Well, it’s that time of year when I put my inability to properly assess and address personal relationship issues on hold (aware that I am just a kid in an adult body) and work on my workshop design, something I can hold in my hands and not get emotionally confused about.
I love being a lazy nerd!
Should I worry when I can’t taste the food I’m eating, when the coffee has no flavour, when the people around me seem like cartoon projections through a translucent screen?
Or do I know this is my normal state now, no longer a part of this world, just a passing stranger with only myself I’ll ever understand, if I know me at all?
I am tired, naturally so.
Time for bed rest, this five-year old in a fifty-five year old body wants to forget himself in his dreams for a while, maybe never wake up…
Too lazy to copy and paste the text. Here’s the link to the New Yorker humour article:
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/im-considering-moving-to-la-now-that-nyc-is-underwater
The latest experiment in the labyrithine laboratory, part “Labyrinth,” part “Pan’s Labyrinth,” part of “The Metamorphosis,” part “The Island of Dr Moreau,” started simply, measuring frog length, height, weight and other characteristics not prone to subjective views, such as colouration and wart count.
But my lab assistants bore themselves with such trivial matters, assigning the tasks to semiautomated industrial robotic arms repurposed for laboratory work.
Then, when I’m not looking at how they’re spending my money (after all, I’m the one who first set up the bank of graphic accelerator chips to mine Bitcoins!), they experiment with frog embryos.
Nothing out of the ordinary, they said, just manipulating a few genetic traits, producing extra limbs through chemical baths simulating agricultural runoffs.
That is, until they discovered newts on the forest floor which covers the underground laboratory.
If only they had asked my permission!
If only I had given them access to notes from previous experiments that I and my former colleagues had meticulously recorded as we, too, decided to play designer gods.
Every generation chooses how to leave its mark on society.
I walked the forest this morning, meditating upon the quietude of a midsummer heat wave, a light fog giving the forest a misty, mysterious maze of tree trunks to meander around.
I kicked over a small rotting tree limb and out scurried a half-frog, half-newt mutant.
My sixth sense told me I saw not a marvel of evolution but a student experiment that escaped laboratory confines.
And, sure enough, my current batch of assistants (themselves a hybrid of biological compnents and electromechanical wizardry that they had convinced themselves were congenital — who am I to tell them differently, my being an amalgam of parts myself?), they admitted the animal was created by them.
Rather than punish them for their creativity, I sat down with my assistants to discuss this creature scurrying and hopping inside the terrarium which sat in the middle of the conference room table.
What did they wish to accomplish?
Nothing untoward, they said, just seeing if they could manipulate DNA to create hybrid creatures.
They had not yet matured enough to project futures during their experimentation.
Of course, the oldest of them was only five so I expected nothing more of them in that regard.
I taught them the Law of Negative Transivity in respect to mutations.
A frog is not a newt so what, then, is not a frog-newt hybrid?
In other words, what shape in the future would the frog-newt become that would not exist otherwise?
Points on a straight line are not always what they seem — every basic mathematical matrix teaches us as much.
A point is an average of all conditions that meet at that point.
For instance:
1+3 = 4 = 5 – 1 = 2 x 2
A frog is not a newt but a frog plus a newt equals a frog-newt hybrid.
Therefore, a frog-newt hybrid plus something equals something else entirely.
I sent the assistants back to the laboratory to continue their experiments after they finished an inventory of frogs, newts and hybrids to account for the missing hybrid I found and to sort out how it escaped.
Meanwhile, I’ve got an empire to run.
Working with a thinktank of self-important geniuses, I’ve projected a future where the vast majority of the world has legalised the public consumption of most major natural mood enhancing plants, reducing the illicit drug trade and changing the face of society.
Of course, it was a predicted progression of the rich getting richer, supplying the poor and destitute with nothing more to ease their worries, pains and starvation but through low-cost medicinal self-therapeutic catharsis, making sure enough of them still accrued sufficient debilitating debt throughout their participation in modern society to keep building the gap between rich and poor.
But we already know all these futures.
I want something more, something more than my hyper-enhanced body provides.
We, us, the global network of human/machine hybrids, we live in a state of constant fear under which people learn to love one another.
We fear total collapse of the planetary weather pattern which has turned us into the dominant if not most prolific species on Earth.
We know it’s going to happen because of natural cycles.
We fear it’s going to happen faster because of our intentional and unintentional changes to local environments which add up to a significant enough change to the global environment that it seems to tip the global weather patterns against nominal climate fluctuations.
I look at my lab assistants and wonder if their frog-newt hybrid is our future.
What if our species is doomed to collapse and our lasting legacy is a totally new set of beings we created through accidental laboratory results?
My intuition says yes.
What does yours say?
The self-centred “I” does not exist, a journey one took from age five on, a journey one understood would test one’s determination, knowing one can, like Pinocchio, wander off a path, get pulled into others’ lives, more or less daring than one’s own, but pick back up at any time one wanted, from wherever, whenever, the path more a philosophical entity than a physical one.
Yet, because labels do not exist, philosophy and physical are terms, temporary pathways through one’s neural networks, comprising memory locations which may or may not trigger other parts of the sets of states of energy we call a body, which all in all are just fractal spinoffs of galactic-sized whirlwinds in the mesh we call a universe.
One can choose a place and time to withdraw from the Zeitgeist, satisfied with one’s legacy, logically concluding that living a quiet life in one’s backyard paradise is the primary goal one sought decades ago.
The emotional attraction to others fed one’s self-centredness, building belief in another path that one had rejected as requiring more energy than one contained or drew upon.
One had achieved one’s place, if such a requirement exists (implying historical social hierarchical placement, a false sense of identity), giving those who believed in such a healthy nod that they were associated with a “winner”; thus, one could step away from them and ensure that should one run into them, one’s identity was easy for them to greet with a friendly smile, handshake, wave, and/or hug.
Therefore, one was free to pursue one’s destination toward death, expecting no rewards at the end, avoiding emotional states one had no training in how to handle, able to focus on health issues that, although not debilitating, were nonetheless interesting enough to take away from paying attention to the needs of others within one’s social circle, real or imagined.
The wisdom complicit with growing older (or does one shrink older? lol) gives one a longterm perspective whereby the pursuits in one’s youth, triggering fond memories, are best remembered rather than relived with newer, young friends, leaving one to find/fund hobbies one enjoys with one or two people within one’s age group.
If younger friends wish to contact one such as this author, they choose to do so realising that one walks a path up the mountain of Insight often involving solo treks, leaving nothing more behind than footprints in the mud, a broken flower stalk, or torn sock threads on briars, seeking neither companionship nor solitude, simply taking off with no plan other than reinforcing one’s meditative trance in the midst of life.
One lives with one’s hearing loss, with deteriorating skin damaged by solar radiation, with internal organs subjected to poor dietary decisions, with body parts damaged in motorcar smashups and sporting events.
One meditates upon the acceptable limits on one’s life based on the conditions in the previous paragraph and future decisions concerning one’s changing bodily conditions, fully aware that death is closer than one’s birth at this point, choosing to believe one will unlikely live to see 6th May 2050, the date of one’s predicted actuarial death, a date one chose to also represent the possibility that our society will announce the successful colonisation of another celestial sphere, preferably Mars but also the Moon or other large object in our solar system.
Otherwise, one closes off the tendrils one had grown out into virtual social circles when one feared that a job shift change would doom one permanently (the fear of doom was greater than imagining how the word “doom” physically manifested itself).
Finding oneself actually close to true happiness, where social connections are at a minimum, where one does not have to worry about entertaining others because one is empty and without purpose internally (unless living a relatively quiet, healthy, monastically meditative life up to the end of one’s life is a purpose)…well, it is the truest path one knows.
One no longer competes with or tries to achieve social expectations for oneself.
When one’s body is, the act of being suffices.
In the first place, you should already have IoT as a key part of your life, right?
If you want to be in first place, leading your industry rather than following it, that is, in the fourth industrial revolution.
The cat’s out of the bag, and no, it’s not Schrödinger’s cat.
My team has elected the next project leader for the next project, an autonomous greenhouse, which is basically a building-sized robot that feeds itself and grows/harvests food for humans.
Interestingly enough, but not surprisingly so, they chose a project management algorithm to lead the project, giving over all decision making and late night number crunching to a software team member who/which won’t need weekly meetings or summary reports to get its point across when fingers are pointed toward the causes of failures in achieving project goals.
The algorithm already mines Bitcoins to generate revenue for the project so cost has all but been eliminated from concerns on this project.
Practically eliminating humans from the design and construction phase reduces labour costs; so, too, during operation and maintenance.
The algorithm has a flexible set of milestones to complete the design and construction, this being a new project for all involved.
I trust my team.
However, I’m building my own scale version of this to compare one human’s design to that of an algorithm.
In my case, cost is of paramount importance, labour cost is primarily my free time and schedule is within a few weeks/months depending on weather conditions and my free time.
Wish me luck!
The scene was set.
A group of friends whose written descriptions would quickly set discussions in motion.
But the author claims no relation to Donald Barthelme.
Instead, the table was set.
A round table, or roundtable, ’round which one’s casual advisors sat:
The Frenchman, the Gunslinger, the Rocket Engineer, the Dance Instructor, the Sister, the Irishman, the Roller Derby Mom, the Running Dad, the Leader, the Follower, the Canoeist, the Classmate(s), the Strangers, the Wife, surrounded by a Peanut Gallery of Rogues, Ne’er-do-wells, Solid Citizens and Ghosts.
To the advisory panel, one posed a question, directly to some, indirectly to others, through observation of a few, through social media to the rest:
“Who am I?”
The answers consistently told the same story:
The author is a friend, more normal than strange, whose presence is more desired than rejected, whose influence is accepted without question.
Yet, the author felt something was missing. What of the One the author felt was key to opening the door to a future pushing the concept of retirement out of one’s thoughts for decades more?
The author approached the advisors with the same question.
The answers drew a different picture than what the author had drawn.
Which picture was more accurate?
The author did not know much about the One except through texts from the One and descriptions from others who had spent many moments alone or in groups with the One.
One’s thought of the One — were they necessary?
If the author always sought a mommy figure and the One always sought a daddy figure, what did they really have in common, except shared members on the advisory panel?
Perhaps that was it and all that was necessary to live in two futures at once, a life of leisurely retirement and a life of active participation in the raising of a generation of children who would inherit one’s desire to question everything while simultaneously accepting everyone’s opinions/beliefs without question.
That’s all this author desired — a handoff of one part of one’s set of states of energy in motion to another, leaving an imprint, however small or large, knowing one is quickly forgotten within a generation or two of being alive.
The author already achieved long-lasting influence, thus the reason for retiring at age 45.
Ten years later, essentially the length of the life of one’s girlfriend who died in fifth grade, the author wondered which direction one was going next.
The author had walked away from the One many times, never assuming that the One would respond, but the One always did, finding some way to contact the author.
The author stopped asking why they were connected to each other.
The author wondered why the mental image of the One differed from others’ mental image of the One.
Did the author too quickly, too easily simplify and sugar-coat everything? Would that explain the image disparity?
The author never liked to offend others, looked for compromise to reduce conflict.
The author focused on activities rather than thoughts, mentally mapping out today’s activities within one’s control:
Pick up dead branches and rotten pieces of wood, clear a space to build a foundation for the next module of the backyard enclave — a writer’s/Maker’s studio, including a treehouse, greenhouse, sleeping loft and entertainment deck.
On the eve of the 4th of July, when families gather for fireworks displays, when piles of flavoured shaved ice become snowcones, where am I?
Standing in line for a sugar high in front of a community college math, science and CIS building, waiting for the US Space & Rocket Center to host a fireworks celebration of a new nation’s independence.
On a planet, what is national independence?
Don’t we breathe the same air?
Part of me is the everything in moderation, including moderation, God’s Frozen Chosen, social safety net Presbyterian.
Part of me is the anything goes anarchist atheist.
Keeping both parts (and all the other parts) artistically challenged keeps me alive.
treetrunkdings 