The Tears of Kulkukan

Jungle cats will eat your king pigeon pose, with a side of guac.

The tears of Kukulkan dripped from the heavens above the Yucatan peninsula onto the busy tribes below. Salty serpent tears fed the earth whenever the sky cracked open, a pattern associated with the aftermath of child-tossing competitions.

The storms were natural then, untainted by geoengineering operations. Real clouds floated across the horizon in dark, heavy sheets, spitting wind and liquid bluster that rattled palm fronds and drowned the torches beside the temple steps. The cenotes swelled with the sorrow of Gods compelled by sacrifice and satiated by the consumption of a mother’s offering.

Does the feathered serpent still haunt this region—the god of wind, rain, and storms, the symbol of chaos and creation?

Does the ghost of Itzamná still loiter near the pilates studios, tattoo parlors, taco stands, and nomad coworking spaces, laughing at the spiritless patrons worshipping Apple laptops with the latest M-chip, all making important Zoom calls?

Are the tears of the serpent Kulkukan still dripping onto the Lululemon threads of powerful girl bosses working remote email jobs on condo rooftops, signing off consequential internal corporate communiqués with names like Jasmine and Aurora and distinguished titles like Sr. Marketing Analyst or VP of Talent Management or Deputy Head of People Success?

People success.

Email jobs.

Remote delivery.

Sun salutations for strangers.

Illusory offerings with no heart or heartbeat.

Corporate keepsakes, like porcelain dolls resting atop a shelf in a locked cupboard only disturbed once each year to collect taxes.

Serpents spitting the seeds of chaos and creation, the consequences of coming quarterly P&L statements.

Did Kulkukan shed tears for the Mayan tribe’s last EBITDA figures?

The childless women now flock to the region with nothing at all for any Gods. The Mayan Gods can see that the women have been run through by Tinder totems, the hypergamous 10%, and their eggs are dormant. They still seek the “spiritual,” and so they look for it in latte art, meaningless self-defiling ink scars, in carved mahogany totems, at the bottom of shot glasses beside infinity pools next to DJ booths.

They nurture and raise content feeds.

They flock to the peninsula for the spectacle of performance and self-consumption. Their only concern is capturing the magic of themselves at an exotic place in pixelated glory using the latest iPhone version available on monthly installments of $49.99 for a three-year contract.

What would the first-century Mayan city-state Tikal founder Yax Ehb’ Xook think of his people paying two times the cost of a hut, just in interest, over the course of twice their life expectancy?

Would they build pyramids with monthly installments of 19% interest on a 500-year loan from the Phoenicians?

What would Kulkukan think of the the creation of digital poses, rehearsed rituals to be captured by the tri-camera module, then heavily filtered, recolored, resurfaced, and reconstituted into a distant representation of the reality of that moment to be later devoured by slobbering strangers a thousand temples away?

The network effect of digital temples.

One times three times nine times twenty-seven sobbing Gods awaiting any kind of digital offering.

The network effect of sobbing Gods.

One lightning bolt, times three monsoons, times nine naked yoginfluencers entangled with indigenous warriors in the Laguna Chunyaxché, too entralled by the naked yogis’ body glyphs and random patterns to remove their bikini parts.

Influencer tattoos, those odd symbols placed in indiscriminate places, seemingly chosen at random with no purpose or function, cannot be detached from the infinite universe’s great mysteries.

Old civilizations die. New ones trample atop their remnants, turning their crumbling ruins into sightseeing opportunities for curious tourists with point-and-shoot dreams, sporting tattooed hieroglyphic riddles.

Not all civilizations have a purpose or spiritual destiny, and if they ever planned for the future, the Gods would laugh at their arrogance and cry for their intellectually malnourished offspring, whom they know will soon decay into the obscurity of a rudderless existence.

Not all civilizations have offspring. Only those with a desire to last.

In recent years, Xibalba, the Mayan underworld, sprouted a few concrete runways and glass windows in the middle of the remote jungles of Chanchen and Colonia Yucatan. The Tulum International Airport provides fresh childless offerings to the Gods every day from Dallas, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Düsseldorf, and Manchester.

The Yoga and productivity influencers needed a new airport. They were tired of grabbing taxis from Cancun down a long stretch of what passes for a highway in Southern Mexico, often squashing the armies of sideways-running blue land crabs crossing the road. It wasn’t good for their aura or wellness to have to dirty themselves with such inconveniences.

They deeply desire to immerse themselves in the mythology of the local culture, where the backdrop provides a mahogany and taupe roman clay Mise-en-scène for staging themselves at the center of all their important content delivery operations.

Yucatan vibing is all about the full and unmitigated absorption of the tattoo’d self, against the majestic backdrop of Mayan ruins dotting an expanding condo-tel wasteland.

Nomads. Performers. Influencers.

Main hustle. Side hustle.

Everyone is for sale.

Nobody offers anything original or of much worth.

A whole new occupation invented out of stupidity and the threads of idiocy by which people hang themselves in frittering all their spare time at the temples of digital consumption.