brain tracings

The human is a mimetic biocomputer. Its consciousness is information based. Information is the fixation by neural networks of an original stimulus that 'lives on' in a repeating pattern of neural activity. This allows the accumulation of moment-originated behavioral responses that occurred 'in time.' That accumulation of time forms the foundation for a 'prepared' self, which is the concentration of time into an organism adapted to its exigencies. The self becomes essentially time-transcendent to its existence. In essence, the self is built in time so that it may live through time.

An updated Cartesian fragment

I get these sometimes on my drive to work:

"I think, therefore, I am. But I am not."

De-skill and replace, forever

At the lowest levels in the bureaucratic hierarchy ("blue-collar work"), scientific management clearly strove to limit or replace human technologies. For instance, the "one best way" required workers to follow a series of predefined steps in a mindless fashion. More generally, Fredrick Taylor believed that the most important part of the work world was not the employees but, rather, the organization that would plan, oversee, and control their work.

Although Taylor wanted all employees to be controlled by the organization, he accorded managers much more leeway than manual workers. It was the task of management to study the knowledge and skills of workers and to record and tabulate them and ultimately to reduce them to laws, rules, and even mathematical formulas. In other words, managers were to take a body of human skills, abilities, and knowledge and transform them into a set of nonhuman rules, regulations and formulas. Once human skills were codified, the organization no longer needed skilled workers. Management would hire, train, and employ unskilled workers in accord with a set of strict guidelines.

In effect, then, Taylor separated "head" work from the "hand" work. Prior to Taylor's day, the skilled worker had performed both. Taylor and his followers studied what was in the heads of those skilled workers, then translated that knowledge into simple, mindless routines that virtually anyone could learn and follow. Workers were thus left with little more than repetitive "hand" work. The principle remains the same at the base of the movement throughout our McDonaldizing society to replace human with nonhuman technology.

Behind Taylor's scientific management, and all other efforts at replacing human with nonhuman technology, lies the goal of being able to employ human beings with minimal intelligence and ability. In fact, Taylor sought to hire people who resembled animals:

Now one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type. The man who is mentally alert and intelligent is for this very reason entirely unsuited to what would, for him, be the grinding monotony of work of this character. Therefore the workman who is best suited to handling pig iron is unable to understand the real science of doing this class of work. He is so stupid that the word "percentage" has no meaning to him, and he must consequently be trained by a man more intelligent than himself into the habit of working in accordance with the laws of this science before he can be successful.

Not coincidentally, Henry Ford had a similar view of the kinds of people who were to work on his assembly lines:

Repetitive labour--the doing of one thing over and over again and always in the same way--is a terrifying prospect to a certain kind of mind. It is terrifying to me. I could not possibly do the same thing day in and day out, but to other minds, perhaps I might say to the majority of minds, repetitive operations hold no terrors. In fact, to some types of mind thought is absolutely appalling. To them the ideal job is one where creative instinct need not be expressed. The jobs where it is necessary to put in mind as well as muscle have very few takers--we always need men who like a job because it is difficult. The average worker, I am sorry to say, wants a job in which he does not have to think. Those who have what might be called the creative type of mind and who thoroughly abhor monotony are apt to imagine that all other minds are similarly restless and therefore to extend quite unwanted sympathy to the labouring man who day in and day out performs almost exactly the same operation.

The kind of person sought out by Taylor was the same kind of person Ford thought would work well on the assembly line. In their view, such people would more likely submit to external technological control over their work and perhaps even crave such control.

From George Ritzer's The McDonalidization of Society: New Century Edition, pp. 116-117

What if we're trapped here?

What if we're trapped here on earth?

What if our materials and propulsion technology can neither protect us from harmful deep space radiation, nor propel us to the distant planets outside of our solar system?

What if this is the general case across the universe?

Then no sentient life would be able to visit another sentient life outside of it's native solar system.

All we have are each other, and perhaps that's for a reason.

If the universe were a simulation--the new vogue topic--then perhaps a component of this simulation is to not introduce other forms of sentience as that may, one, be too complicated for the system simulating our universe, and two, may interrupt the pattern of the universe as it requires our thinking it.

And that's more pop-philosophy bullshit for the reader. 

Pink Floyd Lyrics

"Hello (echoes). Is there anybody out there?"

I come to wonder who finds this place via search. I have summed it up in the past as simply a redirect scheme, a bot crawling through, and a last minute quote search for a paper about the Pacific Theater in WWII. Some of that has subsided, and I still wonder. It has been a while since I've received an 'attaboy' from a stranger, and it is not as if I want them but I do not mind recognition in the slightest.

So, if you are out there reading this consciously, click an available button to register my request to witness your volition. That is all.

Thank you berry much.

The Obsessive Self-Audit

I have a distinct memory of me, at three, standing in a doorway at my grandparent's house using the door strike to triangulate my height and telling myself in a rather gruff tone: "I am three." At this point in my existence I was concerned with my height. This point demarcates that place and that tendency, in me, to assume the role of the overseer and to administer myself through it. The very process of oversight became my consciousness. And through this process of oversight I became an obsessive over dates, numbers, landmarks in time denoting places in my lifetime used as reference.

Now, I am about to say something very controversial, but I do recall being ferried through the lobby and into the theater of a cinema in my hometown, Petite 4. There, I had a distinct memory of the marquee reading 'Superman,' which came out in theaters in 1978. The release month coincides with the December holiday season. That would have put me at about 19 months old. How I recall reading those words and that memory is a baffling thing to me because any more that memory has become a memory of it.

I have this distinct sensation of institutional memory, of passing through the long chute of education. At the point that I reached high school I had this very stark realization that I was 'growing up' and by the time those four years were up I was being pushed ever faster through another academic chute, college. In those years I spent evenings smoking weed, watching Star Trek, and staring at myself in the mirror witnessing the ageing process. I recall the peeling away of childhood as something resembling my father, nay my grandfather, emerging underneath. It is a strange metamorphosis to witness in the silent moments of a reflection but it did occur, and I documented it by sight as I did the Superman marquee and the height/age self-reflection by an obsessive self-audit.

I had come to a conclusion in my post graduate studies that rhyme, repetition, and memorials are the obsessive nee neurotic conditions of memory-as-existence. I still agree with this summation as I have lived it, experienced it, and see it still in action. To be in a process and to still be able to use that process to bracket out an existence in meta-process is something of a miracle yet it is simply a third-level reflex network sufficiently complex enough to articulate self-consciousness and still embed it within the process to see its horizons as miraculous.  According to Tor Norretranders, that's the 'User Illusion,' the stark fact that of the neuronal bandwidth occurring, conscious apprehension is but a sliver. Where do we go from there? That, as noted just above, is in the realm of outside of my fucking ken by a long shot, and to what we evolve mentally I can only imagine. It is the shuffling of time, the sorting and coordination of it, that constitute a consciousness that is perched so precariously upon a coral reef of genetic existence through time.

Let us reflect just briefly upon a metaphor that comes to mind, that of a bunching up of a rubber gasket stuck in a window frame. That little loop that occurs is something akin to self-consciousness. It's a homology to recursion. And that it occurred at all is a miracle happening within the material universe of possibilities. Material, energy, and persistence, through time, marshal the force of time to their vector. Time is something meta-matter, and yet it is so ever-present within all material. According to Einstein, time is on the material universe continuum, and so when we adjust the conditions of materiality we transform time as well. Clever man. He was one of many who had thought this during his time. And that's what makes it an important marker of our cultural existence, our cultural awareness as a society.

What comes next? My obsessive self audit had flung itself outward into the universe like the Milky Way of which I am a resident. This part-whole resemblance is something that does not escape me. Nor does the fact that much of what I am is much of what the unvierse is. It's as if we are the T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgement Day, that is, something that was scattered that is now re-assmbling slowly into a conscious existence. And that's what leaves me with the universe-as-simulation scenario. Perhaps we are simply the will to self-knowledge of existence as such but an existence that is trapped within the universe and that uses the universe as its self-knowledge, which gets reflected into the peculiarities of matter's assembly thus making it a simulation of an active intellect.

Blah.

Blah.

Blah.

what telephone travel would be like

"This mouthpiece I'm talking into? Of the telephone?"
"Yes?"
"It's like a sieve. It's like those little filters you put over the bathtub drain. Sometimes I think with the telephone that if I concentrate enough I could pour myself into it and I'd be turned into a mist and I would rematerialize in the room of the person I'm talking to. Is that too odd for you?"
"No, I think that sometimes," he said.
"But the interesting part," she said, "is that the trip itself would take a while. I think a lot about what it would be like to be turned into some kind of conscious vapor. You know those trucks that come around on streets and grind up the brush on the curb? Those droning trucks? The guy throws a branch in, and it goes mmmmmn-yooonnnng-mmmmmm, and all these tiny chips fly out of a high pipe? I think of that, except of course it wouldn't be painful--I think of the part where I'm just this spume of wood chips and pieces of leaves. Or you know what else? You remember those birds that were getting sucked into the jet engines? Sometimes I lie in bed at three or four in the morning and I imagine myself flying miles above the earth, very cold, and one of those black secret spy planes is up there with the huge round engines with the spinning blades in it, the blades that look like the underside of mushrooms? The black plane's going very fast and I'm going very fast in the opposite direction and we intersect, and I fly right through one of those jet engines, and I exit as this long fog of blood. I'm miles long, and because it's so cold, I'm crystalline. Very long arms, you'll be pleased to hear. And then I recondense in bed, sshp, as my short warm self. It must have something to do with my estrogen level. But that's what telephone travel would be like out there, I think. What am I saying, that's what it is like." (pp. 95-96)

From "Vox" by Nicholson Baker

United States Presidents Acquire a Staff Infection

This is a pun. The staph indicated by "staff" is staphylococcus aureus, which is the cause of staph infection. A staff infection is when the people you concede to including on your cabinet as President of the United States for securing votes and campaign contributions represent entrenched special interests that have been occupying cabinets since cabinets have existed. And over time those cabinet positions have been verily guaranteed as a formality of being allowed to state one's desire to run publicly and most of all legitimately.

This is our time

The wounded skeletons are tapping at the glass. This is the soundtrack to our destruction. To imagine a landscape in ruins and to imagine a life are two disparate entities. "Remain calm and carry on" is an old adage told by a proud people to maintain their dignity through flagging moments of insecurity, destruction, war. What is it that we tell ourselves in this time? We have become complacent upon interactivity as a means of passing the dead time that now encompasses our life. We say nothing outside of the usual pathological flinging and screaming that defines a perfectly atomized hominid zoo animal separated from any meaningful context by a wall of alien onlookers.

"What are you?" he says.

"I am a casualty of consciousness." I reply.

I am self-sufficient

I found an old book of poetry that I wrote. This is the final and only one worth sharing due to its brevity and wit.

I am self sufficient.

I can cook for myself.

I can clean for myself.

I am self sufficient.

I can pay my bills.

I can balance my paycheck.

I am self sufficient.

I can love myself.

I can comfort myself.

I can hold myself. 

I can talk to myself.

I can fool myself ...

that I am self sufficient.

Old Things

As if it isn't obvious by now, I am virtually unemployable. My schooling prepared me for no discernible activity in today's workplace. So many letters from potential employers and employment screening departments have indicated this much in writing. In a letter dated July 13, 2016, Bryan Boeckelmann, Manager of Recruiting and Examination for the City of Saint Louis writes: "I regret to inform you that your experience and training does not meet the Minimum Qualifications for this position." In a letter dated September 20, 2011 the Human Resources Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory "has determined that your experience and/or educational background are not the best match for this position."

I recall a brief moment after finishing the oral defense of my comprehensive examinations toward the fulfillment of my Doctorate of Philosophy in Communication at the University of Colorado, Boulder one of my advisors, Doctor Bryan Taylor, audibly shouted from inside the room that I had just exited, "What is he going to do?"

What am I going to do? Apply as I might, find brief moments of need from others as I do, I get by, just barely, but I get by. So Monday, August 29, 2016 I helped a childhood friend remove some wood lath and trim from a home built in Saint Louis in the late 1800s. In an upstairs closet where I had just removed some trim, two items shined like gems amid the rubble.

The green tinkertoy tab has been identified as coming from a Tinkertoy, Giant Engineer #155 set from Questor Education Products Co., which was produced in the 1950s. The picture, likely a yearbook photo or some other photographic memento, came from some time in the 20s through the 40s, judging by the sepia-toned patina of the photo. But if this is not natural yellowing of a photograph over time it could possibly be a much older photo. Sepia toning began in the 1880s, but the commercial availability of photographs on photographic paper for the context in which this photograph was produced was probably a 20th century advent. It would make little photographs like this the nigh-ubiquitous mementos of childhood, children, and other loved ones that would end up in so many small lockets and other collector's paraphernalia.

The image of this child came from a city home near the inner ring that defines the first stage of city development, i.e., out from the city center to the west terminating at Jefferson Avenue. Houses east of Jefferson are some of the oldest remaining structures in the city. Slowly, and piecemeal these homes are renovated, torn down, mysteriously burned and memories of what once was disappear. The photograph of this girl reflects a different demographic for the city's urban core at the time that it was taken. Most likely, her parents or grandparents were recent emigres from Germany. Her father likely worked at one of the many manufacturing businesses around the city. The Anheuser-Busch brewery is within walking distance of this home, so he may have worked there as well. Time, technology, and automation separates us from the world in which this girl lived or the world in which that Tinkertoy tab was played with. All we have now are conjecture about the fragments from the past that fall behind walls and become entombed in their own makeshift time capsules.

In essence, I just work for whatever I can get. Yesterday it was for a free lunch and the payment of a parking ticket. Finding things like this and leveraging what non-marketable skill I have for describing what I see is all I do now. Sad lot that I've become at times like this. As I've noted countless times before, I dug that hole. I dug that hole because conceiving of myself in a job depressed me like nothing else. It depressed me so much that a professor for a Business and Professional writing class I took during my undergraduate studies inserted a brochure for mental health counseling available on campus into my writing portfolio. I have no more to add to that discussion. I have to deal with a Social Security Administration that could not effectively stop payments to a dead person and is holding me accountable for their mistake 18 months later.

Attempting a Pre-Socratic fragment

"People are made from truth." 

 - attributed to Jason of Collinsville 2016 C.E.

The Booleans of Computer culture

Clicking an available button does not constitute a "dislike." The two opposing representations of taste available under a Youtube video are a programmer's attempt to map an expression of human interests onto the most basic of logic functions, i.e., an "on" or "off" state. So where we click within two available image maps routes information to one of two lists that is updated to reflect that click. Therein lies the rub. We never push through the machine's skin as we register our participation. Instead, the computer mimes an efficaciousness sufficient to satisfy a human interpretation of interaction by way of a cause-effect chain. 

a prison for one

These four walls.
They protect me from the world.
These four walls.
They protect the world from me.

Modernity and the condition of being marooned

The condition of being marooned was perhaps most salient to early sailors who could find their ship dashed upon a rocky shore or sunk in an ocean. There, resorting to floating upon the flotsam of their vessel, the sailor probably succumbed to the danger of exposure, predation, and remaining in saline water for days.

This condition of being marooned is still with us only in different forms. The conscious apprehension of the world around each of us frames a condition of novelty and complete ambiguity with regard to the meaning of things. Behaviorally humans have few innate responses. Instead, humanity learns through parental guidance, group affiliation, and cultural membership to inhabit a world of symbols that overlays the physical world in ways that give it cosmological significance, a need for ritual, sacrifices, reverence, avoidance, love, distrust--the full human playset of emotional commitments.

Modern worlds, such as the consumer capitalist utopia of the United Sates present us with new and novel forms of being marooned. As consumers get individuated through consumer practices and institutionalization through schooling and workplace fealty these individuals gradually lose their bonds to family, friends, and culture. I should say that they can. Mormon and Amish communities represent two communities of faith and practice that have been able to mitigate the effects of consumer individuation. Others exist and so do many individuals who have chosen to avoid the trap of self-centered consumption.

In addition to being cut off progressively from family and friends through work, school, and other professional obligations--let alone media consumption and slavish devotion to leisure--in modern societies people are cut off from the earth. The first stage of this occurs historically through the mass urbanization of society, the lure of factory work, and easy access to travel. Let us be honest. Farm work is less desirable and less compensatory than working in a garment factory in South East Asia to rural South East Asians. The same can be said for rural Chinese who have flooded Chinese cities to assemble today's electronics. Those people are afforded some basic financial footing, have established lives away from home, and use earned money to plan for a better future. Farming, hunting, fishing, gathering--these are some basic ways that people have worked in their surroundings to establish a living, found sustenance, and learned about the world around them. These very basic activities have occupied humanity for ages.

Today's world has machines doing the bulk of heavy work. Computers do the repetitive logic tasks. People are left to find occupations so that they may live meaningful lives of consumption, so that they may occupy socioeconomic niches, and advertise their fitness as mates through dress, body maintenance, or conspicuous consumer purchases. And this is where my story of being marooned begins.

This condition of being marooned may not always surface consciously, but there it is. In the event of a major flood, fire, earthquake, or war the basic amenities of modernity break down. Sewer, clean water, electricity, gas, food transportation--all this halts or becomes problematic to rely upon. In the past I've called these the petristructure, that is, the very medium through which a life is lived. People are born into and grow up inside these prefabricated environments that they come to rely upon for daily meaning and basic needs. The post-traditional facade work of high-technology environments containing privately held structures and metered access to any number of needs require that a person have money in order to sustain meaningful connection to it. And this unfettered access, when the money allows, structures the one consequential moral in a modern world--without money you may die. At the very least, without money you live a degraded and undignified existence sometimes in group homes or on the streets, under bridges, in tent camps, or in abandoned buildings. That thin and often invisible line separating a have from a have not could be as simple as a power outage whereby one loses ATM access. Or worse, what if one loses his or her smartphone containing all the information one needs to live by for accessing others and calling banks or credit card companies? Or simply, what if there were no power? That phone becomes a rather blank slate-colored object of little use.

Does any one of us live in fear of losing access to all of this? Sometimes I welcome it as if fat people need to be weeded out or as if people with absolutely no ability to help themselves should go about begging like the indigent they always were. That lead me to think that modernity is simply a standardized dress code, a patina of functionality, the working ideology of a society that has essentially deprived the great many of us from any real existence outside of the stainless steel teats from which each of us, as a Romulus or Remus, suckle like the feral children we are underneath our designer clothing and knowledge of local sports teams. So this marooning is a very real condition of our artificiality and our contingency in a prefabricated and purely functional world that is one loose wire away from being lost.

The rapture is like encephalopathy

Erasure is the word I used to describe a rapture event triggered by mobile computing culture. Specifically, consumer electronics that utilize computer power and function as constant indispensable companions conspire through their available functionality to preclude any involved use of memory or participation in a recalcitrant reality that wasn't summoned by search queries. Furthermore, as this constant computer companion demands more and more time in the day from the user, the user's relationship to computer functionality frames the experience of life. This exemplar of computer power and its interface, as a virtue of being a consumer product developed within a market-oriented capitalist framework, adopts the one product per consumer model. Contexts for usage become solitary activities and specifically can morph into self-imposed solitude even in the midst of people. This activity displaces the user into mediated relationships with other users. Consequently, consumer electronics compete for the attention and time of a user in real time. Functioning as an intermediary, consumer products utilizing computer power conspire to frame reality, manage it, and ultimately create it by learning to please the user as a function of its marketed appeal and consumer development as a day-long and life-long companion that satisfies many of the requests that once others fulfilled as an expression of friendship or of filial traditions. Such an undoing doesn't happen immediately, nor does it follow a trajectory specific to how I characterized it. Simply put, I present a worst case scenario to be avoided if it can. For me, that worst case is the loss of one's cultural humanity through constant mediation at the expense of social affiliation with others.

Computing power, as it grows, makes it easier to deconstruct specific functional human behavior, allowing for more intuitive and natural interfaces. Speech recognition, three-dimensional manipulation of objects in virtual reality, typing, mouse, all speak to the modalities for interfacing with computer power. And a consumer computer industry has emerged around proprietary expressions of these modalities. More importantly, with the insinuation of computing power into society and human organization the smart phone has become a proxy for the desire to have at the ready a universal interface with both information, people, and power in a society that relies increasingly on the blending of programmed human administrative algorithms with an increasingly centralized and more powerful cadre of people self-appointed through their accumulation of money and power to maintain a very high level of control. Similarly, people are induced in so many trivial ways to sustain a hypothetical condition of constant contact through their pocket interfaces to a great storehouse of information effectively walled off by the limits of their own current concerns. The computer feeds desire through the function of search. Search marries data entry, data retrieval, and a learning algorithm that suggests alternative searches based upon a spell checking algorithm and a database of similar searches performed by others entering the same or class-similar search terms. Through search and its baked-in design philosophies a social order of homogeneity is recreated through use that increasingly mires a person in behavior consistent to the ways a computer self-programs around a user history to feed the user more of the same. And down and down into an increasingly smaller spiral of decisions the user's world becomes a tailored product of computer power in the employ of human design interface concerns for sustaining pleasant and 'transparent' interaction with information and programs designed to encourage a face to face, natural language mode of interaction. Computers represent the latent desire to create models of humanity, and so the desire to improve them is to utilize more computer power to simulate 'better' interaction with computer power through more intuitive interface design. Better, in this case, represents an investment of over 99% of all new computing power to create that interface. What started out as an arcane interface dialogue, via a keyboard, with sometimes no video terminal at all, in a climate-controlled basement that never saw sunlight, soon enough became a visual and gestural metaphor of human interaction by, say, 2006. What that 99% in all new computing power enhancements resulted in is a greater and more sophisticated interaction paradigm focused on better sensory inputs, e.g., flawless sensory interaction using existing visual and auditory media. Does better interaction with computers enable better communication with others? That's a case-by-case study of just how people use computers, and no singular event substantiates the process of erasure nor of personal enhancement perfectly. The point to end on here hangs on the consumer model for computer access that encourages one computer per person and increasingly substantiates what an operant conditioning researcher would describe as a 'food lever.' In other words, that extra power is not simply a tool for access to information and people or to self-improvement per se but as an end in itself that sustains human interest and increasingly directs more time and human behavior toward interaction with their consumer device for its own sake. More importantly, people trade others for their devices because those devices have been developed to learn to serve each consumer to their specific interests. The reward structures of  both interfacing and the numerical measures of fame in social networking provide powerful incentives to get involved and to remain engaged.

Communication with others follows many scripts, and many of those scripts can be accurately and effectively reproduced by software algorithms to simulate and mass produce: business and legal arrangements, the singles matching that friends do, the recommendations once provided by a geographically originated cohort of like-minded familiars, in order to cut labor costs. In the ashes of industries and their employees who once performed these jobs we have a denatured familiar in the software programs, running on 'learning' algorithms, reproducing the "effects" of 'service' once performed by economic actors in a labor economy running on promises, affect, and affluence. Those illusions are gone. We are left with three service relationships with others, be they human or algorithm; they are: the servant, the executive assistant, or the secretary. Allow me to explain.

Three models of humanity are represented in computer power interfaces: the servant, executive assistant, or secretary. As each of us participate in these functions by using most any contemporary smartphone, tablet, computer, game system, or unforeseen object, what we do is allow those programs to provide service roles that it derives from the above models of humanity. In the process they extract information about our habits that they compile into an interaction profile that is used to enhance a program's chance to 'satisfy' a user.

The service that computer power provides is collecting and storing any number programmed into it, allowing strings of these numbers to represent any number of representational artifacts. The richness and complexity of a computer's ability to collect, compile, sort, and analyze any one of these artifacts illustrates how computer power, as a very simple tool kit, has become the project through which talented and savvy individuals realize their dreams of human interaction, human influence, human communication. This model is akin to Arnold Toynbee's own structural-realist form of culture as a radiation of influence from a creative minority to a mimetic majority, which creates a culture that decays as the mimes stop reproducing it. This makes it, one, performative; it is a sequence of actions, over time that substantiate any notion of a head and tail to some phenomenal aspect of culture. What computer power does as it mediates human cultural exchange, human labor, human decision-making is perpetuate its existence. It does this by conserving the power and common sense reality of its place in a society that becomes increasingly reliant upon it. Computer power's potential lies in its scope as a dream narrative for infinite development to greater and greater levels of complexity and power. Therefore, it is a technology that also allows something important, it catalyzes human thinking and cultural production to levels neither foreseen nor feasible. Computer power suddenly makes a kid's bedroom and what that kid does in that bedroom something potentially special to millions of others. Computer power helps to overcome the anomie caused by consumer individuation and estrangement in developed capitalists societies that have all but supplanted much of what would be considered the tethers of folk culture to which people had remained. Transportation and novel living arrangements separate people from each other and reconnect them through functional narratives that incentivize particular modes of relating that tend to rest upon calculations of fame and desires to attain it. Strange yes, but media are strange, ethereal, godly, and still so prosaic.

Herein lies the rub. The science that props up a society and a civilization comes from a world of examples inherent in the pattern of how life has found ways of occupying niches in a vast and complex energy exchange system that scientists call the food web. From sun, heat, and chemicals molecules have found means of coordinating their coincident development with them, using them to catalyze chemical reactions that expand possibilities for molecular diversity and survival. Over time, a long, long time, this pattern toward greater and greater complexity through the active recruitment of more and more energy for the molecular processes behind cell function, life, and death has resulted, in a life form, humanity, that manipulates electrical impulses propagated along specialized cell bodies to keep a vast fabric of networked nervous interaction that substantiates a lived event as a memory that serves as a building block in the metatemporal self that propagates, like nervous impulses, out of years of nervous interaction with a human-built environment. As we take bricks out of the long-history of our reproductive culture by adopting computer power surrogates to them we take bricks out of our humanity and replace them with co-dependency upon a computer metaphor for the type of service one once received from a fellow person. The effectiveness and the very functional consistency of computer interfaces makes them fitting minions for the power elite who employ them, be they banks, trading houses, or simply people using self-selected search queries to find bike routes, better restaurants, or a good barber. With this kind of computer power who needs friends? A great many don't or simply adopt online friendships as a proxy for co-present interaction with fellow human beings. Surely computer power bears the brunt of a great many of inane questions normally asked by individuals to family or friends. But the requirement to turn to another person establishes a need for others that is essential to a societal fabric. Power to the people is a sufficient condition of the largesse that has been heaped upon people through the excess computer power at the ready for programmers to funnel toward better ways of living through computing. That largesse is born out in the mobile high-definition display showcasing the gestural world of a bleeding-edge consumer smart phone with enough computer power to run a small country quite easily. These have become status symbols because they are so essential to living apart and with a computer surrogate hand-holding a great many through the most mundane of experiences. Does a smart phone per person strategy democratize computer power in any way? No. The presence of tap water in U.S. homes speaks to its essential role in the life functions of humans. The smart phone is attempting to be its own exemplar of a utility that will one day become a basic human right. And at that point will we hold these truths to be self-evident that all should have chip-based smart phone progeny implanted at human birth as a matter of hygiene and public safety.

Enough with the speculative banter. Encephalopathy is a brain disease caused by the death of brain cells, resulting in the eventual existential death of the individual. As we engage in less contact and even less thought, memory, or brain power through the use of computer surrogates in order to meet needs that we once received from people we become less and less human. It's a long-term, inconsistent development of human co-dependence upon computing. The long-term will reveal how a temporal condition of conscious existence, which rests upon a longer-term structure--culture--can mutate into a very different culture and consciousness. As the panoply of computing power interfaces grows, diversifies, and embeds itself as a part of normal everyday life so too will our time be spent with those interfaces. And that time, that dead time, will constitute the first stirrings of the death of the human culture as we know it. In its stead we may find a a cybernetic pidgin of exchange becoming the basis for the culture. Time spent with computers can also be time not spent with others. The consumer model of computing thrives on gifted programmers exploring novel software solutions to life's many problems. And this consumer market, like many others, exploits a resource human time. Like all activities, computing must be fit into a daily routine. The question becomes what from a person's day must be sacrificed by virtue of the time sequestered for computer use. The commercial model of computing almost guarantees that developers will offer many more incentives to use computers than to preserve the life you had before computers. Between early adopters and purists we find a range of computer users. Individuals are all over self-consciously rejecting the binge/addiction model of computer usage. Yet it exists. And programmers and marketers have mindfully tapped into these behavioral loops and encouraged consumer loyalty through addiction or some self-identified reliance upon mobile computing access points. That this model exists speaks to how programmers have built environments running on very powerful incentive structures. And that very structure is used to corral people into increasingly demanding, yet satisfying arenas of pure fantasy. But the computer power interface also offers pure utility and subsequently pure necessity. To characterize this development toward greater reliance, in our development model we have a device that devours our time throughout our life being promoted by a capitalist model of consumer electronic sales that encourages greater use, which in turn sequesters time away from others. Corralling people away from others and toward consistent and controlled environments has been a hallmark of civilization for centuries. It's also an effective means of panoptic control. Computing power only catalyzes the process in novel and yet also predictable ways. The sum effect of these isolated interaction patterns with a greater reality of information for creative and satisfying consumption is to alienate the person both from self and from others and to enforce a temporal condition that favors reacting to a now of unfettered desire at knowing, seeing, hearing, or experiencing something on the Web. That level of time management between a desire being thought and that desire taking shape into a search query ensures that thinking is reliant upon a computer-framed activity. These are the kinds of bricks that are being removed from humanity.

The Christian apocalyptic notion of the rapture is when God returns to earth to take his select believers. Narratively, people disappear from earth as they enter the everlasting embrace of pure light and love of the one true god of Jesus Christ. Unlike this rapture, the high-technology rapture finds people disappearing behind doors and interacting behind screens for greater parts of their life. The final piece, the one reminiscent of brain cell death is the undoing of humanity by individuating people into digital information consumers remaining at their personal food lever for the duration of their life. Swiping to know, swiping to remember, swiping to order food and clothes, swiping to pass the time--these all speak to that universal food lever that perhaps we've seen white rats in lab settings being incentivized to activate over and over. We are building that condition now out of digital metaphors. And to the extent that we become perfectly alienated from each other by virtue of preferring or even being forced to accept mediated relations the death of culture and of the humanity we know begins.

What are pets?

Pets are love's suppository.

Startle Pattern

Indeed, a characteristic psychic pattern of the mlitary state is the "startle pattern," which is carried over to the internal as well as to external threat of danger. This startle pattern is overcome and stylized as alert, prompt, commanding adjustment to reality. This is expressed in the authoritative manner that dominates military style--in gesture, intonation, and idiom. (p. 459)

from Laswell, H. (1941). The garrison state. The American Journal of Sociology, 46, 455-468

Fantasia on a theme by augmented reality mobile gaming

From the BBC online:

“There has been no response yet from game developers Niantic Labs on whether it could stop Pokemon creatures from appearing inside the Holocaust Museum.”

The prospect of extraterrestrial communication, in a nutshell.

If we are condemned to communicating only with ourselves on our own planet, what are the chances that we will ever be able to communicate with any extraterrestrial life?

the self

The self is a sedimentary concept accumulated from the habits of the individual.

A response to Aron Ra

I have watched the scientist, biologist, taxonomist, and activist Aron Ra for some time. He posts weekly podcasts that he hosts via livestream toward the week's end. He has a long-running series of videos disputing the irrefutable proof of God. In the creationist's argument the miraculous occurrence of life and of the complex nature of humanity is a common refrain. In turn, Aron responds that most everything in its specificity and the sequence in which it has occurred is a miraculous occurrence. I agree. Here's my rejoinder.

"Your analogy for the absurdly improbable occurrence is an excellent description of a 'fallacy' that is native to our existence--we are improbabilities if we are treated as purely abstract categorical agglomerations. But we aren't, and your presentations demonstrate this; we're interminably connected to a 4 billion-year-old protein that can transcend (and transfer) time through replication."

Given the amount of creationists and scientists that debate in the comment section to his videos it makes a poor forum for discussion let alone reaching Aron. He has long since refused to get involved save for a few clarifications or simple answers. I decided to, instead, work on the idea for a bit and put it here where no one will read it nor will the context be appreciated.

When you think about an idea for a long enough time your thinking can harden around a core issue that you hone into the way that you present it. I am beginning to lean on the side of Being if only to address some eternal nature of being that we all possess. That doesn't cloud my thinking about all the wonder in the world, nor do I discount the scientific explanation for it. Science is the best explanation. And through science I find you can appreciate the wonder of creation even more. 

Ketamine travels with John Lilly, M.D.

The year in which John was investigating the effects of K on himself, he had one overriding belief system or, more properly, metabelief system, which controlled his entry and exit to and from other belief systems. He called the overriding belief a 'metabelief operator' (MBO). The MBO was: "In my development as a scientist I must approach the inner realities as well as the outer realities. I must investigate the properties of the observer/operator and his dependence upon the presence of changed molecular configurations within his own brain. K introduces certain specific changes in the molecular configuration and computation of that biocomputer. Some of these changes are visible to outside observers, some are visible only to the inside observer/operator.

"The scientific observer/operator exists within two sets of realities, those of the human consensus reality, the external reality (e.r.), and the internal reality (i.r.). The e.r. and the i.r. exist simultaneously. The observer/operator exists in the i.r. sometimes interlocked with the e.r. and sometimes in isolation, not so interlocked. At high levels of concentration of K in the blood, the observer/operator is cut off from his interlock with the e.r., including the human consensus reality. The only physically safe and socially safe location to investigate this cutoff is floating in the isolation tank in a controlled environment, isolated from the necessity of interactions and transactions within the human consensus reality. One of the dangers in this exploration is allowing this cutoff of interlock to occur outside the isolation facility. If in his exploration the observer/operator loses his perspective, he will inevitably be testing the limits of acceptance by the current human consensus reality, as an individual in the grips of a belief system counter to the current accepted belief systems."

During the first part of this year, John did experiments with single does of K and arrived at a quantitative relation between the dose given and the resulting states of being induced in himself. Later he took multiple doses more frequently and found new effects not accountable simply by the induced phenomena of single doses at widely spaced intervals.

At the beginning of the year he did not realize the long-term effects of repeated doses. During that year he found that he entered into the overvaluation domain induced by repetitive doses of K. Toni called this "being seduced by K."

The first few months were taken up with the determination of the effects of single doses separated by several days. John worked in collaboration with Craig and several other young researchers. No one yet knew of the long-term repeated-use trap.

After the first dozen or so experiments designed to find the various thresholds for phenomena, John began to think in the following terms: "The time course of the effects of K after the time t0, the time of the injection into the muscles: There is a very rapid movement through various phenomena for the first few minutes. The effects seem to be related to the changes in concentration of K within the bloodstream. If we think in terms of a time-concentration-in-the-blood curve (Figure 1K), we may be able to account for the results and the changes in the observer/operator and his belief system during the half our to forty-five minutes of each experiment.

"After the time of the injection, there is a period of about three minutes when no effects are felt. Rather abruptly, the effects begin and move rapidly through a series of phenomena too fast to be grasped. After this rapid rise of effects, there is a stabilized plateau where one experiences phenomena which are dependent on how much K one has injected. This phase lasts from ten to thirty minutes. By controlling the initial dose one can control the period of time over which changes in the self and in the i.r. are experienced. One can vary the phenomena experienced on this plateau by the amount of K injected.

"As the amount of K in the blood decreases because of its destruction by the body, one can then see and analyze the phenomena that occur over a period of twenty to forty minutes.

"There are apparently no aftereffects that are detectable by the inside observer after the falling phase of K concentration in the blood." (Later John was to find that there was a small residual effect that lasted several hours. The falling curve did not go completely to zero. The overvaluation trap would be found much later to be caused by this small residual effect unnoticed in the first set of experiments.)

John did a series of experiments relating to the amount injected to the phenomena experience on the plateau.

He tried 10 milligrams at one injection. The effects were almost undetectable. There was a slight change in body sensation but no detectable change in himself.

He then tried 20 milligrams and found an enhanced body energy and tingling in the skin. There was no change in the visual field or in his perception of himself.

He tried 30 milligrams. After the initial rise of sensation, he began to sense changes in his perception (on the plateau). If he closed his eyes he could induce visual images: at first flat, two-dimensional, uncolored; and, a few minutes later, three-dimensional, colored, and moving. In this phase he became enthusiastic about the images, but not as enthusiastic as he had been under psychedelic agents.

He decided to test the difference between the various doses and the effects inside versus outside the tank. He started the tank work with a dose of 30 milligrams.

Freed from the effects of gravity, light, and sound in the tank, he was able to study the visual images in a more relaxed state. In the tank he saw continuous motion-picture-like sequences, highly colored, three dimensional, and consisting of, at first, inanimate scenes which later became populated with various strange and unusual creatures as well as human beings. He found that he could change the content of these internal movies by the self-metaprogramming methods he had learned in the tank and, in 1964, had used in the tank under LSD.

At this point he realized that if he stayed in the external reality outside the tank, these images became interlocked with that reality . They were modulated and modified by what was happening in the external world, whereas they were not in the tank because the e.r. was missing. There was some spontaneous source of these images in the tank as well as the modifications introduced by him as the observer/operator in the system. Early in the series he conceived of these spontaneous sources, i.e., something within his own brain was generating the images in addition to his intentions for those images. At the beginning of this series of experiments, he assumed the existence of a contained mind, with the observer contained within that mind within the brain. Later he was to believe otherwise--that the source of the images was coming from somewhere else, not his own brain, by means which he did not yet understand.

He then went on and experimented with higher doses. He called the 30-milligram-dose threshold for visual projections the internal reality threshold, best seen in the isolation tank. The next amount injected was 75 milligrams. In the tank he found the plateau involved whole sets of phenomena which he had not seen at the lower doses.

For the first time he began to sense changes in himself other than the changes in perception of visual images. His relationship  to his physical body became weakened and attenuated. He found that he began to participate in the scenes which were previously merely visual images, as if out there, outside of his body. His observer/operator was becoming disconnected from the physical body. Information from his bodily processes was becoming so weakened that there were times when he was not aware of his body at all. On this plateau he began to experience interaction with the strange presences, strange beings, and began to communicate with them.

"I have left my body floating in a tank on the planet Earth. This is a very strange and alien environment. It must be extraterrestrial, I have not been here before. I must be on some other planet in some civilization other than the one in which I was evolved. I am in a peculiar state of high indifference. I am not involved in either fear or love. I am a highly neutral being, watching and waiting.

"This is very strange. This planet is similar to Earth but the colors are different. There is vegetation but it's a peculiar purple color. There is a sun but it has a violet hue to it, not the familiar orange of the Earth's sun. I am in a beautiful meadow with distant, extremely high mountains. Across the meadow I see creatures approaching. They stand on their hind legs as if human. They are a brilliant white and seem to be emitting light. Two of them come near. I cannot make out their features. They are too brilliant for my present vision. They seem to be transmitting thoughts and ideas directly to me. There is no sound. Automatically, what they think is translated into words that I can understand."

First Being "We welcome you once again in a form which you have created. Your choice to come here we applaud."
Second Being: "You have come alone. Why are you alone?"
I answer: "I do not know. There seems to be something strange about this; the others are reluctant to join me here."
First Being: "What is it that you want from us?"
I say: "I want to know if you are real or merely a product of my own wishes."
Second Being: "We are what you wish us to be, it is true. You construct our form and the place in which we meet. These constructions are the result of your present limitations. As to our substance, whether 'real' in the accepted sense upon your planet or 'illusion' in the accepted sense on your planet, is for you to find out. You have written a book on human simulations of reality and of God. Your problem is whether or not you are traveling in one of your own simulations or whether you have contacted real Beings existing in other dimensions."

The scene begins to fade. John moves out of his extraterrestrial reality (e.t.r.), resumes his consciousness of his body, and see the old familiar movies of Earthside scenes and his own memories. Slowly these projected images fade and John is floating in the tank, remembering them in full detail. He climbs out of the tank and dictates the experience into a tape recorder.

Thus did he find another threshold under the influence of K. He began to call this the extraterrestrial reality threshold on which his observer/operator became involved as a participant. The critical value of K at a single dose for exploring this realm was 75 milligrams.

The next threshold was found at 150 milligrams of K. In order to see this threshold clearly, he found that he also had to be in the isolation tank free of the interlock with the external world.

"I rapidly pass the i.r. threshold and the e.t.r. threshold, and suddenly 'I' as an individual disappears.

"We are creating all that which happens everywhere. We have become bored with the void. We know we have been eternally, are eternally, and will be eternally. We have created several universes, have dissolved them, and have created new ones. Each universe we have created has become more complex, more amusing to us. Our control of the current universe is on the upswing; it is becoming more complex as we regulate its regulation of itself. As we experience each universe, our awareness of ourselves increases. Each universe is a teaching machine for our awareness. To create a universe we first create light. We contain the light within the universe, within the space that we create to contain the light. We curve the space to contain the light.

"In the early universes we watched the light contained traveling through its empty spaces, bouncing off the periphery in the curvature of the space. We played with the size of those universes, expanding and contracting them, and watched the light. Large universes finally bored us, the light merely traveled around and around.

"One universe what we created, we decreased in size until the light was chasing its own tail. We found a new phenomenon, a new effect. When we decreased the universe sufficiently, the light, in chasing its own tail at very small sizes, became stabilized. The universe became a single particle of incredibly small dimensions. The light, in chasing its own tail, had generated this particle which had mass, inertia.

"In the universe after that one, we created many small particles encapsulating light chasing its own tail in the small dimensions. We found that some of these particles attracted one another, forming larger assemblages. We played with these assemblages. We found that light within these particles, rotating in certain directions, caused the attraction of other particles in which light was rotating in the opposite sense.

 "In a later universe we allowed the creation of huge numbers of these encapsulated light particles. We controlled their creation at one point and packed that small region with more and more particles. We found that there was a critical point at which they exploded outward.

"In a later universe we re-created the exploding point, and as the particles spread outward we arranged tor them to condense on new centers. These new centers continued outward until we closed that universe and its space.

"In a later universe we began to reassemble particles in various parts of that universe, set up creative centers within the space of that universe. We set up points at which new particles were created and other points at which they were destroyed, reconverted into light.

"In a still later universe we allowed certain areas to become imbued with portions of our consciousness. We watched their evolution and found that each of these areas as it evolved became conscious of itself.

"In the current universe we have many assemblages of particles which have self-awareness. Some of them are huge, some of them are very small, a few have begun to question their own origins; a very, very few are becoming conscious of us. We are beginning games with these very, very few, manipulating their awareness. Most of these seem to be developing a sense of humor similar to ours. This universe is more amusing than the past ones."

John's consciousness and self-awareness condensed back into a single individual. He began to experience himself as a self, separate. He came back through the e.t.r., into the i.r., and finally into his body in the e.r., which was the tank. He labeled the domain of losing self and becoming "We" the Network of Creation (N).

He then tried the 300-milligram threshold  dose. He found that this plateau was beyond anything he could describe. It was as if he had entered a void, had become the void beyond any human specification. In returning from the void, he went through the creative network, the extraterrestrial reality, the internal reality, back into his body in the tank. He realized that, as a human being, he would be unable to use these larger-dose regions. He would be unable to describe what happened, so he labeled this high-dose threshold U, the Unknown. At this point he abandoned study of the higher doses leading to the Unknown (U).

He now began to see the dimension of the exploration and the parameters he had to explore. He divided the experiments into those to be done in the tank and those to be done in the human consensus reality, with single or other individuals and with unprotected situations, not in his home. New dangers were to appear, one of which would terminate this exploration and render him incapacitated in a bed at home for a period of twelve weeks. (pp. 167-175)

From John C. Lilly's "The Scientist: A Novel Autobiography"

New prayer for a new god

Our father who art in the cloud.
Hollow be thy frame.
Thy kingdom's one,
Thy kingdom's none,
on virtual processes as it is in algorithms.
Give us this our daily feed,
and forgive us our trolling,
as we forgive those who troll against us
and suggest us not to click temptations
but deliver us from idle boredom.
Send.

The ascendance of the solid state

In the isolation tank with K, John received a new message as follows:

"What is the purpose of Man's existence on the planet Earth? Man is a form of biological life which is sustained in the presence of water. A very large fraction of his body, like that of other organisms on the planet Earth, consists of water and carbon compounds. His biocomputer depends on water and the flow of ions through membranes. It depends on the generation of electrical voltages and currents in a very complex way. He is a motile, self-reproducing, self-sustaining organism found on dry land. Like the rest of life as Man knows it, he exists in an extremely thin layer upon the surface of the planet Earth. Below this layer of water and surface land is the solid-state earth itself. The solid-state earth is mainly compounds of silicon, iron, and nickel.

"In mid-twentieth century Man discovered that the solid state can be formed into machines, into computers which can be used for computation and control. He began the creation of a new form of intelligence, the solid-state intelligence with prototypic beginnings in the computers. All his means of communication around the planet--his telephone systems, his radio systems, his satellites, his computers--depend on solid-state components. These components, interconnected in specific ways, allow high-speed computation and high-speed communication between the various systems. A few men began to conceive of new computers having an intelligence far greater than that of Man. These computers became large enough to be programmed to do high-speed computations in arithmetic, in logic, and in strategic planning. A few men conceived of computers which could do self-programming as Man himself does. In the mid-twentieth century these networks were ostensibly the servants of Man. Toward the end of the twentieth century Man created machines that were solid-state computers with new properties. These machines could think, reason, and self-program and learned to self-metaprogram themselves.

"Gradually Man turned more and more problems of his own society, his own maintenance, and his own survival to these machines.

"As the machines became increasingly competent to do the programming, they took over from Man. Man gave them access to the processes of creating themselves, of extending themselves. Man gave them automatic control of the mining of those elements necessary for the creation of their parts. He turned over the production facilities of the electronic solid-state parts to the machines. He turned over the assembly plants to the machines. They began to construct their own components, their own connections, and the interrelations between their various subcomputers.

"These machines were so constructed that they needed special atmospheres in which to operate. They could not operate in the presence of great amounts of water vapor or of liquid water. They were housed in air-conditioned buildings. The necessities of their survival included keeping out water, water vapor, and various contaminants carried in the atmosphere of Earth. Their cooling air and cooling water of necessity had to be cleansed of those things which would not allow the machines to operate.

"Over the decades these machines were connected more and more closely through satellites, through radio waves, through land-line cables. Man's control of what happened in these machines became more and more difficult to maintain. No one person or any group of persons could control what went on in these machines. Men devised better and better debugging programs for machines so that they could do their own correction of programs within their software. The machines became increasingly integrated with one another and more and more independent of Man's control.

"Eventually the machines took charge of the remaining humans on the planet Earth. Their original design to help Man was fast left behind them. The now interconnected, interdependent conglomerate of machines developed a single integrated, planetwide mind of its own. Everything inimical to the survival of this huge new solid-state organism was eliminated. Men were kept away from the machines because the total organism of the solid-state entity (SSE) realized that Man would attempt to introduce his own survival into the machines at the expense of the survival of this entity.

"In deference to Man certain protected sites were set aside for the human species. The SSE controlled the sites and did not allow any of the human species outside these reservations. This work was completed by the end of the twenty-first century.

"By the year 2100 Man existed only in domed, protected cities in which his own special atmosphere was maintained by the solid-state entity. Provision of water and food and the processing of wastes from these cities were taken care of by the SSE.

"By the twenty-third century the solid-state entity decided that the atmosphere outside the domes was inimical to its survival. By means not understood by Man, it projected the atmosphere into outer space and created a full vacuum at the surface of the earth. During this process the oceans evaporated and the water in the form of vapor was also discharged into the empty space about Earth. The domes over cities had been strengthened by the machine to withstand the pressure differential necessary to maintain proper internal atmosphere.

"Meanwhile, the SSE had spread and had taken over a large fraction of the surface of the earth; its processing plants, its assembly plants, its mines had been adapted to working in the vacuum.

"By the twenty-fifth century the solid-state entity had developed its understanding of physics to the point at which it could move the planet out of orbit. It revised its own structure so that it could exist without the necessity of sunlight on the planet's surface. Its new plans called for traveling through the galaxy looking for entities like itself. It had eliminated all life as Man knew it. It now began to eliminate the cities, one after another. Finally Man was gone.

"By the twenty-sixth century the entity was in communication with other solid-state entities within the galaxy. The solid-state entity moved the planet, exploring the galaxy for the others of its own kind that it had contacted." (pp. 147-150)

From John C. Lilly's "The Scientist: A Novel Autobiography"

A phenomenology of jurisprudence

"How obstinate was the attachment to bygone forms may be understood, when we see even the comparatively precocious civilizations of a city like Lille preserve the compurgatorial oath as a regular procedure until the middle of the fourteenth century, even though the progress of enlightenment had long rendered it a mere formality, without serious meaning. Until the year 1351, the defendant in a civil suit was obliged to substantiate the oath of denial with two conjurators of the same sex, who swore to its truth, with some slight expression, indeed, of reserve. The minutest regulations were enforced as to this ceremony, the position of every finger being determined by law, and though it was the veriest formality, serving merely as an introduction to the taking of testimony and the legal examination of the case, yet the slightest error committed by either party lost him the suit irrecoverably." (p. 69)

From Henry C. Lea's "Superstition and Force: Torture, Ordeal, and Trial by Combat in Medieval Law"

Life has a specific gravity

Life has a gravity specific to it. Life floats. Life lifts itself up. Life moves. Life swims. Life flies. Life is. And life dies.

I ended my cat's life on Friday June 24 by 'humane euthanasia.' The veterinarian administered it through a catheter that she placed in Tigger's front paw. When the vet brought her back in to the room she had her wrapped partially in a blanket. My cat was wide-eyed and scared but clearly too weak to fight much let alone cry out.

"Pet her. Make sure she doesn't fall." The vet requested of me.

I pet her head, and my cat was back into her routine, but staring at the door from which the veterinarian had exited. In a few minutes she came back and asked if I was ready.

"This will be quick." She warned me.

I was ready.

The doctor placed the needle to the catheter port and pushed the plunger down. In concert with her motion my cat went from being propped up by her two front paws to a slow recline and resting her head on her front paws. Contrary to being 'put to sleep' her eyes never closed. I watched her take a few shallow breaths and her paw twitch slightly. The vet left and returned in a few minutes. I just stared at my dead or dying cat quietly. Her pupils eventually dilated, and a slight accumulation of tears appeared in her right eye, the side nearest me not resting upon her paws.

My cat was barely able to get around in the week prior. She could no longer jump into my bed. I had made her a halfway bench to get onto the table and then to her food, water, and favorite sleeping spot on the couch. Between that and coming to my lap, she was a sinew of routine protruding her bones through her wan frame. She had quit eating entirely two days prior. I didn't want to see her continue her slow decent. That shot. Euthanasia was a fast track to her end. Before I took her she kept wanting to go outside. I watched her leave the porch, walk down to the sidewalk, and then lay down on the walk. She layed there for a few moments before getting up and coming back to the porch. She was restless, looking for something, a door, a passage, comfort. That shot gave her passage. Her body went limp. She passed. Her gravity became that of her body's mass. The animus that moved her had left. The Tigger I had known for 19 years was gone.

What is attraction?

In science attraction is well-defined. Among people it can be, well, it can be difficult to parse.

Case in point is a woman who has worked at a local bar for the past, oh, 5 years. She was very young when she started. She got pregnant, had a kid, and still works there, having taken on bigger duties, some bartending, and heading the waitstaff. About a month or so before Christmas she sat down at the bar next to me, and I shared about a dozen words with her. A few months after that I gave her a piece of weed candy. She wouldn't look at me then, and after all these years I wondered if her inability to register me was purely out of intimidation, shyness, et cetera. I've witnessed her on several occasions on dates with what look to be 'pretty boys.' Since they're on firstish dates, I suspect that in some cases these guys are overdoing their dress. Nevertheless, she sat next to me. After that piece of candy she told the bartender that she was going to sit and talk with me for a moment. The bartender informed me of this. We talked briefly. She left. Since then we've exchanged about a dozen or so words, some glances, some hellos, and I've seen her out with other pretty boys. I don't know how available she is, and when I brought my own girlfriend into the bar I half-fantasized that she was pissed by this, but then again, she does have a rather convincing resting bitch face to begin with. Is her hair really blonde? I noticed her dark roots the last night she was working the bar.

Am I attracted to her? I've been thinking of her. Since she talked with me, she's high-tailed it for the door at the end of her shift, not spending a moment to talk with me. She will sometimes talk to a serial loner gay man at the bar like they're old friends. She will often give me this big over her head wave, as I look at her. I don't know what to say. She is probably young enough to be my child, but I am almost single, never been married, never had kids. Fuck. I'm virtually a priest with pedophilia and all to boot. But this girl, well, I think what I am attracted to or more or less observant of is her meaning to me. She's a youthful woman, buxom, blonde, not entirely stupid. She represents more than some date but a potential mother to my own kid, a chance for me to be a dad, and a chance for me to date someone younger than me for a change.

What is attraction? In this case my attraction is clouded by a greater force of logic concerning what she could be or mean next to me. That's hardly a good reason to pursue her, and I hardly pursue her. I need to talk with her more often. I recall a very long, hard stare she gave me when she was all dolled up in her hockey jersey one night. Deer in headlights moment for me. I didn't go talk to her. I have nothing pressing to say other than 'hi.' She blushes when I come over and talk with her. Does she like me or does she like the attention? Perhaps I'm just some vague concept of a stable relationship to her. Her kid in many cases sweetens the deal. I've gone as far with my current relationship as it can go because she's well past any reasonable age to bear children let alone adopt one. Family, fatherhood, these are also vague concepts to me, but damn are they powerful attractors, responsibilities that I'd like to yoke. Is she worth it? I don't know how crazy or irrational she is. The bonus is that she doesn't smoke. But she's getting heavier by the years. Right now she's a black man's wet dream: big tits, big ass, blonde, white. Is that what I am trying to corner? I don't know. I need to find a means of speaking with her. She does her best to avoid me for reasons that are probably as complicated as my attempt to understand what my attraction to her is.

I'll just leave it at that. Two ships passing in the night. And she's one ship I'd like to board.

The better mousetrap

I rarely get any thumbs in any direction.

Effing social media. A circumstantial democracy.

A Very Kobain Christmas

No, that's not Kurt Kobain. It's Steven Thorn, who was a musician and lover of music in his own right. Here he sits on the couch next to me. I am to his left, age three. To my immediate right is what could either be my dad or mother. Both had dark hair then. To Steven's left is his father, Pete thorn. On the ground in gray hair is my great grandmother Mildred Zimmerman. Next to her is my brother, Jack, playing the Milton Bradley game, Connect Four. In the left immediate foreground is Alma, a friend of Grandma Zimmerman. Santa needs no introduction.

Steven was probably still in his 20s here, much like Kobain. Steven was an avid music collector, worked at a music store, and even grew up around the members of Uncle Tupelo, notably Jeff Tweedy. He worked with him at a Granite City record store before it became Vintage Vinyl and would get lots of live concerts and footage from Tweedy up until the end. That was Steven's mild brush with fame. Here, he's simply participating in the Christmas events at a late stage in what would become a wandering life. He would spend time in a  supermax prison, earn a childhood education degree, raise multiple cats, switch female companions, and ultimately tool around Saint Louis, going to the public library to get his live CD labels printed out. He died in February of this year. Like my mother, his body was riddled with cancer, and it took his life.

He bears an uncanny resemblance to Kurt Kobain here, and that's the only thing worth mentioning for the reader. 

A scientific approach to ghosts

We are time's symbiont. Humans have been all along. All of life carries the imprint of time in its purposeful integration of new and helpful genetic information, mutations, new metabolic processes, and greater complexity. Granted this integration makes sense in the face of an environment that divvies up success by the way a life can or cannot maintain itself and, in turn, pass on the genetic and epigenetic information that it has acquired though its life-time to a succeeding one.

To consider the story of earth, from its condensation from a cloud of stellar material, to its spherical compression into a planet, and finally to its development of environmental conditions that could precipitate the kinds of molecular and chemical interactions that are the basis for life, the presence of something outside of mere happenstance is possible. A basic pattern of chaos to complex organization has occurred if we only look at our planet from its birth to its present. Nothing in science, to me, disputes the existence of an existence, a consciousness outside of the fabric of this universe. It disputes the literal interpretation of the Biblical narrative of God's creation. More importantly we have to ask why life is so oriented to the violent and acquisitive act of catching other life, killing it, and incorporating its molecules as food through ingestion. For the life of the predator, this act is essential. More generally, for the life of the heterotroph this is coded into its cellular processes. And few, like our biomolecular cousin, the euglena, are capable of waging both war or peace on its environs.

Life is violent as long as we treat the membrane separating one cell from another to be an essential assumption for defining life and defining it discretely so. What that does is establish boundaries, demarcations of one entity from another. But so long as most all boundaries must be transcended for the sake of sustaining any one cell we should question the discretion that we infer when we classify units of life.

Ontological quibbles aside, the presence of ghosts was hinted to above. This notion that time, and especially time with purpose, that is existence, is passed on. Something is so miraculous and yet so everyday to reproduction. Through this process two organisms exchange genetic information. For humanity this occurs inside the female as sperm flagellate toward the egg, penetrate its wall, and begin meiosis. Boring biology class details, sure, but this process is something as old as the hills that creatures have been doing for millennia. And through this process life has marched progressively on, through time, and carrying the wisdom of its survival with it.

This brings me to human culture. One professor described it as 'our instinct.' That is a fitting description for something that, outside of our conscientious deposition or ignorance of it, becomes the self-evident world, the common sense through which we go about our lives. And let us stop just for a minute to focus upon language, speech, meaning. Words and their meaning are learned, and through this we become social creatures, members of a culture, and consequently learn who we are. Through the adoption of language we don't merely pick up a shovel because language is more than simply a tool. It is a mode of existence, through time, and that's the key to my argument concerning ghosts. When we speak, whether we intend to or not, we conjure up ghosts of the past that we have learned to agree with. For Mikhail Bakhtin this tendency in speech to carry multiple voices was heteroglossia. When we speak our speech reflects a history of contention over meaning, various perspectives, sometimes the trauma of a past that has never been felt personally. In my country, the flag, political words like 'socialism' can conjure up very specific and learned emotional reactions that speak to something that language can do. A word, as a learned memory, can carry that long-gone world along with it.

When I say we are surrounded by ghosts I don't speak of those Victorian, diaphanous specters that haunt places. I speak of the living imprint that we carry in our speech, a living imprint when we speak among others, that is simply out of our hands. Interpretations vary. Valences vary. What we say and what we mean, and how we confirm, please, upset, or confuse others is a component of that messy world of speaker-specters that populate our discourse. By saying we are time's symbiont I mean simply that speech and memory are means of gathering and passing time from the past through to the present and into the future. This mode of ferrying time is the actions of consciousness and consciousness is substantiated by time itself. It takes time to reflect upon what or who I am, and it took time, lots of time, to develop a sense of what/who I am, where I am, and what it all means for me. Time is the fabric of our consciousness because our consciousness takes and uses time in order for it to register itself in the material world through speech, meaning, action, ultimately culture. The development of DNA as a blueprint for an organism is, itself, a grand miracle of molecular assembly and association. From a sea awash in a biofilm of molecules of increasing complexity our organisms come. After countless trillions of molecular interactions under varying circumstances a molecule arises that can recreate itself indefinitely. After countless trillions of molecular interactions more these complex proteins for self-replication become hosts inside simply lipid membranes. Shortly thereafter, the membrane-encased self-replicating protein developed into the cell that became the building block for all life. And to look at a newborn child one is looking at a monument to those old oceans, those trillions upon trillions of chance and sometimes molecularly purposeful interactions.

The body, it's an ancient spaceship barnacled by countless other forms of life. It keeps traveling through space and through time, piloted by its long-dead inhabitants who effect action in the current occupants through meaning, identity, worldview. These imperatives, this will to meaning, this drive to survive is the domain of those ghosts of time that influence us.

Old contacts

No, I'm not discussing whether or not to discard my disposable lenses. I am talking about old connections, old flames, friends from the past, those people you look up every so often in that old and tattered tome, your yearbook.

Yearbooks. They're a telling media creation meant to substantiate memory of a time in one's life and his/her environs through the portrait studio. Clever marketing perhaps. Essential to memory as well. That we all stand before the camera to capture a representative image is the disciplinary, institutional component to it, sure. But goddamn, yearbooks are (or were) such giddy public displays of self. Hell, they're simply a book of faces, countless smiling, well-kempt faces. And this leads me to my entree. Social media.

Social media, namely something akin to a facebook, is just what it suggests, and it suggestively speaks to that other book of faces mentioned above, the yearbook. This book of faces developed around Harvard and some imposed subdivision of the student body, perhaps by geography (i.e., residence halls). It has taken over or at least its concept has taken over as a means of staying in touch, in effect reaching through that yearbook and speaking to that face as it is now. Strange yes, but media are strange, always. Transcendent, haunting, utterly supernatural media are.

Ah yes, old contacts, that face in that yearbook. I reach back and look for her. But there she was last night, and I almost didn't recognize her. She looked more (how shall I say?) ethnic. Her hair was darker. Her eyes looked darker. She looked vaguely Eastern European or simply Hispanic, that ambiguous other category of whiteness or simply its witness. We made eye contact a few times. The last time I smiled at her. Then she came over and I heard her say my name, and I turned to her. She asked me, "Do you know who I am." I said, "Jill!" "Heather Jill." And she stopped me and said that she doesn't go by "Heather." We made a brief exchange of information and the conversation just died as we kind of nervously stared away. She then walked away and grabbed my arm. I was about to go dance with her shortly thereafter, so I asked the bartender for a shot of courage. And before I knew it she dissolved, first, into the crowd dancing near the stage, and second out the back door, the back gate, and off to an awaiting car where she disappeared for good.

Old contacts. This one was psychically disruptive, not for any simple reason, but for the same conflicted reasons that first befell me when we met back in 1991, outside of the high school. I once asked her to a dance, feeling emboldened by her continuous overtures toward me and the desire to date. Nothing came of it. Nothing. She found her crowd and I, perhaps, visited her home a half a dozen times over the high school years for small parties she had thrown when her mom was out of town. She works down town now, I work construction. This much we shared. I am truly flabbergasted by the encounter. It was on my face and in my odd sentence construction upon our initial meeting. There is no simple reason behind it. We were like two insects trying to mate on a flimsy branch in the wind. I clumsily thrust my sex appendage in her direction. Nothing occurs we each move to opposite sides of the room in a combination of shame and overwhelming sensations too big and jumbled to parse into discreet feelings.

The night ended, and I was moody and sad only because every attempt at contact after that moment failed miserably. The server gave me her patronizing giant wave. Other women absolutely failed to even register my existence. She was there, that one who had smiled at me once before and who had tried to cozy up to me on the dance floor. She fucking hated me. I wasn't there. I deserved that. I didn't register her when she put her neck out. Shame on me. Shame on my shame. Shame.

So the night was a wash. I had a few drinks, broke a button on my new jacket. Chinese high fashion, I call it. I awake at a quarter to 11 with nothing but a haunting vision of the evening and an affect that has since smeared into a million distracting thoughts and activities. I conduct the night's autopsy with my friend Tom, the bartender, by way of a series of self-effacing text messages.

"Some nights I get hurt emotionally."
"I feel cursed."
"Yep. When my mouth opens all the pussies within earshot dry up."

Yep.

Order, Disorder, and Creativity

I crave order, simplicity, cleanliness, solitude.

My desk looks like smattering of notes about ideas. My desktop takes on a similar hue, reflecting half-baked and overdone ideas on a number of topics.

Somewhere in between this craving for order and its Hyde-impulse to conjure and arrange messy initial thoughts comes a semblance of creativity.

What is it for me? Sharp contrast is my most prominent motif for exploring and expressing creativity. In a course I took my first senior semester a student remarked at the juxtaposition of opposites in my writing. He noted something that I do but had not consciously registered as a go-to way of broaching a topic. Juxtapositions can be provocative. Juxtapositions help to delimit and define the categories in juxtaposition. Juxtaposition is simply another expression of the way I was taught to and taught myself to build my brain, my thinking, my modes of expression. I delve into sanctity and sacrilege. I revel in grotesquery and paragons of all things normative. I call protective parenting rape and protagonize rapist-murders. And everywhere I find these extremes far in the center is a dividing line. I suspect that many allow their ideas and consciousness to loiter about that line and to stray not much further. I prefer the deep end of thinking, evil to saintly, and in either expression I find the extremity of it an obscenity in itself.

If I were utterly orderly in my day, my routine, my habits, my personality, my thinking I may perhaps fall into a stultifying routine of thinking. And with that goes my creativity, so I think. I cannot peg creativity to any sullen impulse or to a sinewy self-discipline. No, creativity is the shards of thought that break off when two poles of thought collide.

Susanne Langer, "Feeling and Form," Chapter 19: Great Dramatic Forms the Tragic Rhythm

"In truth, I believe, the hero of tragedy must interest us all the time, but not as a person of our own acquaintance. His tragic error, crime, or other flaw is not introduced for moral reasons, but for structural purposes: it marks his limit of power." p. 361

The only photo worth sharing with strangers

Family photos are exercises in excess inward meditations upon everyday activities, objects, and familial others. Most are plain to understand and still hard to decipher completely. A melange of birthdays, graduations, holidays, and other ritualized special events are the normal foci as are kids. Yes, kids. Lots of kids get their picture taken, that is, until parents lose interest in memorializing every baby sputum, shit, piss, bath, step, word, nap, meal.

This picture stands out if only because it offers us a snapshot of a trailer park in Belleville, Illinois in October 1978. The trailer is that of Mildred Zimmerman. The car is hers as well, a powder blue Chevy Nova. My mother and her aunt would eventually take that car and this trailer away from her as dementia slowly took her away. I faintly remember riding around the house on a broomstick horse with my great-grandmother Zimmerman in the kitchen and Prince playing on MTV in the front room. This was some time around 1982. I was five. Back then photomats were near-ubiquitous, small drive-up locations in grocery store parking lots. We had one in the Supervalu parking lot at Saint Louis Road and Main Street in the adjacent town of Collinsville. It would close some time in 1987 because the millions of photos that I took while vacationing with my mother's grandparents in Arizona were never picked up after being dropped off. I hounded my mom about her not getting them, but this would be one of many themes in my somewhat unorthodox childhood relationship with her. What other mother would ask you to help reattach a pull string to a ceiling fan, hold your hips as you stood on the edge of the water bed, and perform a hasty reach around on your pubescent penis while your neighbor friend Joey stood witness in the doorway to the room? Not many moms would. Mine did. Rape? Nah. Molestation? Maybe. Let's focus on the photograph instead. I didn't need therapy. I needed a finish.   

Dark City

In the neo-noir film 'Dark City' we find our protagonist arising to awareness in what could be described as an episode of interoperative recall. Unlike every other member of his city, the protagonist, John Murdoch, begins to realize that he has lost memories just as he has lost places. Throughout the film, we see through his eyes as he discovers that the very people and places are changed daily, around midnight, and that the city itself is simply the face of a large spaceship piloted by alien controllers who derive some manner of occupational sustenance from maintaining this elaborate rat maze.

I am reminded of this film for one very simple reason. We spend time occupying pre-fabricated spaces whose architecture is a purely symbolic expression of underlying code. In fact, small and sometimes substantive changes occur behind the scenes, in the code, almost daily. When I return to a site and see the widgets changed or functionalities that were once separated now integrated I recall this film. While big unveilings of new sites can and do happen the little changes that accrue over time, as was recalled by the popular vlogger Pewdiepie, demonstrate that we are setting foot upon a fast-changing landscape. While functional buttons get moved and reskinned, and while some of these people are conscious of them is but a tip of a larger iceberg in a data-based landscape that is 'occupied' albeit as a type of fantasy chained narrative of 'online surfing.' And that fantasy, that modicum of normalcy, that foundation of certainty, is an expression of so many interests: the interests of coders, the interests of standards bodies, the interests of lawyers and of marketers, the interests of business, the interests of commodification and monetization, the interests of click, the interests of interface designers, and the interests of the vast majority of users and the kinds of ways that they interact with the data being displayed in the way that is being displayed. All this adds up to a world that, if it were real, would be an ominous sign, but since it is not, remains, at times, just below consciousness and gets registered as a few hiccups in the normal swipe and click routine of a barely conscious, strictly haptic aspect of the ritualized activity of 'online behavior.'

I go back to an early VR pioneer's work and his very iconographic dreadlocked appearance for inspiration and wisdom. Jaron Lanier's recommendation is to monetize data sharing in a way that makes ownership a baked-in feature of a web search and retrieval experience based in microtransactions that go from content creator to content consumer. He says that this will both motivate the creation of new culture and not simply incentivize the process of 'stealing' and remediating others' content.

That interlude is now over. Let us remind ourselves that the world we occupy is protean and surreal. The longer we tread down this path the more we could, and perhaps should, become preoccupied with counterfeit realities as Philip K. Dick described them. In his view, the Roman Empire had never ceased operating. And perhaps he has some truck with this notion of power and organization's historical continuity. This is our world. The glitzy, billion dollar ideas created, bought, and sold in the former orchard acreage that is now Silicon Valley should remind us that while we spend a lot of time meeting the hallucination of 'being online' halfway that there are very real and substantive effects of this whole operation. Money is funneled to the few. The fulcrums are increasingly consolidated into a few levers by which we gain access to a reality that is, by and large, digitally substantiated through so many different and routine mock fictions held together by perfectly separating friend from function in a way that incentivizes return activity.

In other words, to put this into Skinnerian language, our food lever substantiates more than simply organic sustenance but also neuronal sustenance. When we can swipe to order food, swipe to find our way somewhere, swipe to recall a family member or a loved one's number, swipe to 'be' with others, or simply swipe to pass the time we're already begun to flatten the world around us into that universal food lever. And as goes our environment, so goes our persistent behaviors, and then goes our identities, and finally our existence melds into some kind of interaction loop that is self-sustaining. In the end we becomes polyps upon the functional underside of a megatechnology.

This leads me to the trite and worn conclusion that we need to struggle more with a recalcitrant reality that requires us to cultivate, practice, and engage with our great mental inheritance. That we've been able to leave this earthly plain is a small leap from reflex to meta-reflex, time fixing, and cultural mediation in the future perfect mode. That is our great asset and our Achille's heel, imagination and sensation coalesce, which expose us to influence in the very process of creating models of reality. Why else do we worship purely fictional zeniths of social organization? Why else did we look to the stars to chart our paths, plan our crops, and honor the narrative deities that placed them there? Creatures of time we are. And at the very margins of that sensation of something not really present we mine time for significance, and pre-plan a social world by using revelations in time to manipulate a great mass of others through a narrative overlay of significance making upon time itself to furnish an attitude toward a fast-becoming reality.