Microsoft keeps changing my screen saver, showing me these exotic places that I will never travel in this life, which makes me feel kind of sad, and like a loser, like someone from a romance novel, flipping backwards through a magazine in the dentist office and daydreaming of distant beaches. Most days I am lucky enough to make it to the grocery store or the gas station, which strangely has an ad for 89 cent eggs, and potatoes for 2 dollars, although I’ve never actually seen bags of potatoes at the gas station, and when did we all start buying food at the gas station, or even getting dinner! Like the commercials for SHEETS where the young black woman who looks a bit like Rae Dawn Chong, (daughter of stoner legend Tommy Chong), the lead from the 80s classic break dance movie Beat Street is ordering on her cell phone, and then filling up her tank and getting dinner all at once! How liberated and lucky we are to live in the 21st century. But all these photos turning on my screen remind me of Soylent Green, this 1970s sci-fi where big white cop Charleston Heston is investigating a murder in a post-apocalyptic future where people dress in drab clothes and wander around the streets waiting for their delivery of these food crackers, particularly the super tasty Soylent Green which is made of sea plankton and when they are short and the deliveries don’t arrive, the people riot. The police come with these giant garbage-truck-like-scoops and in the back the people go to be carted off to no one knows. In the middle of the film Heston’s father, played by legendary actor known for his profound portrayals of gangsters Edward G. Robinson, tells him of how things used to be, but Heston just thinks his father is kind of nuts, until his father signs up for a funeral service, a postmodern euthanasia program, and as his father is in the death chamber passing on into the next life, Heston breaks in and sees flickering across the screen all these amazing scenes of nature before the apocalypse—the ocean and sea animals, the grand canyon, the towering red woods, all now dead, and Heston says, I did not know. This is what these screens Microsoft sends me every day on my computer are like, as each day the ocean fills with plastic and another living thing grows extinct. Today it is cranes, flying into a rust red sunset over the Uganda savanna, where yesterday I read a dozen elephants were slaughtered by poachers. Microsoft doesn’t show me those bones. Google tells me “Scientists estimate that 150-200 species of plant, insect, bird and mammal become extinct every 24 hours. This is nearly 1,000 times the “natural” or “background” rate and, say many biologists, is greater than anything the world has experienced since the vanishing of the dinosaurs nearly 65m years ago.” Even while I sit here typing some rare beetle, or some plant with the cure for cancer just vanished from this earth. At the end of Soylent Green, we find out where all those people in the dumpers go. The tasty Soylent Green isn’t made by sea plankton. The movie ends with Heston running through the streets shouting Soylent Green is made of people! So, I find Microsoft customer service and I start sending them emails Soylent Green is made of people, Soylent Green is made of people, over and over. I picture the customer service agent in India going what the fuck, or maybe they will say Hell ya! And think, this is us. And they will start to send it out too. Soylent Green is people! It will go viral, as they say, a phrase that takes on dark significance these days with our old becoming daily extinct. And now I am sitting here waiting for an answer in front of a screen of the European Alps, some strange mountain goat staring at me. We might as well be yodeling off a mountain these days, or are we all the canary in the mine? The fiddler as the city burns. What tune will I soon be singing? What whistling dirge? How often are we made to sit around waiting for the answer? To some form or request for funds to buy food or help us pay the rent? How many of us camped along the tracks or rotting behind institutional walls? How far are we from Soylent Green? My wife calls up as I am waiting and asks if the kids have eaten lunch. I say I will get to it. She is sober and not in pain today and reading a cheap paperback novel. I put my computer on sleep. I go downstairs and open a jar of Peter Pan, that magical flying androgynous being that feels like a metaphor for what our bodies could become if only we would listen to the wings beneath our skin; but this is Peter Pan peanut butter, mostly made of corn syrup and a lot of chemicals I cannot even pronounce. I take down a loaf of cheap white bread made in a factory the size of a city and a dull steel knife and spread the peanut butter thin. I take this to my daughters as if this will save them, as they sit in front of their tablet screens playing each other in some virtual world called Roblox they point of view play through realities without any goal I can discern. Games without end, wars without end. What are we teaching them to be? I feel everything is not in my control lately, this world I woke to find myself already old in. They barely look up at their father but say thanks and Oh so good as they start to chew. Outside, the last cicadas of the summer are whirring. At least there is that music here. The cicadas who have survived every extinction give me hope. I listen to the rise and fall of their voices through the trees, calling and answering to one another. If we only listen. Soylent Green is people. I am waiting for my answer. Somewhere on the other side of this planet Vikram Patel is forwarding my email to his supervisor for clarification. I look out our bedroom window at the above-ground-pool and watch the inflatable animals—a rideable turtle, a dolphin ring, an orca raft—drift in a slow aimless circle.