epic fail

People use the word epic a lot, to refer to something very good. 

It is the successor of awesome.

And I suppose it isn't going to matter that they're diluting its meaning because those sorts of adjectives aren't being used seriously much anyway.

Grand theory has been discredited. Grand narratives are a pejorative.

Grand pianos take up too much space. Grandparents aren't grander parents.

There aren't undiscovered territories to discover. I could do a trek or something,

but that's because I don't know, not because humankind doesn't.

And anyway, if I'm out of mobile range for a few days, people start panicking about me, or I about them.

If I commit a grand crime passionel I can't flee the country with the name of my love on my lips because I won't get a passport.

And there's enough troubles at the border already without unbalanced lovers queuing up to question their Line of Control. 

Oh, and there's no solving murders of international import on the Trans-Siberian railway either, because the train takes forty days from start to finish and I'll never get that many days off work.

I don't want to be nostalgic about the days before I was born, that's my parents' job.

Nor to long for TB to consume me while I breathe sea air and try to get used to my impending death. And let's not go into the plumbing and things.

And as consolation there's still racism, to deport immigrants with, and imperialism, to keep your car going,

And sinocentrism, because the -centrisms were getting too North-heavy. And Americanism, which should've been an ideology but instead stands for something so uninformed that only someone utterly internationally privileged could've thought so, and yet people can organise their words around it. 

There are still epic battles on ESPN every third Saturday in season, and some civilisation-sized observation waiting

in every expert's larynx for the right note to be hit in international affairs.  

Everybody's little drama is a big deal as we're all equal, and those who capitalise on it are an offence to humanism, which in turn only an ecological ignoramus could've come up with.

Not that I have an alternate future in mind, but discoveries are all to the scientific,

As battle used to be to the swift—or perhaps the strong—and the rest of us

are busy looking backwards and forwards in time trying to avoid human failings 

before we cross the road.