B: “Well, I’m not aware of the tinnitus all the time either, so…”
~
B:
C: “OMG! That’s soooo deep!”
Memory of A: “For you maybe.”
B: “Et tu?”
C: “Who?”
B: “Never mind.”
~
When you finally have a bit of money, but realize there is nothing you actually want in life anymore.
Except for coffee, decent internet, grocery delivery, a smartphone, good chair and computer rig, bed that doesn't cause back problems, uh.. yeah, oh and just enough money to pay for various entertainments, like for games, audiobooks, and series streaming, yeah, that's it, we're post-materialist minimalists now, we got just the basics, everything else is virtual.
~
Ghoulish Angels:
For what matters: Polite and agreeable, mostly shy. Walk around the clumps of wool they’ve gathered, there’s no need to rouse anything in anyone, try not to let things go awry. Observe them, pick everything apart, say nothing, have no part.
For who does not: Clownish and empty, mostly crass. Pose the horrid, watch them squirm. Avoid any indictment, let them learn. Poke at the holes in their souls, reciprocate every spurn.
~
C: “How can you say there’s no meaning? Surely you used meaning to express your alleged ‘nihilism’.”
B: “Yes, I’m a nothing-ist, not a no-meaning-ist. I mean there’s lots of meaning, it’s just not very interesting or purposeful.”
Memory of A: “Are you sure you wanna say that?”
B: “Shush!”
C: “Huh?”
B+C: “…”
~
Your dreams are not always your dreams, many if not most of them stem from either a cultural script, or a deep seated deficiency in your core, you need to learn what these are and work to resolve them, lest you should spend a lifetime suffering in chase of a dream that will turn into a living nightmare.
~
K: “Clean your room!”
B: “And with what force of compulsion, mind you?”
K: “Wrath and Disappointment.”
B: “Hah! Good luck with that.”
~
Imagine, like a Chiangian Predictor device, that with a NeuroBind installed into your head, you download an app on your phone hooked up to your brain activity. Anyway, so then the app, it would be of a solid color, but with a white circle in the center that can flash some pastel version of either green or red, and a soft shadowed block underneath it, showing, in a neat lightish-grey font, and in coordination with the circle’s changing colors indicating the choice made, the time it took for your brain, without your knowledge, to decide to tap on the circle. Like, with the predictor device, the aim is to tap the button without it flashing before you knew you wanted to tap it, it’s a little game you play, a game that ends in disenchantment with a chanceful side of mental illness, basically stemming from the realization that your “rational and autonomous” you is quite a flimsy bit of work, and a lot less “you” than you’d think. But that’s no matter to you right now, carry on.
~
A Saying: “When you put your big toe out the door, then it costs money.”
One reason I rather má just stay home.
~
I’d rather live alone, than spend one minute more in my life arguing, then immediately fretting again about the sudden impossibility of the future.
~
“Oh yes, we’re very elite, in fact, we’re so elite, there’s only one of us, and he’s not good enough.”
~
The Sir: “Why don’t you just take off your mask, what could you possibly be hiding under there?”
P: “Mask sir? There is nothing under it, no personae, just nothing, I wear it so as not to frighten people.”
The Sir: “Oh I don’t believe that, that’s nonsense. Prove it! Take the damn thing off.”
P: * removes mask, revealing an abyssal void that could swallow the earth *
The Sir: “My god, boy! Put it back immediately, I’m traumatized! Never do that again.”
P: * hurries to put on face again * “Sorry sir, yes sir of course, thank you sir.”
~
With the dishes stacked to high heaven, after she left, there was nothing to be done. The slothful fuck died from starvation at home a month later.
~
Memory of A: “What, you? Hah! You, giving out advice these days, ey?”
B: “No.”
Memory of A: “Why would you think someone must give a second of thought to you? You’re a failure, a damned hypocritical asshole.”
B: * deletes it * “sorry”
~
Said? Said they said what?:
“I provided and listened,” he said.
“I was there,” she said.
“Develop some character,” they said.
“We’ve no answers, help yourself,” they said.
“Don’t be like him,” she said.
“Don’t be like her,” he said.
“Oh but don’t be like that,” they said.
~
C: “Oh, you know, maybe you just haven’t found yourself yet.”
B: “Well, I looked once, but what I found was a bit shit.”
~
After Cryostasis is Real: For various reasons, some choose, or are coerced into, taking on a lifestyle wherein grand spans of time are spent frozen in cryogenic stasis. Between their skids across the surface of time, they get unpaused, and not always because they want to, but that’s what happens, and so, they live again in a different time, sometimes not for very long. These meta-temporal people, they live for the future and only the future, they hurdle towards eternity in search of decent and enjoyable time.
Thoughts:
“Welcoming and Reintroduction Centers”, where groups are set up for every 5 to 10 year time segment ever since cryostasis became a thing. These places help to reintroduce the meta-temporal to the current time. Changes are explained and steps are taken to ensure temporal etiquette.
There are “Old & Young-Old” meet and greet reunions, where people have a chance to meet with others from similar time segments. Though at every re-entry less and less familiar faces seem to show.
Then, there are the “Ancient Ones” they are those who have skid across over a thousand years. It is considered an extreme honor to have an ancient one attend your party, for their time is extremely valuable considering the distances they’ve leapt.
There is an ancient challenge among the Ancient ones, it is the race to become the most ancient human being to ever be unfrozen and live. (super ancient)
The Freezing and Unfreezing takes a heavy toll the more it is done. For some, their skid is a gentle suicide, a kind of wager against time. There are of course also “The First Ones”, they are those who have never been reanimated since the time of the first cryostasis systems. It is highly controversial, however, there has been an amendment to the meta-temporal ethics and constitution, like the world-heritage sites of old, a number of the first ones have been chosen to remain frozen for as long as possible, humanity tells itself that they are a sacrifice for memory, they are life eternal stolen from time, they are relics of the before world, when the times did not yet mix.
A scary thing that happens from time to time are the errors and occasional deliberate interference with people’s unfreeze date. A woman with Huntington's disease (after cryo, before cure) once made a promise to her daughter that she would do everything she could to be there, in not only her life, but in the lives of the grandkids also; they decided to schedule some gran-times with some padding for special events like births, deaths and marriages, but in general, they decided that young gran, who is eternally in her 30s, would come and visit for a couple months at a time once every 3-5 years, this way, she would last for a couple generations, before the Huntington’s got real bad, and who knows, maybe before then they’ll find a cure. B
ut this is not what happened, somewhere along the lines, someone, a random hack or something, messed up young-gran’s unfreeze date and set it way longer than it should have been. For her family life moved on, and when the time came, 3 years after, there was nothing to be done, they could not unfreeze young-gran, for it is illegal, outside of court mandate, to tamper with the freeze dates which an individual has set for themselves. They should have filed a complaint and offered proof of tampering, but because years have gone by, the gap to do so had long since passed. It was 300 years before young-gran was finally unfrozen, by then there was a cure for her disease, however, because of the severe and traumatic disappointment with the whole cryostasis industry, for 3 generations, no one in the family chose to be frozen, they all lived full linear lives. None of the remaining 4th and 5th gen family youngins and young-oldens even knew who young-gran was. Young-gran was horrified, she was all alone in a world that has changed so much, too much, in the time since she had last walked the Earth. It was too much to bear, young-gran couldn’t handle it, so she decided to be refrozen indefinitely. She became irrecuperable some 400 years later, when a war time tragedy struck, and her facility became unstable, losing 87% of its frozen on its right-wing which had been unearthed due to the force and heat of some terrible nuclear blasts nearby.
The legend of “Quasipseudo” a murdering time goblin with a terrible name, who hunts you down, no matter when you go.
~
Perhaps there can be no final way to escape finitude, but if we had less people, decent memory, and sufficient automation, it wouldn’t matter as much.
What is meant by decent memory is that by recording or recreating enough of art and the facets of life and feeling, we’d have created an archive from which endless entertainment could be generated, like a palette with which an AI can paint the semblance of lives worth living, or alternatively one wherefrom any question could be answered as well as possible, there would be no end to the disenchantment, we’d witness ourselves become hollow, having had our souls analyzed away into oblivion. If we had such a tangible grasp on history and ourselves, it could change everything, if taken seriously, it would stop so much nonsense where it stands. Reflexivity is a strange thing; if we manage to think outside of history or culture bound time, then what are we, or more importantly, who are we? Even now, with the internet, we can consume fragments of each other’s lives, we can, with cameras, eat experiences across many times and places as if they were in first person (and also with games, approximate a customized version of that). The point is, if you think about how profoundly literacy changed the game, then it is quite clear that we have no idea what we’re getting ourselves into by stepping outside of our own times and lives. What would happen, if a child was raised purely on fabricated experiences and those of other people, what identity would, or even could, they assume? And mind you, this is nothing magical, it is what’s happening right now. Videos exist, and so do games, like Assassin’s Creed, The Fallouts, or Far Cry Primal, that engage with history and funnel what it-has the potential to mean for people who’ve not encountered that history (or any) elsewhere. What if a fluke or twist in interpretation in a video game changes, for example, an entire generation’s conception of the past, and so too every generation thereafter. With myself for example, as a Gen-Z, the “feeling” I have of the 1950’s is almost exclusively from Fallout games and fragments from the internet and television and what precious little memory there remains from history at school. We don’t understand what time does to us yet, we can’t get a good grip on what we are until we understand how history and its tendrils shape us, or for that matter what the lack of any particular texture to time periods will result in.
~
Y: “Where do you live?”
X: “Nowhere but everywhen.”
~
Pettiest of Petties:
Crossing the street, I didn’t look.
A lady honked, and my bag fell.
This life is a crook. My first bottle
of chocolate bread spread broke.
Long walk home, glass chocolate
shards abound. Sticky hands,
torn bread bag. bleeding hands,
dripping, tired feet. Ah,
there she is, my love,
resignation and
defeat.
~
* Standing in a hallway looking in through the doorway *
Visitor: * pointing to a motionless patient sitting in a chair by the window at the far end of the room * “What’s wrong with him?”
Nurse: “He felt too much.”
~
That feeling of utter dread and disgust, when you watch your first extreme shock-video at an inappropriate age. For me, the first and worst one was where some Arabian gentlemen hacked the hands and feet off of a thief and wrapped the stumps in blue plastic, before lugging him onto the street, him fumbling to get upright, not quite yet understanding that his feet are no longer there. And let us also never forget “BME Pain Olympics”. Heh, and they still ask why is this internet generation so fucked, so efukt.
~
Nominalism: There are only [spatiotemporal] individuals or particulars, universals and abstract objects do not exist.
Universals qua numbers, abstracta, platonic forms, or similar. And why you might add “individuals” alongside particulars, is to avoid trouble with any weirdnesses the physicists come up with, like 1D objects that are smaller than space and time in that they play a role in making up space and time. Also, check out Wilfrid Sellars, his nominalistic naturalism, and his attack on mythical givens.
Conceptualism: If there are universals, they’re all in your head and come through also in language.
By this reasoning, your uniqueness don’t mean shit, because everything is of a singular variety (see the irony?). Like empty potato-masher-relativism, your belonging and relations to nature and other people are fictions built to comfort you through the isolation you feel in your own mind.
~
How do you help someone who is not stupid, but just unfeasibly hurt and who is also perhaps a little naive, someone who has at some point had to unfortunately learn to stop trusting altogether in order to protect themselves?
~
When your entire life’s struggle is reduced to an exemplar of “I’m 14 and this is deep”, like you should know better, except there aren’t any answers, and everyone else puts their head in the sand. Or when, as an exemplar of “I am very smart”, your shining star and anchor in brilliance is reduced to an embarrassing pit of shame and inanity, the depths of which you will never fish your name out of.
~
It’s one thing to do wrong and suffer thereby, it is another thing to become one’s wrongdoing! Wear your past stupidity like a trophy hat, because not all can say they have overcome theirs, let alone recognize it.
~
All the pitiful legacies of pitiful people:
“Jan, son of Hendrik, janitor of the east wing, keeper of stamps.”
“Mary, daughter of Anne, inheritor of crippling mental illness.”
“Hank, the unwanted yet there nonetheless, pimping son of a skank.”
“Penelope, daughter of the first graduate in their family, and an as of yet unfulfilled liver-up-toer of untenably high expectations.”
“Toby, son of Ronald, tender of a bar he despises, where Ronald also worked, fearer of cockroaches, liver of a mundane existence, keeper of an unlivable hollowness inside.”
~
Those moments when everything in you wants nothing more but to vomit and recoil in horror at the fact of this existence you’ve been cast into, that is this your life, and this is your body, and this, the room you’ve existed in for so long, the room down the hallway and next to the shitter, where your best years have come to die, and then the thought that there are rooms just like this one all over the world, millions upon millions of people thinking exactly this thought, just as distraught, and you wonder, like, why do I try, why do I bother keeping
on with this worn out joke, this little fragmentary piece of sick black humor that is being a human being.
~
* When the world is on fire *
People: “Shhh, it’s ok.. it’s ok.”
Sense: “It’s not ok.”
People: “Even if it’s not ok, it’s ok. Shhh.. Shhh..”
~
Gawie carved his name into a rock, his life has meaning now, but Dawie’s has more, because his name is burned on BluRay, but Nonie’s has even more because her’s is on a gold plate in space, and Wub Wub Zugloid #7’s has the most, because their name is spelled out with giant Galaxies, made of densely clustered swarms of nanobots each carrying a digital copy of the name, very high up and very far away.
~
Morsels for the Depressed, Depraved, Pessimistic, and Otherwise Declining Page 12