The Cambrian Incident (Cambrian; referring to the first explosion of life in the early Paleozoic)

A small man in a large chair behind a large desk in the spacious office of a tall building smiled gazing at the mission statement on the wall, 'More Is Better.' He pushed the intercom button to this secretary. "that bright young man in research who was talking about something called cable television. Send him up here."

Seth Angstrom appeared nervous and excited at the door, "Come in, come in! Sit down. I want to hear more about this cable idea of yours." Seth walked over hurriedly and sat down across from the desk.

"It’s really very simple. You see there is really no limit to the number of channels technology will allow us to have. We don't have to settle for what there is, we can have seven more or seventy to compete with them. The man in the large chair behind the large desk smiled, "Competition, that's what I like to hear. Always brings out the best in everyone. I want you to draw up a proposal and have in on my desk first thing next week." Yes sir. Thank you," Seth said as he got up and hurried out past the secretary who was muttering under her breath, "Why can't the existing ones compete for quality."

Seth Angstrom's depressive brother Bernard had tried to caution him at the time against the Pandora's box he was opening but Seth, the green light in the family had considered the source, Bernard, the familiar family red light, and ignored it.

Bernard was frequently depressed but had become more so recently. It was not just because he had always had the sex life of a bear in hibernation; he knew there were just as many people who were happy because of the absence of a sex life as there were unhappy people because of the presence of one. It was because the importance of living had gone out of his life.

Sitting in his recliner in his small apartment on an early September morning Bernard found himself recalling the incident as he surfed sadly through the Sunday morning paper's litany of misery. Reflecting back Bernard could see that the subtle horror confronting civilization had begun innocently about 1958 or 1960. He found a dark symmetry in the awareness that the 'nice days' has started disappearing right around the time everyone started asking you to 'have one.' There had been an invisible silent invasion that had been effective precisely because of the disarming subtlety of its appearance, the innocence of multiplication, the slow, gradual, exponential, cumulative assault which commerce, in cooperation with its first cousin, competition, unleashed upon the fragile homeostasis of the human nervous system like an unstoppable virus.

Bernard had first sensed it when they came out with the Old Gold filter King 100's. It was an excess, an adding on to what was adequate. He was not aware that it was an omen but he later felt he should have seen it when his city opened the first Mall in the country in 1960. Commerce's first cousin competition had stuck its right foot in the door. Even though a small alarm went off inside him he was misled by the novelty like everyone else.

He had actually noticed it sometime before that when Ford made the first ''Thunderbird' and Chevrolet made the 'Corvair,' the first murmurings of our infinite desire for infinite variety. Then the new car with the funny name 'Toyota' appeared but by then he was smoking the Old Gold 100's and shopping in the mall so he didn't really pay too much attention. Bernard could not have foreseen that the small free verse poetry of the road-Packard, Plymouth, Ford, Chevrolet, Hudson and Desoto, with all their odd individual shapes and charming peculiar styles were going to become extinct before the next evolutionary stage of Acura, Integra, Infinity, Lexus- a scientific slaughter of the motor arts which would breed a swarming horde of indistinguishable sleek, streamlined steel pea-pods, each with the same look and feel as the other which would not stop coming till they had taken over every garage, street, highway, and parking lot in sight, coagulating into giant metal clots clogging the natural flow of life and movement. Just as innocently three new television stations appeared around the same time that the innocuous looking Honda car was introduced. They were received as eagerly and enthusiastically as a dog being tossed three new bones next to the two he already had.

Sometime during this unnoticed expansion it metastasized to baseball. The two familiar friendly American and National leagues just weren't enough anymore. It was decided to separate the Leagues into different Divisions in each League and add more teams. Soon even the members of the teams themselves, the reliable recognizable family line up of familiar names were gradually replaced with strangers, the teams fell apart as players were tossed and traded faster than balls in a professional ping pong tournament. It became impossible to keep up with who was with what team. It was an orgy of cancerous growth that kept amassing in size to a magnet cry of 'more' till finally the players became virtually indistinguishable from each other, pouring out from an endless invisible assembly line of farm clubs like fresh duplicated Xerox copies. There were just too many players, too many games, too many home runs, too many commercials selling too many cars and too many fans eating too many hot dogs. Bernard finally stopped watching after another xexor copy hit over 120 home runs. There was no longer any joy in Mudville. Mighty Casey had not struck out, he had simply disappeared among the tidal wave of players and teams.

Then it spread to the movies. There were more and more films chronicling more and faster disintegration and more mall theaters to hold more and more people eating more mall popcorn while partially watching the tidal wave of new films that poured out like bullets at a firing range sending lots and lots of limitless entertainment, delivering everything except the psychological and emotional space to see or process them.

Even the health care system was not immune to this tsunami. It wasn't a health care system. It was a nervous system that just didn't know what it was supposed to do anymore, check the days receipts or check the low blood pressure in bed 5. There were just too many health plans offering too many exemptions from coverage (coverage was the only other commodity mysteriously remaining small and even shrinking).

Bernard couldn't understand why there was such a loud insistent vocal campaign to ban smoking which co-existed alongside a chronic indifference to a national health care plan. But it didn't matter really. At some invisible tipping point in the invasion we had simply become matter that no longer mattered. There was simply too much disease, too much physical illness, too much mental illness, too much domestic violence, too many car accidents, too many industrial accidents, too many ecological accidents, too many missing children on too many milk cartons, too many criminals, too many policeman, too many homeless people pushing too many shopping carts through the public sector and the private sector without raising a decibel of protest or outrage from a uniform political voice reflexly allergic to any agendas vaguely surrounding the issue of 'assistance.' Bernard felt that he was living in a famine of plenty.

And Books, books, books. There were too many books. They just kept coming, pouring our of that peculiar insatiable fecundity, the writer. The display of 'New Arrivals' were quickly moved to 'sale' display tables to make room for more 'New Releases.'

Bernard looked down at his newspaper at a full page add for a new best seller, 'How To Keep Your Brain Active and Alive.' He thought only someone without a brain would want to do such a thing. He rose dejectedly from his recliner, threw the paper on the floor, put on his coat and headed out of his apartment into the gray September morning on west 54th. He started walking the three blocks toward the corner grocery store and was nearly run over six times by two cabs, three SUV's, 2 kids on bicycles, and a shopping cart. When he arrived at the store it was vacant. A sign on the door said, "to our valued customers. We regret having to end our many years service here but this block is being demolished to make way for a six story parking garage and mall.”

The growing despair in Bernard reached a critical mass and right then something inside him caved in. He decided finally to end it all. He walked twelve more blocks to a new gun shop he'd seen in the neighborhood. He hesitated briefly outside the door then went inside where he found himself instantly paralyzed by the endless shelves of guns, there were rows and rows and rows of guns, hand guns -rifles-machine guns- A-K 47's to A.K. 547's. He just stood there looking, unable to decide, there were just too many guns. Overwhelmed he turned around and left. He was walking dejectedly back toward his apartment when the thought of 'pills' struck him like a revelation. He would use the pills that he had. He felt an odd rush of muted happiness at the certainty of his imminent release. Nearing the apartment his pace began to quicken fueled by an odd brisk buoyancy as his mind reflected on the cupboard above his bathroom sink that was full of bottles of pills, lots and lots and lots of pills.