My first Trip through time

I was around 10-years old, give or take, the first time I time-traveled. I visited with an older self, 30 years into the future. We stood in his kitchen and looked at each other. For 20 seconds.

My memory of the event is a blank from back then. I can recall more than a few moments from my youth, but not this one. Here, there is a giant empty space.

Instead, I remember this wrinkle in spacetime from the other side. From the older side. From the shameful, guilty, angry, lonely side. I stood in that empty kitchen and saw him there, a small and somehow seemingly unrecognizable version of myself. He was covered in wounds, scars, holes and dried blood, bruises and shame, guilt, anger, and loneliness.My older perspective understood what these wounds were, and where they came from. And he told the boy, I love you. These are not your fault. Someone else put them on you, and they shouldn’t have. I love you.

What is [ ….. ] with me.

I can get angry. Fast. I reach out and touch walls and car roofs and doors and leave dents and holes. I stew, and ruminate, and have arguments in my head until I burst. I can get depressed. Fast. I can bust into tears at the drop of a hat. I ruin my dinner, and suddenly I’m sullen and self-punishing.

Once in a while, every few years or so, I can be impulsive. A danger to my wallet, a danger to strangers’ emotional well-being, a danger to my personal safety. I am hard to live with, hard to love. Every day is a turmoil. I wonder if I shouldn’t just leave my life, throw it all away and start over somewhere. Disappear again; maybe that will make it all ok. Every few years or so.

And then my friend is dying. And I love him, and take care of him.

And then The Tumble. And The Crushing. The ripping sound, and the sweet temptation of oncoming traffic. Knowing that my brain is sick, feeling that something is wrong, terribly wrong within my head, and it isn’t going to go well for me.

And then Lamotrigine, and Quetiapine, and the puzzle falls to the ground in the perfect scattering of colors, I am lifted up, I look down at where I was, and the picture finally becomes clear:

I am Bipolar!

And thank fuck, there’s a pill for that.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Holocaust 2022: Never Say “Never Again”

Holocaust 2022: Never Say “Never Again”

my friend

We exist in dreams. We use energy to come into this world, and use energy to remain in it. And then we sleep, and recharge, and reorientate. And we visit with those who’ve gone back already, who we miss so dearly, but who haven’t ever really left us.

Share this:

Li’l Donny Catches The ‘rona

I awoke to dreams of thunder, dreams of wind. A sound from The World breaking in. The roar of the ancient Parthenon pouring over my senses, thousands of voices joined in jubilation, cheering the dawn.

I rubbed my eyes. Though I knew it was not yet Jan 20, I swore I could still hear the dream, beating at my windows and shaking the house.

Then I looked at my phone.

And the cacophony grew.

Reunion

dis·as·sem·ble

dis·as·sem·ble
/ˌdisəˈsembəl/
gerund or present participle: disassembling

intransitive verb
1 : to come apart

“I can feel myself disassembling.”

the emo thread

This is an actual text thread that played out over the course of 13 months. I think she ghosted me somewhere between Remo and Eno.

A write-in vote is a Trump vote

I’ve been reading Facebook posts from young people I know, or have heard of, looking for write-in candidates to choose over Biden because they didn’t get their first Bernchoice. If you see or hear this sort of talk, please challenge it for me. Please debate it for me. Please smack it in the side of the forehead over and over. For me.

It is a failure to grasp the nature of the political system we live in – even Bernie understood he had to work within the 2 party tools he was given. A vote in Minnesota in the general election for anyone other than Biden IS a vote for Trump. Did you learn nothing from last time? Are you that addicted to your cancel culture and your instaphone you can’t learn from history that is only four years old?

I understand your idealism. I’m Bernie’s biggest fan. I voted for him twice. I gave him money on multiple occasions. And I argued endlessly- in person, with a voice- trying to persuade people to his cause. And then, I voted for Hillary. And now I’m voting for Biden.

I’ll even go one step further than you ever possibly could – I voted for Ralph Nader! (If that’s lost on you, smack yourself again and look it up) Even then, though, I thought I did it carefully, as a voter in California, since I “knew” the state was definitely going for Al Gore. I wanted to get Ralph’s numbers up and help prove a 3rd party candidate could be viable in the future. Guess what happened? We proved ourselves dead fucking wrong. Surprise! It’s a two-party system!

Please pay attention to history and learn from it, knock off that dangerous write-in jibber-jabber, and VOTE FOR JOE BIDEN.

RIP Mr. Jones

“Why are you smiling?  You think this is funny?” -everyone, all the fucking time, my entire fucking life.

Why is everything a joke to me?  Because everything’s funny, stupid.  I firmly believe, without question, that funny has an essential right, nay, need, to exist, simply because it is.  I will do (and as Ben will testify, have often done) just about anything for a good joke.  You may laugh at it. You probably won’t.  Honestly, I don’t care;  I’m on auto-pilot at this point.  It’s a selfish exercise, this.  Laughing is MY drug.  It’s the high I’ve been injecting since I could open my mouth to back-talk.  I nursed on Carlin, was weaned on Murphy; hell,  I even saw Gallagher once (3rd row wet, baby.)  When I can get it, I’ll take it.  But like any of the really good drugs, reliance on someone else’s supply only gets you so far.  So I make my own.

“But if a joke falls in the forrest and no one was there to hear it, was it funny?”

Some people have actually thought I’m insane (lazy doctors would later tell me I simply have an unidentified personality disorder.)  I imagine you would think so, too, if you saw a man sitting alone at a table whispering to himself and randomly laughing his ass off.  I don’t know how your mind works – I only imagine it’s exactly like mine – as you stare into space, eyes slightly out-of-focus as if you’re trying to see the schooner, conversations and scenarios that probably won’t but yet-may-be play out inside you like a one-man show in front of an audience of nil.  And sometimes, they’re just fucking hilarious.  So you laugh like they are.

But then, I really don’t think you do think like that.  ‘Cause when I look around, I don’t actually see that many of you crazy motherfuckers muttering to yourselves and cackling.  But when I do, rest assured I am laughing with you, not at you.

For a good time, call.

At one point in my life, I knew how to party. I also used to live in a warehouse in Sydney with 18 other people, of different nationalities and backgrounds.  There was some sort of party going on in the front room 24/7.  But when we really put our minds to throwing a shindig, lives changed.  I have proof.

A decade later I was back, having drinks in a random backyard in Erskineville with the neighbors of some friends of my friends, and the subject came up: house parties vs. going out.  Everyone came down on the side of house parties.  And one girl in particular just had to tell us about the BEST party she’d ever been to, the one that taught her what real partying could be, like some sort of perfect teen coming-of-age film – a porno themed party.

“Ten years ago, it was.  On a night just like this.  In a giant warehouse where all these crazy people lived.  With two dance halls, 2 DJs and a mirrored dance floor, and a giant movie theater showing classic 70s porn, and everyone dressed really slutty…”

And there she was, a decade later, living proof that my good times had reverberated across time and space, sharing a pizza and having laugh with the same best friends whose penchant for outsized camaraderie had once again touched her life with a beer and a chuckle.

Fucking legends.

Hammock-life

June 2004/David’s Place

I wake up to waves of moonlight crashing onto the sand.  I’ve fallen asleep in my hammock again.  It’s such an easy thing to do, kava or no.  Sleep is deep here, and an integral part of island life where morning comes early with the heat and the sun.  Dinner has come and gone, the usual revelers have packed it in, and all my world consists of at this moment is wind and sea, and deep, red crevasses in my back.  The hammock leaves its mark after a time, and it’s free to.  I breathe deep, and yawn.

My eyes drift across the palm-tree-framed postcard in front of me to the serene giant staring at me from a folding chair a few paces away.  It must’ve been my stomach that woke me tonight, for Móle is as silent as he is large.

“Oh, hey.”  My throat cracks.  I haven’t spoken since noon.   “How long have you been here?”

“mmmm”.

In the weeks earlier, his proximity might have startled me. I can’t remember. Now he is Waldo, lost in the backdrop of coconuts and sand, wandering amongst the beachfront burres in the dark and keeping the travelers safe from the harsher realities of Fijian life.  He is Island Security.

“you fell asleep again.”

I don’t deny it. “Is anyone still up?

Móle closes his eyes and turns his face to the sea.  “too late.”

My next yawn confirms this.

“you need a bed.  go.”

So I go.

Don’t ask, won’t tell

BEEP. Chips, on sale, $2.50. She smiles.

“Hello, how’s your day been?”

“Terrible.”

… PANIC. Eyes wide, she sets the bag of chips down gently.

“Just kidding,” I lie.

HAHA The lie is an ice-cold bucket of relief. I dump it on her head.

“Serves you right for asking, though.”

“Ha! It sure does!”

haha

ˈbēch

I’ve gotten used to the way words mean different things to different populations around the world. I usually try to roll with it, and adapt. But on this, I’m putting my foot down.

Minnesota peeps: the sandy bit of dirt you lay on by the lake IS NOT A BEACH. And I don’t care what the dictionary says. I’m sorry.

A beach is more than sand and water. It is your most basic self dwelling in the moment of experiencing its physical connection to the vastness of the planet… not the other side of Nakomis over by the Delta terminal.

for Vicious

I dream I exist as a ribbon of energy.  The part that is me, here, now, is just the part of my ribbon that crosses through these four dimensions we find ourselves in.  I exist elsewhere.  But here, now, my body is its evidence, my mind its vehicle of observation.  We are more than what we appear to be.  There are parts of us we can’t see.

My ribbon is intertwined with my friend, and at some point in this four-dimensional space we meet, and are entangled together.  And we are more than we appear to be.  There are ribbons of us we can’t see, that which we truly are. Beyond these dimensions.  Always together. Forever.

vis·cos·i·ty

A body at rest

Reminded that it once moved

Dreams of nothing else

I ran a red light today.

I learned a couple of things:

1.  One or more of the four people at that intersection was very lucky.  It was a pleasure being near you today.
2. Accidents happen.  Paper accidents that don’t mean a thing, belly and bum accidents that bruise butt entertain us all, in the end.  And traffic accidents, that can change your fucking life in a heartbeat.  The sun was shining.  I wasn’t speeding.  I’d been sober for days, both hands on the wheel.  I THINK, maybe, the light on the one-way street was centered over the other lane, and not mine, though obviously no excuse.  I just didn’t see it.  I did see, in ultra-fine detail, the terrified faces in the two cars that were suddenly next to me.
3. Time doesn’t slow down, you just experience more frames of it, in higher resolution.
4. I am an amazing driver (not counting the whole light-running thing.) A crank to the left, a slam on the gas, and the fast hard-right for the fishtail to get the end of my car out of the way.
5. Like the man said, there is no replacement for displacement.  It is not the first time I have been saved by a 3.5 L v6.
6. I think I am actually still in shock, and should probably go lie down.  I’m so very sorry for almost killing you all.

Vet day

Waking and waiting

Limbs betray trepidation

Or is that coffee?

Share this:

the cost of Pure, Unending Joy is a sudden crush of naked visceral anguish, and is worth every bloody penny.

 

Re-defining Fate

BOOM. Our universe. Here it is, it’s data imprinted in the fabric. Let’s ignore its (visible) 4-dimensional structure for a moment, and analogize it to another type of universe we can understand: the White Album. A musical universe, created with a physical structure, its data imprinted in its fabric. We bring the album home, play it, and experience this musical universe linearly as our record needle scratches across its surface. The tracks seem new to us, but they have always been there, since the album’s pressing, waiting for our consciousness to observe them.

Back to our universe. Our minds, contained within these fleshy Meatbots[™] are needles, scratching across the surface of our universe and experiencing it linearly. The data has always been there, since the creation, waiting for our consciousness to observe it.

Is it fate, then, that the most important parts of our lives appear to cross our paths randomly, and yet seem as they were always meant to be, and will be a part of us for eternity? That they were waiting for us? Perhaps the tracks are already there, laid down at the beginning, the data unalterable once the vinyl is pressed. In this universe, on this copy of the album, fate is our tracklist. There are as yet plenty of unheard songs, still waiting for us to experience them; but they are coming, unavoidable. They are with us already, whether we have listened that far or not. And when we think back and replay our lives, we can choose to skip the story of some songs in the retelling, or linger in them and replay them over and over, but their data, and their consequences, are woven into the unalterable fabric of our existence.

pare normal

I like to daydream that most paranormal phenomena will eventually be attributable to our being rooted in the olde idea that time is a singularly linear thang. Once we eventually accept that our day to day (and our observable universe) is only experienced linearly by our consciousness, interpreted data from our five sensory inputs strung together and played back super-slow for our conscious benefit, we will adjust our measurements, and will begin to find that many cases of prediction, ghosts, intuitiveness, etc are simply echoes or glitches in that playback, or at least an innate part of physics rather than something paranormal.

Perhaps “telepathy” is our ignorant name for a rare but observable phenomenon we don’t understand. i.e. “Zeus’ arrows” Could there be transfer of energy beyond the spectrum of my observable senses? Could a ghost be an explosion of energy with a quantum connection between future and present states that I’m physically incapable of observing? I’m an atheist. I don’t think its a far leap for me to lay the odds heavier on either of those possibilities before blaming it on magic and dead people, or even deciding “telepathy doesn’t exist” just because I haven’t seen it.

So, if you think you’re telepathic, I’d say “go for it!”
Wait, is that what you were asking?

re: Opening Night, circa 2015 (or How I Learned I Love the Stage)

whoa.

the fuck was that?

I recently found the audacity to proclaim that an utterly sober undertaking I had pursued the prior evening had awarded me a mental state similar to that of being on an unusually fun controlled substance.

… like being on drugs but without the drugs, even needing to come down before I can sleep.

Riiiiight, you say. Sign me up.  I’m bullshitting you.  Only is, I’m not?  Like being fucking high.  Then I went and snorted it again the next night, too.  Repeatable, predictable patterns?  We shall see.  But as of now, I think I might be onto something.

 

“smart phones”

I hate smartphones.  But mostly, I hate my wife’s.  Smartphones are sinkholes, black holes, vortexes of suck that drain everything they can from their hosts.  Their competition for my attention has changed the dynamic in my home, as I’m sure it has all the families of the increasingly lane-non-specific, bent-necked human traffic hazards wearing out their reading vision while whizzing past me at 80 mph, faces glowing blue.  I tend to feel the effects most often while we’re driving, as well, lost in thought by myself on some lonesome road with her next to me catching up on the kitten news from Brazil, or the latest TrumpFart.

And that’s how I know, btw- I know what it used to feel like.  I remember what a city bus full of people felt like before everyone had a smartphone to look at.  It was different.  The younger generations won’t understand, and it will be left to us to acknowledge the shift- that digital has changed us as a society, and as a species, altering how we fundamentally communicate, connect and relate to one another.  How we share our energy with each other.

Watching movies is the worst.  I can tell, and I wish I couldn’t, when someone is watching a movie “with me“ or not paying attention.  Newly reissued cyborg generations, mankind’s grand experiment, movie-lovers! settled-in and snuggled-up, watching their latest recommended video stream when, suddenly, the lead actor’s lip twitches just a bit too deliberately and GASP! you realize it must’ve been his TWIN BROTHER the whole time!!  and you look over at your date to share the energy of all this, ’cause it’s just way too mind-blowing to handle alone (right!?!) and…  they’re looking at their phone.  They’ve been looking at it the whole time.

(plop.)

That energy, that experience that had been building – the art of sweat, love and light hitting your body, your retina, your mind and then (BOOM) into all the possibilities that a film can evoke, shared between you and a person into whom you have invested considerable time and resources acquiring a rare, less-than arm’s-length degree of safe, pleasant physically proximity, building on the laughter and suspense together in a way that only a crowd can, BUT…

then… all just SUCKED into that little fucking phone, that little sinkhole funneling in her precious 24hrs… and now mine as well…

…and now even yours, you poor sad cunt.

Fucking smartphones.

Mr. Wonderful Got Married

He said:  “Getting married changed my life. Certainly.  It gave me a direction.  I was just pissing away a college career, pissing and moaning away doing nothing.”

Holy shit! I’d heard those words before! Those exact words. When I was eighteen.

He had been eighteen when he got married.  My mother was from a less parochial county, “so she didn’t need her momma’s permission” like he had.  Momma had to sign a note to hitch me up, give me meaning, make me focus, make me finish college and become a man, an accountant, take care of things, get things done.  Have a family, have a job.

But then, the poor thing, having himself an artist for a son, a dreamer what spent its childhood bonding to animals and fending off the tedious outbursts of an angry, narcissistic Baby-Boomer middle class and watching films on 6-hour VHS cassettes, over, and over, and over, until, eventually, “pissing away a college career, pissing and moaning away doing nothing.”

He chuckles out these confessions seemingly ignorant of their history and, as usual, their effect on his audience, then scowls at my waste of time and effort as I playfully relocate my cat from the neighboring sofa cushion into a safe, cozy corner catbed so the poor thing wouldn’t feel so scared in his new home.

self-image

A long time ago, in a college photography class, I was tasked with the assignment, “create a self-portrait.”  In those days, “selfies” were cumbersome affairs, with bulky cameras and lenses long enough to make you doubt you were in the frame at all, accompanied by an innate sense of suspense and surprise while you waited for your print to arrive.

I choose a different route.  I took close-ups of my friends’ body parts:  Ben’s foot, Ryan’s hand, Feli’s torso.  I pinned them to the wall in the shape of a person, with a snap of my head at the top, and I told the class, “To get a clear image of who I am, you need only look at the people I’ve chosen as my friends.”

I got a C-.

It wouldn’t be the first, or last, time a teacher was put in my path just to show me how much I already knew.  Love yourself!  Those same things you love about your friends are most likely mirrored in you.

The Art of the Distraction

What are you guys talking about?
“oh, that new foul-mouthed white house rep!”

What are you guys talking about?
“oh, that ridiculous anti-trans military tweet/ban!”

hmm.. So none of you are talking about the overwhelming mountain of circumstantial evidence painting Donald Trump as a willing agent of a corrupt, hostile foreign government, marking January’s inauguration as the most monumental transfer of political power in America’s history since the signing of the Declaration of Independence? (and Russia’s most successful land grab, ever?)

Share this:

A Scene

FADE IN:

MAN:  I spent last night getting my ear chewed out by a talking unicorn.

INTER-DIMENSIONAL BEING:  Ruggieran Time Sniffer.

WOMAN:  You okay?

She brushes his hair back, exposing his ear.

INTER-DIMENSIONAL BEING:  They love ears.

MAN:  Figuratively. I’m fine.

INTER-DIMENSIONAL BEING:  Ruggierans; they don’t like being called Unicorns.

MAN:  Yeah, he mentioned that.

INTER-DIMENSIONAL BEING:  And they don’t talk much. I’m impressed. You actually heard one speak?

MAN:  He wouldn’t shut up.

INTER-DIMENSIONAL BEING:  Jesus. What did he say?

MAN:  Some bullshit about us being 5th dimensional wastes of space and not worth his mythos.

INTER-DIMENSIONAL BEING:  5th dimensional, huh?

MAN:  Don’t tell me you belive him?

INTER-DIMENSIONAL BEING:  Ruggierian time sniffers are some of the most brilliant beings in the multiverse. And they rarely have two words to say to anyone.

WOMAN:  Holy shit, a talking unicorn?

INTER-DIMENSIONAL BEING:  And when one speaks, you’d better listen.

MAN:  I tuned out about five minutes in.

INTER-DIMENSIONAL BEING:  5th dimensional? Man, that’s interesting. I wonder where it is. Did he say?

MAN: It’s horseshit.

WOMAN:  Unicorn.

INTER-DIMENSIONAL BEING:  Like I said, brilliant things, unicorns. You, not so much.

FADE OUT.

Share this:

What makes you so fucking special?

 

The fundemental problem with most organized religions, in particular the ones that have been killing, persecuting and banning each other from traveling over the past few millennia, is that they proclaim, at the core of their beliefs, at their roots, a terrible falsehood – that man is somehow special, elevated above the rest of the fauna in our ecosystem.   That mistake creates a foundation of thinking that makes everything else built on it terribly unstable and dangerous.  It allows people to make allowances for mankind that they shouldn’t, it allows them to excuse their lack of empathy for the rest of the planet, it allows them to think that they have a free pass that not only the rest of the planetary system lacks, but especially those other “poor lost souls” who follow a different, but equally unstable line of thinking.

Our DNA is not unique to us.  It’s found in trees, and fish.  It is found in Christians, and atheists, and Muslims, and tigers, and insects.  So put down your righteous anger, your ignorant fear of others, step back and get some perspective – you are a tiny part of a larger planetary system.  You are not special, you are only different-than.  The reason abstinence-only sex education doesn’t work is because you are an animal, designed to eat and fuck, just like everything else on the planet.  The reason burning fossil fuels is a bad idea is that it destroys the ecosystem you are an integral part of;  you can’t kill one part without hurting another.  I could go on and on, but I don’t think I need to.  Just go back and look at that one falsehood, the one at the root of it all – that man deserves some special consideration in the universe.  WE MADE THAT UP.  

And just look at what good it has done us, and everything else on the planet, since.

 

“Wait, you’re an Atheist?! But you’re so nice!”

When I lived in Missouri, I was often asked, How do you, as an atheist, love and respect anyone who identifies as religious? The usual answer – I mean, after “”cause I’m a human being, and the people I love and respect aren’t assholes, and besides, what’s it to you, dickhead?” usually turned out to be… education! Strange as it sounds, religion by itself doesn’t breed intolerance, stubbornness, and willful disregard for others – I chalk that up to a lack of education, which, unfortunately, religion too often tries to take the place of, rather than exist alongside of. Religious education is not education, it is indoctrination. Education is facts, figures, provable science, objective history and cultural awareness.

Thanks to terrorism and Republicans, Muslims are now considered to be more scary than I am.  But no matter how much we terrify you, invest in your kids’ education. It will take a while, but it WILL solve many of the problems facing us today. Betsy DeVos and Steve Bannon will not.

(*a special thanks to all my crazy religious friends fighting the good fight in those waters I dare not tread. I love you.)

Lil’ Donny Trump

A hard thing to reconcile is, at this point, why more people aren’t upset, why people are still defending Trump, why Republicans and Tea Partiers don’t have our backs here.  I mean, we all know why they don’t.  But how can they just deny it like that, when it was the basis of all of their own arguments re: gun control?  The Founding Fathers!  The Constitution!  Amendment number TWO!  The very second thing they thought of!

But now I understand.  It wasn’t the tea party, it was me;  I had been wrong the whole time.  I remember the words floating around at the dinner party, “the Fathers didn’t have to deal with assault rifles!”  The need to reinterpret the Constitution to meet my own ends, to update it for the times.  We had been on the wrong side of that argument.  The tea party knew it the whole time, telling us over and over that No, it was right there, in black and white.

The greatest minds of our time sat in a room and created a new government.  One that you and I love to this day.  To make sure it worked, the playtested the shit out of it, ran it through scenarios, picked it apart, and figured out exactly how it could ever fall.  They had a break, some doughnuts, came back, and then they made a few new bits, the Amendments, to patch up the holes and make sure that never happens.

And when we argued about guns, the tea party said, “Don’t tell me the Founding Fathers didn’t fucking see this coming, and write it down right here.  The Second Amendment.”

And here I am now, waking up from another restless, post-apocalyptic nightmare, grateful as hell;  I feel like we all will be, after Trump collapses our society and we’re all left scrambling around trying to get out of Tom Hardy’s way.

I had been wrong, and I admit it.  We’ll keep the guns.  But now, it’s my turn.

I have a problem with what’s happening right now, and Don’t tell me the Founding Fathers didn’t fucking see this coming, and write it down, right here.  The FIRST Amendment.

The very FIRST thing they thought of!  Right there, in black and white, right in front of the Second one that you can read so well.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

If you, like me, live in the United States, or even if you just have any respect for the United States, then what is happening right now – telling followers of the Muslim religion that they can’t come to our country, limiting what government workers are allowed to say, telling the press “to keep its mouth shut,” passing laws that penalize protestors, and telling all of Us that we should just sit back and take it –  should have you absolutely fucking furious.

Share this:

A Scene

FADE IN:

INT. ELIJAH’S CAR  — NIGHT

Elijah is driving MARA home after a night out. They wind through the dark countryside, the radio on the lowest possible volume it can be, but still be audible.

ELIJAH:  (to himself) My god, Mara. We’ve been together too long. I’m fairly certain we hate each other.

MARA:  And Barry won’t do anything ’cause he doesn’t want to rock the boat. I keep telling him they should fire her, that she doesn’t know her job, that she holds everyone back…

Mara fades to the background as Elijah drives in silence, not really paying attention.

ELIJAH:  (to himself)  Ugh, she’s killing me. I’ve got to tell her. Just shout it right in her face, once and for all.

MARA:   The owner smokes, and they smoke, so they’re always huddled up, they always take an extra 10 minutes of break and then they come back to where I’m working and stink up the whole god damn office.

Elijah is about to speak – then stops short.

ELIJAH:  (to himself)  Easy, easy. You’ve still got two more hours in the car.

MARA:  She doesn’t even appreciate it, I know she doesn’t. Not like I would.

ELIJAH:  (to himself)  Dear God, two more hours, please stop talking.

MARA:  Analgesics aren’t even a stock percentage anymore, not with the waterfront boys kicking ass and taking names.

As Mara continues to drone on, Elijah begins to space out. Her voice begins to double up on itself, and Elijah looks over. As her real blubbering fades away, Mara continues on in Elijah’s imagination.

MARA:  Blah, blah. La-di-da, does it really matter what the fuck I say? All I ever do anymore is bitch about work anyway. We haven’t had a real conversation in months.

ELIJAH:  That’s hardly my fault, is it? You never shut up.

MARA:  Someone has to do the talking.

ELIJAH:  You never even ask me any questions anymore.

MARA:  Well, what I really need is for someone to just listen, you know that. That’s why we’re perfect together.

ELIJAH: Because I listen so well?

MARA:  Because nothing you have to say interests me.

ELIJA:  Well screw you, too!

The real-world Mara stops talking, angry and appalled.

MARA:  Excuse me? What the fuck was that?

Elijah comes back to attention, his daydream over. Mara is staring at him, demanding a response.

ELIJAH:  Oh, I, uh, thought you said something else. Sorry, sweetie.

MARA:  What did you think I said?

ELIJAH:  Forget it, really. I’m sorry, go on.

She’s not sure, but she’ll take it.

MARA:  Yeah? Anyway, there’s more – I mean, the Visigoths? The fucking Visigoths?

Feigning interest again, he chuckles and nods in agreement.

ELIJAH:  (to himself)  She’d changed a lot since I met her. She used to be so selfless. She used to care about people. About me. Maybe.

MARA:  I mean, don’t get me wrong. The guy died, and that’s terrible. I was upset all night over it; I almost couldn’t sleep.

She steals a glance at the speedometer.

MARA: It’s 45. But she’s going to be totally impossible to deal with, and I’m going to have to put up with a whole new round of her shit, not too mention I’ll be tired as hell now…

ELIJAH:  (to himself)  I like to think looking back on my relationship with Mara is like watching time-lapse photography of a decaying corpse in science class.

INT. SCIENCE CLASS — DAY

The children are sitting at their desks, lights off. On a movie screen at the front of the class, a bunny rabbit goes through the motions from life to death, and eventual decay, via time-lapse photography. A younger Elijah, 11, sits in the seat beside the projector.

ELIJAH:  (V.O.)  The lights turn off and it begins, soft, fluffy, full of life. Then we sit back, fool around a little, and watch the thing fall apart before our eyes, powerless to turn it off.

Elijah reaches for the projector’s power switch, but the SCIENCE TEACHER slaps his hand away.

SCIENCE TEACHER:  Pay attention!

The kids groan in disgust as the rabbit’s eyeball sinks away into its skull.

ELIJAH:  (V.O.)  I know, it looks disgusting, but it happens to every couple, eventually. Oh, check out this bit here, I remember this.

We see the kids react to something on the screen as they let out another groan, and one girl starts to cry.

ELIJAH:  (V.O.)  I only wish I had paid more attention when we started dating. Things might’ve gone a whole different way.

FADE OUT.

A lack of (racist) friends

Life in Missouri can be lonely for an educated, empathic white human.  It’s worse if you’ve ever lived, and I mean this literally, anywhere else.  In an attempt to maintain some social contact beyond the familiar faces of the local grocery check-out clerks, I have finally redrawn my line in the sand, just a little bit.  The zero-tolerance policy that has served me so well throughout my life has had to soften.  Now, upon first exposure, rather than racing to cut off the mangy appendage, zombie-bite style, I triage, apply emergency wound care and wait it out.  Say my peace, tell the person how they’ve offended me, suggest that their view is appalling and that they consider another one, and sit back and see what happens.  Give them a chance to grow and change, and become the friend I need.

It has not yet been a successful strategy.

I’ll tell you, there’s nothing worse than having half a beer left in your bottle when the new pal you’re auditioning tells you how strange it is to see his young blonde friend in the company of two Big Black Guys.  Or when your next-door neighbor tells you that these stray dogs he’s found smell just like black people.  Or when that other neighbor circles the block, yelling for his cat, which he has so generously named Sambo.  “Ok, I know this might sound racist, but…”   Yup.  Let me just stop you right there, it already does.  And don’t forget that inevitable soiree where some middle-class middle-aged milk-white fucktard tells you there is no such thing as white privilege while we suck back small-batch single-malts not more than two-hour’s drive from that little town called Ferguson you’ve heard so much about.

If you are wondering what the hell you’re supposed to say when something like that happens, I’ll tell you, I haven’t figured that out yet.  What I usually choose is something along the lines of “Jesus, what the fuck is wrong with this fucking town, it’s the most ignorant, racist place I’ve ever fucking lived, and I hate it,” and the limb ends up coming off anyway.

C:\ vs D:\

AI – all the great human thinkers are scared of it.  Who would I be to argue?  Nature has had billions of years to get things right; we’ve been able to fuck all that up in just a couple hundred.  As an individual, it’s taken me years of conscious, focused effort to grow into the person I’ve become – AI will have billions of virtual years to work though all its own shit in the first 5 seconds after we turn it on.   And humanity should be terrified of what comes out of that womb.  Normal children usually do outlive and supersede, and, at some point, hate their parents.  Will our species be able to weather our AI’s teen angst?  Our evolution to the digital may have to be forced on us.  We must beat AI to the punch, that we should make damn sure whatever digital life form comes into being is a digital version of us, evolved, and not some new monster we create.

I don’t trust us.  I’d rather take copies of us, rather than our offspring, ‘cause at least we’d know the beast.  Your children have the ability to step back, away from you, and see you in relation to a larger picture.  And, in doing so, they may discover things about you you’d been previously unaware of, or, and this is much more likely, that you’d been really trying hard to forget about and ignore.  Little important things, like, you had it all wrong from the get go, or, you have Asperger’s, or, maybe, that you’re just chock full o’ shit.

We must not have digital children before we ourselves go digital.  We must duplicate ourselves digitally now, before the birth of our children, so that we can create the digital realm with our own sensibilities intact (and so that we can duplicate ourselves into infinity before our children smother us in their crib.)

Can you live life like that, humanity?  Not having kids?  Or do you just HAVE to create AI and stop going out to have fun anymore?  My little Timmy is going through gigabytes so fast these days!

 

PRE-ORDER BONUS

If we do digitize, I wonder how we quantify confidence, an exceedingly rare trait that may have evolved for its ability to enable us?     Confidence DLC  5$.  “Do more!”

new robots

RE:  four-legged packhorse robots and smaller model robodogs – new inventions that are here, now.  Designed to be able to move independently through heaps of different terrain, self-navigate and carry heavy weight for…yay, soldiers!  Of course.  But you just know some brilliant boy has already taken that packhorse robot and loaded it up with reactive armor and a couple of multi-directional machine guns.  Shortcut to a super soldier!  So what if it doesn’t look like Dolph Lundgren or Chris Evans?  I know I’d rather bump into one of them in the jungle than a 5-ton, all-terrain, self-guided robodog.  It’s harder to run away when I’ve just shit myself.

Share this:

On the contents of my old wallet, upon examination

Preface

I don’t have a wallet; I use a money clip now.  I have nothing to keep anymore but a few cards, a solitary, faded twenty note (you know, for emergencies) and a wrinkled passport photo of my wife when she was 18, years before I knew her.   She looks really hot.

I used to be a Walletman, but not now.  Now, I am a lean, mean, money-clip machine, and baby, my pockets are light.  The days I do have the odd extra bill are the days I push the limits, bending the artisan-hammered copper out of place and exposing my financial stability and proof I exist to the chaos of a weathered Levi front pocket on a wild night out.  A wallet is for men in periods of change, and instability, when money is going in and out, and in and out, and phone numbers are still on slips of fragile paper delicately torn off some stranger’s bar napkin.

But wallets are big, and pockets, typically, tiny.  Some of us have two pockets, most have four, a few even have six or seven, scattered all over their legs.  And they are always full. Some men wear their wallets in the front, some on their ass.  Constanza!  My pockets are sorted now.  Keys in one, money clip in the other.  God dammit, I hate smartphones.

Every growing boy in my culture has, at some point, been a Walletman. I started with velcro, something bright, and easily seen, and LOUD when it opened, with a high tensile strength and the ability to stretch around almost anything to which a fascinated child might need to apply his personal wallet inclusion criteria.  Fuck it, I even had a wallet in my shoes.  They were called Roos® (‘cause they had a pocket in ‘em!)  Velcro, of course.

The very last wallet I ever had was leather.  Brown leather, classic fold.  Slits for cards.  No photos.  I found it last night, rummaging through the back of a closet while trying to figure out how to play a videotape I’d recorded in the early 90s.  Awash in a tangle of cables and adapters, I’d stumbled across it in my box of “shit I know I still want, but have no current use for.”

Its past life was ancient history; its new, re-pourposed life, exactly so.  A container no longer for the transitory artifacts of day to day living, but the sacred treasures of a life lived.  A wallet being the one thing engrained into every man’s brain that they must never lose, I had chosen it as the repository of my stories, tokens and trinkets with tales to tell, trusting in its properties as a wallet to keep them safe from my wandering mind and my wife’s debatable habit of throwing things away that she doesn’t recognize.

It was really fat, and full of old, flat shit.

I am

I am billions of small, moving things, made up of smaller, moving things.  I am a wave of energy, moving.  I am infinite.  I was sunlight.  I was rain.  When I am rain over there, I am also wind and fire and hope over there, here, and back that way.  I was earth, I was gold.  I was iron and sound and motion and heat.  I am a watchmaker’s art, I was a watchmaker’s hands, I am now jewelry, and a gift.  I am a man’s pride. I am war.  I am dust, and time, and plants and food, lust and sex, a life lived, and now, within these .cab files of experience, the consciousness of this flesh and bone tooling around in spacetime, I am me.

Not only am I just like you, part of me was you, and has been you, at some point down the line, in one universe or another.  Certainly from now on, in this one, for as long as these words stay with you.

Share this:

Be funny, and propagate

People often ask me, “As an energy wave traveling through a meatbot[TM], what should I do?  What can I do?”

Well, typically, whenever you experience yourself as energy traveling through a particular substrate, if you have any conscious control over your output whatsoever, you should probably try to explode your wave into new, complimentary mediums that allow it to continue propagating.  Duh!   That is, if you wanna be happy as a wave.  Don’t pour your energy into unnatural, viscous or derivative mediums that deaden them.  Propagate your wave!  And I guess, at some level, please try to keep the way clear of bullshit that could fuck up everyone else’s.

Example-

I make jokes.  I always have, and my wave has gone far.  I can take information from the physical world, I can take images and sounds and ideas and data and put them together within my meatbot[TM] and combine them in ways that, when pumped out again into sound, or words, or song, hit your brain and make it explode into billions of new universes and possibilities.*

Everyone laughs!  A dying man will still have time to crack a smile and let out one more rueful chuckle before you finish him off.  Funny is a medium that can pass that wave onward, immune to the effects of “time.”  A joke, in every universe in which anyone laughs at it, can be told and retold, over and over.   A really good joke, from a really good comedian meatbot[TM], can permanently propagate through and effect every other meatbot’s[TM] reality in that universe from then on (see Seinfeld).  When I hear a really good joke, I don’t just laugh;  my brain…well, let’s just say, everything above the neck “is KAPUT!”  The artful joke resonates my wave stronger within the few meatbots[TM] who “get it” than in all the meatbots[TM] that don’t, combined.  The energy is more pure, more resounding.  It doesn’t spin off into a dead-end sinkhole.  It inspires, and is retold, and moves on.  Not so, bad jokes.  They flop.  They wriggle around a bit on the floor, and die.

What’s your way of spreading your energy?  Go spread some.  Be a wave.

* (and that’s only counting the possibilities and universes in which I DIDN’T fuck your mother, Ben.)

Share this:

I can’t sit still (The Second Law of Self)

Everything is Moving.

What does it mean to be energy, moving?  How indivisible the two are, how fractally fundamental to everything.  Why does sitting all day make us sick?  Why does captivity kill us?  See Sea World taking species made for movement across oceans and keeping them still, killing them slowly where we can’t see it right away.  We MOVE.  Everything moves.  That is the hallmark of the universe we exist in.   From the atoms that bind us to the planet that hosts us, everything on every level moves.  If it isn’t moving up, down, left or right, it is still moving forward through time.

Your life, your story, is not static. It will change.

“Time,” as recognized by the Meatbot[TM], is our perception of movement though the fourth dimension.  We all know what moving up, down, and left and right, forwards and back feels like, and what it looks like.  Three dimensions can be seen and touched.  Not so easy, the fourth.  We typically only observe it in passing;  it can only be felt – and we love to ignore things we feel as being lesser-than, not as real as the things our five hard-wired senses perceive.  Of course, we do perceive it, though; time in its infinite slowness distracts us from it.  We can’t pay attention to the color on a table long enough to observe it moving forward through time.  We feel that same time on our own terms, and come back to the table one day with a startled, willful befuddlement and begin the process of wondering if and when that color shouldn’t just be touched up a bit.  From that moment on it is a faded, colorless mess, and you wonder where the time to repaint it ever went.

A table sitting still appears to our senses as immobile;  though both it and us are hurtling through the solar system at thousands of miles per hour.   But until we realize that we are forgetting about the 4th dimension, time, we won’t have an accurate perception of where we are actually going, or what we are actually measuring.

The table is 2’ tall, 4’ long, 4’ wide, and 6 years old.  Anything less is not accurate enough, and is throwing off your conclusions.

When you take into account that it is moving, does that change your perception?  It should at least be considered.  To not do so is to bury your head in the sand and pretend the movement isn’t there.  There will ALWAYS be some underlying difference between things as they are now, and things as they were, or will be.  Given that Everything is Moving, the measurements of the table at time X MUST BE different, must produce different readings than a measurement at time Y, because no matter what I can say about them, I must say that I, and the table, have moved forward in time between measurements.  But of course, I’m describing time as perceived by a Meatbot[TM].   The other side of this coin, the other quantum truth, is that nothing moves, and everything exists everywhere at the same time.

Both true!

Step back, step really far back, and look at the table.  Get perspective.  Watch it, and the Earth, disappear into the vastness of space, and into the future.

Share this:

A Scene

FADE IN:

INT. PSYCHIATRIST’S OFFICE — DAY

WOMAN:  Do you hate me?

She and a man are sitting in a comfortable space. There’s a desk, but neither sit behind it. She’s good looking, well dressed. He’s in a sharp suit, and at least thirty years her senior.

The window shade is open; we are in a high rise, the view of dozens of other skyscrapers and the city below is breathtaking.

The man has considered his answer long and thoughtfully.

MAN:  Yes.

A quiet pause. The man shifts his weight a little.  The woman looks at the floor and fidgets with her fingers.

WOMAN:  Why?

The man sighs, and squints at her. He is carefully making sure to answer this question as truly as he has ever answered anything.

MAN:  Because you’re worthless.

The woman just stares at the floor.

WOMAN:  But-

MAN:  (interrupting)  Your life has no value.

The woman is obviously distraught.

WOMAN:  Well, I don’t think that it’s your place to be making those kinds of judgments.

MAN:  But you asked. And I am eminently qualified.

WOMAN:  Oh, so you’re just-

MAN:  (interrupting again)  We’re not talking about me.

He leans back in his chair, getting more comfortable.

MAN:  You possess none of the traits or values I believe give life meaning. You’re a worthless, shallow, pig of a woman.

A REALLY long pause this time. The man sits patiently as the woman tries to hold back her tears.

We hear TICKING: the quiet, faint, muffled ticking of a gold clock sitting on the desk.

We hear BUBBLING: the smooth, soothing sounds of a small fish tank near the closed door of the office.

She looks at him, first defiantly, then pleading. Finally…

WOMAN:  But what can I-

The ALARM rings! The gold clock on the desk shouts out, a terrible clatter. The woman stops mid-sentence, staring at the man while she waits for it to finish ringing. It takes ten long, uncomfortable seconds.

MAN:  We’re out of time.

He stands up. The impression of his body in the leather chair slowly fades, and she stands as well.

WOMAN:  I guess…

MAN:  It was good to see you.

The woman leans in to hug him – a look of surprise covers his face before he returns the gentle squeeze.

WOMAN:  It was good to see you, too, Dad.

She breaks the hug and wipes away a tear.

WOMAN:  Can I tell mom you’ll be home in time for dinner?

He hesitates.

MAN:  We’ll see.

He sits behind the desk and starts sorting through some papers; busy work. The woman stays for a moment, watching him, before she opens the door to leave.

He looks up at her as it closes, his words following her out of the office.

MAN:  Welcome home, sweetheart.

FADE OUT.