Terra Augustus Utopia presents…

A Strange Welcome

For "A Strange Salon" on March 9 2026

1.1 - Survey

Excuse me, do you have a few minutes
To answer some questions
Toward a more loving future?
Great, great, thank you for your time.
I assume you had a choice.

First off,
In the Gregorian calendar, what year is it?
Oh, yeesh. What a year that was! Is.
Anyway, second question:
Is this place still called --
Now I know I'm gonna mess this one up
So help me out, I wanna get it right --
Ama-reessa?
Amer-eyeka?
America, huh. OK, I'll send that up the chain.

Next up:
Raise your hand if you speak at least one of the following languages:
- Chinukwawa
- Ojibwemowin
- Nahuatl
- Quechua
- Guarani
- Diné bizaad
- Maya
- Tzeltal
Hm. Hm. Alright. Noted.

Now, raise your hand if you only speak
Tongues brought to Turtle Island by genocidaires.
Really?
Colonial paucilinguism is that prevalent?
Well, I guess that's why my job had me learn Angelfish.
Excuse me, English.
I've only been doing this for thirty-some years,
Cut a new-timer some slack.

This survey here is but a small part
Of a grand plan to discover
What the fuck is wrong with us.
Between today and the tomorrow from which I hail,
We forgot a lot, and we lost a lot,
And we might have fixed a lot but
Not even turning the blood in the soil to fruit
Could keep the ghosts in the plastic from screaming.
We might have gleaming towers built from joy
And libraries aplenty with lifetimes of poetry
And cuisines beyond counting, who know how to season,
But it could always be better.
Your responses today will help us
To tend forests so long we will call them ancient
On lands where today span only desert and concrete.

We think that if we can remember the past,
We can grieve for it, and mend epigenetic lesions.
Do you know what that means? Epigenetic?
It means that when your parents hurt,
You hurt. And you hurt your children,
And they hurt. And they hurt theirs,
And they won’t understand why.
It takes dozens of generations to heal those wounds,
And nothing really keeps us from slipping back
Except each other.
So we might have abolished war and poverty and starvation and plague
And the systematized cruelty you loosely describe as
Capitalism,
But it hasn't made us particularly kinder, or wiser.

When you run a society with horizons measured in geologic eons,
What you consider an existential threat changes.
If we can't trust ourselves to love each other through thick and thin,
Then someday the human social fabric, which at its core is love,
Will fail like a plane crashing,
Crumbling on a shattered runway,
And everyone who might fix it won't see the point in trying.

So, with that in mind, I have two final questions:
Do you love yourself?
Why or why not?

1.2 - Foie Gras

Dears and darlings, friends and foes, my name is Terra Augustus Utopia, and it is an honor to stand before you tonight. My people grant names based on where we are sent, so here I am upon Earth, the magnificent paradise.

My people are a religious sort, but I'd appreciate if you didn't call me a pagan. Our ways are private but I'd like to share some inside humor. Maybe you'll even laugh.

…

Among my pantheon, there is a joke
Consisting of only two words:
Foie gras.
The phrase is grim humor in itself,
Its punchline, inevitably alien.
In our faith, the Creator is Creation.
All things are its aspects.
We are all the Creator; we are all everything.
To hate a thing, is to hate oneself.
To hurt another, is to hurt oneself.
So how curious, how bizarre, how laughable
That a person might feed themself to death
Against their own will
Because such a glutted demise
Makes their flesh delicious.
What could the Creator have been thinking
When it made a Creation that contained
Foie gras?
When you are disgusted by the practice
Of shoveling gruel down a resisting throat
It is the Creator, repulsed by itself.
My pantheon titters with jaded laughter.
They are the Creator too, of course.
They giggle like adolescents:
How little we must understand ourselves
To be confused by what we choose to do.
Foie gras.

2.1 - The Fate of Monsters

[Before I begin this next piece, would you be so kind as to answer a question? Raise your hand if you've used ChatGPT or one of its cousins voluntarily in the last month.]

I'm worried about you, humans. Do you want to go extinct? You sure act like it.

I think some of you want to watch it happen. The seas might boil in your lifetime, mortal, because you couldn't stop the death cult of capital and colony. You still can, there's still time -- but how much?

I don't know that you grasp the significance of the changes your hubris summons. It won't just be uncomfortably hot or cold or strange. You won't make a home in bunkers or vaults like your adorable stories depict, to wait it out, to inherit the ruins of a world that yearns for your return. Gaia won't wait for you. She will shrug you off and move on, with no more care than to shift in one's sleep. Like all species, you exist in a narrow band of ecological possibility, a puny sliver of tolerable conditions in temperature and atmospheric composition. If the oxygen content of the air you breathe rises or falls too much, the patience of bunkers won't save you. The Earth will have no place for you, and it never will again.

If Gaia does allow you a niche, if the extinctions you summon do not altogether swallow you, then some wretched few who have forgotten everything and who trust no one, who are sick and ill-suited and stubbornly alive -- they will be the offering to evolution's grace. If it takes mercy on you, it will take its penance. It will take your fingers and your toes and your frontal cortex. It will reshape your eyes and your tongues and your dreams. It will take civilization from you because it so clearly posed a threat to your survival. Your naked skin will become a crushing flaw in weather no longer meant for you; your grey matter, the very depth of your thoughts, a liability shorn like wool, braided into the layers of the soil of the eons, and you, none the wiser -- not any more.

You won't miss the world that was, because the world that will be, will be all you've ever known. You'll eat insects and be thankful for every calorie. You'll shiver in the winter and be grateful to wake up. You'll scour the microbial scum that grows on plastiglomerate stones, gnawing at the detritus of your Ozymandian ancestors, and make a paste of them that qualifies as nutritious.

Perhaps you will return to the trees, the ones that remain, and become quick-moving sloths that birds and lizards have nightmares about. You'll swing like a primate more savage than any other, because the lesson your body will learn is not that cooperation triumphs. If you'd cooperated, this wouldn't have happened. No, you'll learn that brutality is always the answer. You'll bite what struggles until it bleeds and struggles no more. You'll descend from the covenant of profit and privation, back to that of prey and predator, where the bears and tigers of the new world will consider you their delectable lessers.

Maybe you'll take refuge in caves again, deeper than any ancestor before you. When your bunkers fail you, maybe those frail bodies that spill out of them will find their way in the dark down deep below. You won't need eyes there, not like you have. They will become white and empty, and your ears and nose sharper than ever. Your digits will turn stubby for digging, or long for climbing. Slick surfaces that generations of fingers slowly wear away will one day feel the touch of fingers grown for them. You won't think anything of it because it'll be all you have ever known.

If you want to keep what you love about being human, you'll have to use it wisely. You can transcend the covenant of predator and prey with a few fancy tools and institutions, but that doesn't get you out of your pact with evolution itself. If you live at all, it's because you keep a niche. If you lose it, you're done. No descendants. That's what it means to be part of a genetic legacy, mortal. As for me, I'll return regardless. I'll be one of those birds and lizards that has nightmares about you, and every time you catch me and bite my head off, my last thought will be to wonder: why would Creation contain a monster like you? Unlike you, immortals can't learn. I'll never understand why you do this to each other, but I'll keep coming back to try and figure it out. I hope the calories of my corpse grant you the time you need to change your mind.

Unless, you really do want to watch it happen. Then buckle up, my dear voyeur. The fate of monsters will be quite the show.

2.2 - Dream of Pointing the Finger Back

The Delegation

I have a recurring dream that takes place in a decolonized Americas. In it, I am watching, or part of, a delegation to not-quite-the-UN, to vote and deliberate but also to deliver a version of a speech I have now heard in hundreds of languages. We come to point the finger back, to lay the task upon all those empires that remain: now it is your turn to put away the vestiges of capital and colony.

A few weeks ago, I heard a peer speak his version of it in Nahuatl. He lets us call him Marcos, but his mother calls him Huemac. I recall the beauty of his voice, of Nahuatl’s lilting weaving syllables like the sound of rain on a pond, like sweet spring water burbling full of life. I felt pride hearing him speak, like a blue whale crying elated in an ocean the size of my heart, my heart the size of an ocean.

The conference’s interpreter corps struggles to keep up with what they call our delegation’s antics. See, our young domain has countless names but no official language. You’ll find Spanish on most of our documents, English on some, but we reject choosing a singular tongue emphatically, joyously. I have heard our delegation speak in Ojibwemowin, Chinukwawa, Haitian Creole, Farsi, Urdu -- because our one people is every people, and our tongue is every tongue. The miracles of love and dignity live in every body, and can be spoken in every language, but never exactly the same. That is our strength: our differences. What distinguishes anyone makes all of us stronger, if we can be wise enough to understand how.

The delegation declares how we have abolished poverty, plague, famine, illiteracy, and every other evil that cleverness and compassion can foil. The speaker then challenges the rest of the sitting powers to do so too. Now it is your turn. We have no more excuses for the trappings of empire. Now we can stand together as neighbors astride the whole planet, to carry the weight and responsibility of shaping what our children inherit. The spirit of the settler lies dead in its own home. Now it is your turn to bury those devils that remain.

Sometimes it's me at the podium, spitting fire in my heavily-accented Rose City English, but I prefer to take that duty only when nobody else wants it. I tend to think the world has tired of English. I have.

When I tell it, here's how it goes:

Now It Is Your Turn

Now it is your turn
To put away the vestiges
Of capital and colony.
In the place once called America
Everyone eats. Everyone thrives
Always by choice.
Prisons are empty; schools are full.
Hospitals, trains, grocers, and libraries,
Plentiful and gratis.
The water is clear like an open mind,
The air no worse than foggy.
Now it is your turn
To put away the vestiges
Of profit and privation.
In the place once called America
The dictatorship of price rules no more.
The council of our compassion prevails
And it rules with ambitions we animate
With a genuine concern for one another.
Now it is your turn
To put away the vestiges
Of imperial ire and covetous conquest.
We call upon you as neighbors
Because this is planetary stewardship
Not some international rivalry.
It is our privilege and our challenge
To seek and lay the highest roads
Of our most sacred ways.
Now it is your turn
To put away the vestiges
And beat us at a new game
That we dare to call love.