We Are All Liars

Sitting alone in a room, New Year of 2017. Futures - both real and imagined - swell and sigh in my mind like dormant volcanoes, infected sores. I find myself fixated on Tuvan throat singing; as if blasted by a bolt of divine lightning, the strident, difficult sounds of a strident, difficult people begin to rattle my cheap Dell plug-and-play speakers. Somewhere, caught in the musty trap of a retiree's garage, a lonely Inspiron yearns for its lost audio output.

Sometimes I wonder why those pesky nomadic peoples kept pushing, kept probing, century after century, ever eastward, ever westward. They cannot have been that bored: try finding a week's worth of grown food or forage on the Mongolian steppe and let me know how much free time you can muster. They say idle hands are the devil's workshop. There are no idle hands on the steppe.

How many children and children's children from the horsemasters of the Khentii saw the world grow, and shed its layers like skin from a snake? The Romans metastasizing across the Mediterranean, the Chinese coalescing into the superstate of empire, the first Caliphates birthed in the merciless sands of Arabia. To be surrounded on all sides at all times by economic competition, vastly technologically advanced cultures, societies changing and morphing faster than their flimsy borders could corral them. What is the steppe nomad in the face of these? Theirs should be a history of slavery, subjugation, starvation, servility. But it is not.

And does it even matter why?