The Chase
Chris Pais
In the old days, our ancestors chased antelope so they could put food on the table. The fact that they didn’t have a table is another matter, but today, we buy our tables from big box furniture stores and food in sterile packages, deboned and gutted, all the hairy bits and the pits taken out. The fruits have been picked, the ground has been tilled, the animals have been slaughtered and skinned, the forests have been cleared and gutted, the mountains have been stripped and mined, the oceans have been pillaged and dumped on, and the dams have been built. We have altered the course of rivers and then wonder why the level of the sea is rising. We make colossal bonfires and wonder why the sky is turning brown. We run incessantly on treadmills or speed down ski slopes to catch a thrill. We pump our muscles with steroids. We catapult down roller coasters, zip-line across ravines, free-fall from aircraft, hurtle across rapids and climb the tallest mountains, leaving behind heaps of garbage and a trail of flotsam, jetsam and detritus. We have birth control strategies and we have fertility clinics. We consume products to lose weight and products to gain weight. We build roads and we lay rails, we build bridges and we burn them. We build houses too big to live. We put men on the moon and we dance with the stars. Some of us want a tan while some of us want a bleach. Some of us want a perm and some of us straighten our curls. We color our hair and our nails, and we want to be colorblind. We have places for breast enhancements and places for breast reductions. We wage war and we broker peace. We make alliances only to break them. We make laws for the same reason. We read history, we rewrite history, we make history and sometimes we learn from it. We melt glaciers, we freeze assets. We copulate and populate. We disfigure the landscape. We make art. In the frenzy of living, doing, making, building, growing, we are also seeking stillness and meaning. At the end of the day, we’re still chasing the elusive antelope.
Chris Pais grew up in India and came to the United States to pursue graduate studies in engineering. His writings and art appear in Poetry India, The International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, Wingless Dreamer, Wild Roof Journal, The Literary Bohemian, Defunct Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area where he works on clean energy technologies and tinkers with bikes, guitars, and recipes.