LINER NOTES

We run toward the people we love and the things we desire. We run for health, for fun, and to win races. We run away from fears and from our darkest thoughts. We run from our enemies, to escape, and in the most horrifying of circumstances, we run to stay alive.

Around us, machines are running. Keeping us cool, calculating our debt, drilling our teeth, blowing up buildings and scanning space for life.

Still, running can be liberating. Gaze at Equus ferus as it sprints across the plains. The wild horse runs because it can, and because it wants to. It’s an unbridled exercise of freewill, one thwarted only when man saddles the beast. And then the beast is tamed, forced to run for the amusement of an audience and for the profit of its captor. With a man on its back, the horse runs, now because it is compelled to.

We are like this racehorse, running for profit, captive of something bigger than us, circling the track for the entertainment of others. And this human race seems inescapable, eternal, unwinnable, until one day we find ourselves running headlong into the darkness. Running into the void with no one on to pull back the reins. Running toward a finish line that we cannot see, and whose presence we feel but cannot possibly understand.

Now my nose is running, I am running a fever, My batteries are running low. And we are all, no matter our best efforts to stave off the inevitable, running out of time.

- John E. Citrone