 Zach Peckham is a writer, editor, and educator. His work has received Pushcart nominations and has appeared in jubilat, Territory, Poetry Northwest, Always Crashing, on the Academy of American Poets website, and elsewhere. He currently teaches at Cleveland State, the Cleveland Institute of Art, and is managing editor at Cleveland Review of Books. Cryptobiosis, or What Will Happen to All Our Emails When We Die so here you might imagine an arrow shot from a bow and traveling deep into space very fast but let’s be honest it looks like slow motion at this distance woooooooooooooooooosh leaving a location on earth you pick but probably the Midwest going out and on for lightyears imbued with importance carrying a message our last great hope or something a sign that we were here all the mothers heroes explorers doctors artists writers musicians philosophers humanitarians pilgrims city planners politicians MRI technicians software developers middle school English teachers well-tipped golf caddies NASCAR drivers sailors child actors magicians’ assistants managers of Subway® sandwich shop franchise locations air traffic controllers social media influencers DJs event planners arborists and dads our final memory of having lived shooting majestically out into expanding space so slow : MAKE MONEY AND CHANGE YOUR LIFE NOW! WITHIN 5 MINUTES YOU COULD BE MAKING REAL MONEY WORKING FROM THE COMFORT OF YOUR OWN HOME! : precious golden arrow carry us gently into infinity : you wake from a dream about the future you are hungover or have lost the ability rise under imperfect conditions hours of sleep, units of hydration, levels of blood sugar and cortisol an ongoing state of lack this requires substantial effort : a being may see its life as a discrete sequence of events lined up like dominos waiting to topple one moment into the next each after the last : this other might see a long and gentle arching beam of multicolored light to be ridden like a slide or kind snake : a geoduck (phon. gooey-duck) is a giant saltwater clam with an elephant trunk overspilling its shell no brain or eyes but prized for its distinct savory flavor crunchy texture apocryphal aphrodisia living 160 years : OPEN NOW TO LEARN HOW TO MEET AND ATTRACT BEAUTIFUL WOMEN! EVEN IF YOU AREN’T TALL, RICH, OR HANDSOME : at night you see lights flashing in the pines : the average human life lasts 79 years the oldest koi fish lived 226 : when are they coming to get you : so then an exploratory committee was formed and the leaders were very pleased because the readouts promised excellent conditions for a condo with a patio development of more beachfront property salt water blue and fine good yellow light at the center all these benevolent marsupials roaming the yard beautiful stuff carpeting the ground breathing life into the air which was also full of all these other things singing and breathing about everything else but then someone on the excavation team discovered a critical error in the calculations an untreatable cancer had already infected the body and was beginning to spread : maybe you see it now just a glow starting around the edges : RETIRE EARLY AND NEVER HAVE TO WORK AGAIN: SAVE MORE AND WORK LESS, IT’S THAT SIMPLE! : tortoises are frequently cited as the longest living terrestrial creatures Harriet, a giant tortoise disembarked from Darwin’s ship after the long and harrowing expedition of 1835 and died in an Australian zoo in 2006 : Adwaita the giant tortoise was gifted to a British officer East India Company, 1750 lived vigorously until his shell cracked 2005 : today the oldest tortoise lives on the Island of Saint Helena stalking the dewy grounds of the governor’s lime green plantation house blind with no sense of smell but very good hearing 190 years old Jonathan : the arrow slipping silently through the Kuiper belt leaves an orange dusted transit path ribboning smoky memories of us outward : or maybe an impression indents on a plane made by waves of light tracing a shape : if each word equals a pocket of air that stays inflated unless it’s deleted is this a marker : 5 SIMPLE TRICKS YOU CAN START USING TODAY TO EFFECTIVELY REMEMBER EVERYTHING YOU LEARN : Lin Wang, Asian Elephant, 86 years Greater, Greater Flamingo, 83 years Cookie, Major Mitchell’s Cockatoo, 83 years Thaao, Andean Condor, 80 years Ol’ Billy, Horse, 62 years Andreas, European Brown Bear, 50 years, World’s Oldest Bear : warm-blooded life seems to have the hardest time keeping clung to earth one exception homo sapiens Jeanne Clement, b. February 21, 1875, d. August 4, 1997, 122 years and 164 days Kane Tanaka, b. January 2, 1903, 119 years, oldest living person : the ocean teems most densely with immortals this may not be surprising : Freshwater Pearl Mussel, 250 years Greenland Shark, 392 years Icelandic Ocean Quahog, 507 years Giant Barrel Sponge, 2,300 years Black Corral, 4,265 years Glass Sponge, 10,000+ years, max lifespan unknown : but it’s just not that impressive when a sponge outlives a human : EXOTIC MIRACLE FRUIT BOOSTS ENERGY, IMPROVES LIBIDO AND REDUCES STRESS: CLICK HERE TO ORDER : you try to remember a time when you could make it through a day without some shard of noise piercing in to strike you with wonder at whether you’d made the correct decisions if the path from there to here wasn’t where else you would be : you are stuck watching a movie of someone else’s life : in 50 years the number of dead people on Facebook will start to outnumber the living by 2100 some estimate the total deceased with profiles at 4.9 billion or the entire population of earth in 1987 : much more impressive to think we have already become immortals that our selves outlive ourselves when the afterlife is data a server farm is Valhalla : the arrow gliding softly into a tide of oncoming waves parts them in an opposite direction encrypted chatter mingling with radio static as your credit card numbers and social media handles brush hands with deep space distortion : the sky goes dark again you know they must be there hanging back like always watching us make our go of it hear them cheering they’re waving big foam fingers and drinking beers in the bleachers if the earth is round it’s a ring for pro wrestling : SEAFOOD WELLNESS BREAKTHROUGH: ASTHAXANTHIN ACTIVATES THE FOX03 ‘LONGEVITY GENE’. THE TRUTH DOCTORS DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW : seamonkeys, nematodes, waterbears some names for brine shrimp, roundworms, and tardigrades who stop their metabolic processes at will should conditions become imperfect levels of water, oxygen, toxicity, temperature, environmental solute concentration falling out of balance into a state of lack brine shrimp, roundworms, and tardigrades simply stop themselves from living and pick it back up later when the timing is better : turritopsis nutricula, a small hydrozoan the immortal jellyfish passes repeatedly backward into earlier stages of its lifecycle changing one cell into another indefinitely theoretical lifespan infinite : WANT TO TRANSFORM YOUR BODY FROM FAT TO FIT? NOW YOU CAN! OPEN NOW TO CREATE THE BODY YOU’VE ALWAYS WANTED : the worst thing to imagine is that aliens have already been here looked around shrugged and left NOTES:
Facts about humans, animals, space, earth, and the Internet are casually researched and sourced from Googleable articles and shallow Wikipedia dives. Collected here:
Text in all caps is a blend of actual spam email subject lines and clickbait ads with some light embellishments. None of this content is copyrighted. The “golden arrow” is an echo of the gold photograph records aboard Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, launched in 1977 and exiting the heliopause into interstellar space as of 2012, still in transit.
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