Yesterday or the day before, along the way toward getting my car inspected, which proved to be impossible due to shortage of skilled labor, I'm guessing, I had a mild panic-like attack driving behind a massive confederate pickup sporting balls from its hitch. You know, rubber bull testicles. How long before we're all at literal war with ourselves?
Then last night I'm awakened by a car alarm just below my window, which had backformed itself into the dream I was having. I couldn't get back to sleep. I knew I would be feeling as miserable now as I actually do. Now. But sometimes my thoughts are more clear when my body's feeling wrecked.
I had to eat something in the meantime, composing brilliant words as I flopped the blueberry pancakes. I mean I could never be a chef, but they tasted pretty darned good, even if I ate too many of them and likely lost most of what brilliance I thought I was cooking, during the time I was cooking. All my mental composing was lost.
But here's the thing: Every little desire I have now is translated up into the brilliant cloud of want satisfaction, at the other end of which is some corporate controller whose maximal value is to satisfy that want in the aggregate. And we, the elite readership who consider ourselves well-informed, want to hate those self aggrandizers. Especially when they become elected Republican officials.
We readers really want the same thing as the blockbuster movie watchers, right?
But anyhow they are us! We want oil, we want gizmos, we want plastics, Benjamin, plastics. And we want it packaged. There is a new store in town, just opened, where you can buy such things as metal straws and glass soap dispensers, and who knows how long it's good for. The store, I mean. You can get it all by way of Amazon. I'm sure.
All I know is that in just one supersized year I'm suddenly afraid to cross the country ever again. Could me my age, but I wasn't all that much younger when in summer of 2020 I came back from the West Coast hauling my tiny home and deploying it as my portable quarantine just in time for the big 65. It was at least three circumnavigations across the three years before that. And I'm done! Medicare and out!
I'm afraid - and rationally so - to cross the anti-vaxxer states, and I'm afraid of weather and I'm afraid of fire and flood, and mostly I'm afraid that my knack for always finding a lovely spot to spend at least a night will have been overwhelmed by just the mass of new RVers. I gauge this by the inflationary cost to own one.
Hell, I think I could get more than I paid for mine now. Sell before the crash? Make me an offer I can't refuse. Please!
I remember when Dad's dementia started to get bad, and he wouldn't wash. The nurses helpfully explained that some folks in dementia can't be confident of the floor to the shower and are afraid to step into what is sensed as a black hole. Or a white hole.
So Dad, a lifelong habitual - one might say fanatic - swimmer, would essentially wash by swimming in the pool. Which didn't exactly make me want to join him, but mostly a male nurse would be recruited to guide his shower beforehand in the large shower-room, which felt familiar to Dad as a locker room from his swimming days in high school and college. I guess. He's always been more comfortable swimming naked the way they used to do in school. Imagine! Mom talked him into at least a jock strap in his personal endless pool.
Now I look back to work I was doing on my daughter's house, using a crappy table saw with non-existing safety features, disentangling crossed wiring, shaping new mullions for rotted storm windows with a cranky router, and cringe about doing it now for myself here in my little apartment, which also needs some improvements. It's like looking down into the black hole of a shower. Gone the spring of youth! Terrifying.
Well, I was right. My clarity is gone, though my belly is full. I haven't shopped since forever. What am I thinking? I must keep supplies in store. There were flood warnings even here in Buffalo, soon to be the destination city for those escaping what they thought was climatic and geographic nirvana. The most privileged will be travelling to Mars. They should live so long.
But I don't just see the yawning black hole in front of me where I used to see exciting prospects. I see the future, and . . . OK, well, it does look like a black hole. I read my first real article about 6G just now. It was in Chinese and described research in the "science city" whose director showed me around in the Pu Dong New District of Shanghai. Like many modern new-builds in China, its celebratory days seemed behind it then, a few years ago now, and the presentation centers looked decrepit, though they'd been new just "yesterday." Ah, China.
Science City must be buffed back up with China's post-COVID bounce-back. The excitement about 6G was palpable and real in the reporting I read. And then I found the Ericsson white paper and felt the let-down that the Chinese was hyping the English-language hype. But no matter, the thing is real.
It feels like this: You shorten the wavelength down to sub millimeter, and you reduce the latency by a couple of orders of magnitude and you get a kind of Capitalist or CCP wet-dream of a globally distributed mesh where the mesh itself will sense where the nearest and best computational power and authority is, and where the storage is, and presence will be real, and so will facial recognition and WOW the artifice of intelligence. WOW!
And yes, it feels like a black hole. As in, trust who exactly? Which experts will handle the security the privacy, the distribution of resources. We don't even know how to do civic education anymore, and we sure don't share the same national mythology anymore, and anyhow how will any of this slow down the discard of single-use container waste and the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, and where will the energy come from? And what will those sub-micro-waves (I have no idea if this is technically correct, but I think it might be) do to our bodies, not to mention the body politic?
I think that all I really wanted to say before and during breakfast is that we have found the enemy and the enemy is us. They - those who the readers among us love to hate - are only trying to give us what we want before someone else beats them to it. And the role is so addictive that they are loathe to relinquish it, even though they might have to sell their soul to keep it.
Is this really such a sin, aggregating all our little wants and meeting them? I am so sick and tired of the refrain from people who think that intelligence ought to rule the world, that these Republicans are all nuts. They've sold their souls to the devil. They're out of touch with reality! Well, guess what? We all are.
Do we really think that our rational self-interest will outvote our id? Really? When votes are bought and sold the same way soap is. In plastic containers? No money is put into the hands of the voters. Oh no, that would be patently illegal. We manipulate you behind the scenes of all the fun you get for free. Easy peasy.
Well, that's grim. But really, we know we're all implicated in what's going on. We all want guilty stuff. We're all guilty, no matter how woke.
A day has gone by now, at least, and I was offered a boat ride post-flood and we stupidly, against fellow boater advice, went for a slow cruise up the Buffalo River. We had to brave a maze of clustered logs and debris which had been flushed down the River, but not quite out, and the boat's skeg hung up on some of it, which was scary and embarrassing both.
Two woke offspring of my good old friends were along for the ride, one with an infant grandchild. And I was called out as just not trying anymore for my claim of no longer knowing how to work parts of the boat. But I think it also meant my fumbling with the preferred pronoun "they" for someone we were talking about who I used to know as "she." Guilty!
The other was the young fellow from New Orleans who'd shown me the literal "end of the world." It's a "monument" or "landmark" some-such on Google Maps, and he was both thrilled and amazed that Google had recorded the name that he thought he'd coined. Must have been in the airwaves or something. Anyhow, he was making a surprise visit to town because he works as a windmill blade repair person. That means ropes and dangling and fiberglass and grinders. He got his start in oil, in effect. But I think he's found his niche now. He seems to think so too.
So yeah, in just about another brief decade, we'll all be vibing together, and China will be doing it more seamlessly and better, probably, each individual person having internalized how to stay safe inside the all-knowing stack of ubiquitous computing. Each wanting to look like the ideal Han. How Han.
And we will be driving pickups sporting AR's and AK's or whatever can be laser sighted, right? And flags, which mean different things to different people.
Dark, dark, dark, black hole.
But I don't quite see it that way. I don't. I mean, I would be terrified to do the work, just as I am suddenly terrified to run a table saw right now, but it's not really my work to do anymore, is it? I ducked out when the clouds rolled in. The trust web stopped working for me. I was responsible for HIPAA related security and I shuddered.
I feel so relieved.
None of us went swimming yesterday, which was already the day after the yesterday that I started talking about here. Back in the day, we would have, but we all anticipated the post-swim chill and being wet at dinner time out. When I was scolding for growing up rich, and everybody needs to defend how poor they were now. As if any of us were. I ate out. I was warm and dry and we ate outside.
And I did marvel at the boisterous dock life; a concentration of non-readers for sure, and by far mostly powerboats at what I was reliably told was the largest dockage in all New York State. Though nobody believed my reliable reporting that yeah, there are more swimming pools in Buffalo than anywhere in the world, per household, which is obvious when you fly in as my young New Orlinean friend did.
Which all just proves my point that human life on earth has little to do with our misapprehension of what consciousness is. Sure there are such things as perfectly drawn circles and squares and stars and ellipses now, and it is very very hard to imagine that these would not be recognized as such by any consciousness anywhere in the knowable cosmos. And that there therefore must be natural law and it must be universal.
But before you apprehend the perfect circle you have to find it somehow beautiful and want it. Music of the spheres kind of thing. And nobody's music sounds like anybody else's, right?
So all this 6G humming coming together might wake us up, right? Right?
I mean like this guy literally dressed literally in the literal flag comes up to Matt Goetz on the beach next to Marjorie Taylor Greene all excited to see them and chummy and putting his arm around Gaetz tells him "I don't think you're a pedophile" after telling Marj "I don't think you're crazy at all" and it takes them a while to catch on. You can check it out for yourself. It's really funny.
Like how do you ever know who you can trust and who might be a provocative agent from the enemy? Like I didn't even know I was bloodied and bruised after climbing up from the head on the River yesterday. There should be an age-limit warning against the contortions you have to make.
Whatever~
Right?
Yeah, so anyhow we may discover that here on earth we humans really aren't all that distinguished from one another as the boundaries between and among us dissolve into the silicon solvent and we realize all over again that government of and by and for the people is far more precious than we ever did imagine and we take back the networks because they were ours in the first place, and blockchains don't make anyone rich ever anymore because you get to see what you own as distinguished from what everyone else owns and you give it all freely away when you need or want to because we're all suddenly rich together.
OK, now it's time to wake up. I am sooooo fat.
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