Another 1000 Words of Summer, Days 4 - 7
Below are the words I've written for days 1 - 3 of another 1000 Words of Summer.
8-13
"There must be a significance to the June bugs jumping off the cliff," I said, pausing on the trail. Larry kept walking ahead. "This means something!" I called out.
Larry turned around. 'What?"
"This means something, it's a sign." I walked toward him. "From the animal spirits."
"Are you feeling alright?" Larry said. "You're talking weird again."
"It's not every day you see June bugs jumping off a cliff. That's highly unusual behavior for any animal en masse, except for lemmings. And even that's in question."
"Here we go." Larry sighed. "You're the most superstitious scientist I've ever met."
"Number one, I'm not a scientist. Number two, you haven't met any scientists. Number three, superstition is in the eyes of the beholder."
Larry closed his eyes and shook his head. Then he shrugged out of his backpack, pulled out a bottled water, and handed it to me. "You might be a tad dehydrated."
I grabbed the bottle and took a drink. "Thanks. We've got to figure this out. I came here seeking vegan enlightenment via communing with the animals, but that didn't happen at the sanctuary. That's because I was meant to see this sign, here. The June bugs. It's all coming together. Take some pictures of them; use a high shutter speed and your zoom lens. Then we'll go back to the cabin and figure out what the message is."
But Larry just stood on the trail staring at me. Finally, he said, "You came here to get a vegan... what, 'highlighting'?"
"No. I mean yes, but it's 'enlightenment'." Whoops. I slipped up. "I mean no. I came here -- we came here for our second honeymoon. That vegan stuff was just... you know." I looked down at my dusty shoes. "You know how I am."
"Yep. I had a feeling this place wasn't actually a couple's retreat. It's all vegany." He slowly took his camera out of his backpack and walked back to the June bug jumping point.
"But it is a couple's retreat," I said, following him. "Don't you see the couples everywhere?"
He said nothing, but took photos of the leapful beetles.
"Yes, everything's vegan, but vegan is going mainstream. It's a coincidence. Kind of."
"Are twenty pictures enough?"
"Yes. Thanks." I watched as he put away his camera. "You mad?"
"What's there to be mad about?
I paused, marveling at his cleverness, whether it be accidental or not.
"Nothing, I think. Unless you can think of something."
"Nope." He took a swig of a bottled water. "Back to the cabin?"
"Yeah. Unless you wanna keep walking the trails. It's your honeymoon too."
Larry laughed.
We started back to the cabin, Larry walking at a brisk pace, slightly ahead of me. We passed a few other couples on the trail. Vegan couples, smiling, laughing. In full flow with the vibe of the retreat. Back at the cabin, Larry loaded the photos onto his laptop. "I'm gonna take a little nap. I tossed and turned last night. You know how I am with strange beds."
"I thought you slept well. You didn't even snore."
"That's because I was awake."
I scrolled through the photos at the desk while Larry snored in bed. Most of the shots were clear. The beetles looked like shiny black ovals against a beige cliffside. I Googled "lemmings jumping off a cliff," and read the wiki article. Turns out lemming actually do jump off cliffs when their population booms. But they don't do it deliberately. And they don't explode. I found that odd, as I didn't know they had been thought to explode in the first place. So I added that to my notes on lemmings. Then I Googled "June bugs jumping off a cliff." I put it in quotes to filter out the mundane. Google returned tens of thousands of results, but none one them -- on the first page, at least -- had the quote in it. What's the point of quotation marks when Google ignores them? But I did find out June bugs don't have a sense of direction. They're probably dyscalculic.
The animal spirits absolutely were telling me something. I just had o decipher it. Non-exploding lemmings and directionless June bugs. In the month of June. All very mysterious. I wondered if there were any lemming at the sanctuary, and whether they liked to be petted. Whether lemmings ate June bugs. Whether June bugs had anti-self-explosion powers. Whether June bugs liked to be petted -- no. Most likely not. I started to Google "lemmings as symbols, but just then Larry rip-snorted so loudly I jumped, and my hand hit the keyboard. I had accidentally Googled "lemmings app." So maybe the answer what there. Larry's breathing settled down a bit, and I downloaded a lemmings game. I help the cartoon lemmings float around in space and find their home. Hmm... "Space" and "home." The June bugs represented lemmings jumping (actual lemmings jumping off a cliff would've been too upsetting, and the spirit animals knew this and so substituted the bugs). Or maybe lemmings weren't native here. Anyway, the spirits were trying to tell me to give Larry space at home. All this trouble for such a simple message. And perhaps I was being a bit overbearing. I even deceived my husband into thinking this place was a couple's retreat.
Larry gave another rip-snort -- mercifully, this one a bit softer, then woke up. He gave me a pat on the head as he walked past to get to the bathroom. "Get it figured out yet?" he called from the bathroom.
"Yeah. I need to give you space," I replied. "At home."
I heard the toilet flush, and then Larry steeped out of the bathroom. "No you don't."
"Yes I do. The lembugs told me. He laughed.
"You have any plans for tonight?"
"Yeah. After dinner at that vegan place, I wanna come back to the cabin and partake in my favorite activity."
"TV?"
"Yep. Maybe find a movie. A rom-com."
I laughed. He knows that word get me every time.
8-14
We spent the rest of the afternoon in the wonderful air conditioning, looking of the photos of the June bugs and speculating that they were actually visitors from another galaxy. They came to Earth, but after a few minutes, got so distraught by the state of Earth that they started jumping off a cliff.
Finally, something that makes sense! Or maybe it's the stress of deception. I know I must eventually spill my guts and you'll you use the American flag as a cover for ANTIFA. No judgment, just a drape for your body, and if the flag has bullet holes in it, all the better. It's the story of our struggle. The red stripes mean something different to everybody, but they're always eye-catching. Especially to medical workers in these unprecedented global pandemic times. The stripes are a vivid call to action, a galvanizing of in-the-trenches work that must be done to stop the flow of Rona bodies from piling up in the street. Because there's no room for them in the streets, as the peaceful protesters and rioters are taking up all the spacee. And it's just another day in the life of lockdown. The Trump-lead war against the citizens and illegal immigrants in the United States will rage on until Trump is ousted in the election... unless he somehow manages to thwart the will of the people, be it from shutting down the post offices or demanding a fraud investigation or refusing to relinquish his presidency via an election postponement. And Trump could even try all of these things and the republicans would praise him and the democrats would tsk-tsk him and it would be business as usual. The great lie of politics. Everybody's an actor, save maybe three. Any official transhuman candidate, Sanders, and Stein. We need an overall leader to ensure the biosphere is blissed.
Getting side-tracked by contemplating the side-tracks. I don't know how many words I've written. I look at my keyboard and I see the letters as Scrabble title pieces. And I won't look at the count until I feel like doing so. Just as in my Twitter feed. I see something abhorrent, and I take a break. I already know abuses take place all the time all over the world, I don't need to see it. I'm already awake. I know what must be done. And whether that's via the Singularity or something equivalent, it must and will happen. And I'm trying to make it happen sooner. Doing my submicroscopic part to bring benevolent change a fraction of a decimal sooner. Because every millisecond counts. I contemplated writing "nanosecond," but thought better of it, because I'm dyscalculic. I can't fathom how long a nanosecond is, so who am I to assign (dis)value using that unit? Likewise, can the smallest possible temporal measurement have anything piggybacking on it? Seems implausible. And if there's no room for piggybacking, how is (dis)value smuggled in? Does it pop into existence, like matter and energy and time in a void? Krauss says there's no such thing as nothing, and I tend to agree. I'm not even sure a state of nothingness can exist in the imagination. Because nothingness wouldn't even have any space or time. The absence of all measurements and meanings. The absence of even the potential of (dis)value. What mind-brain could encapsulate that beyond experientially removed conjecturism? Does the encapsulations of nothingness even make sense? Perhaps the Singularity will yield the answers. But a nanosecond (or less) before, it will yield the answer to all the ills of Darwinian life. Whether that be obliteration or transformation, who knows. But it shall be swift and sure.
And I just got back from a Facebook break, and now I need a break from Facebook. Seems all the middle-eastern men from which I've accepted a friendship request think Facebook is a free porn exchange and sexting site. Almost every time I get on Facebook, it's a barrage of "Hey Baby' or "Hey" or "H" or variations and dick pics and porn gifs. Just gross. What kind of fucked-up culture are they from? Islam? On Facebook I'm an android, for fuck's sake. These sexters don't even bother to look at the posts, they just see a female face of demand a video chat. Seems I spend more time unfriending and blocking than I do networking. Pearce talked me into Facebook as he talked me into Twitter as he talked me into editing for Invincible Wellbeing etc. And he still acts like he's over the Moon with me when he's told me he's not. And I've repeatedly pointed this out to him and he still does it. And he talks of another Summit, and so it goes. All the while revealing almost nothing of his past. After I've laid open my life. But I am backing off, slowly but surely. I just need to keep at it, keep to the task of uncoupling my mind from his existence. Fawn and feign all you want, Mr. Pearce, and you shall find you no longer are able to elicit rhapsodies from me. You rang the bell loud and clear. And now you will receive the echo of it. The three-year deception is over. Our friendship is forever awkward, and I continue to put distance between us. What did you expect? And why am I still having one-sided conversations with you (mimicking real life) in my mind? Perhaps after three years it will just take me awhile. My OCD nature. I asked for the truth and finally got it. So how about you just go away now and stop bothering me? You've had your fun. You're smart enough and empathetic enough to know what you did. Yet you keep fawning. And I choose to preserve our friendship. Perhaps in time I will have put enough distance between us that your fawning will elicit simple amusing, perhaps indifference. Perhaps I will just have to wait for that to happen, and be exasperated in the interim.
8-15
My vegan and my carnist are at the fake couples' retreat oblivious to what's going on in the world of the story writer. Not "their" story writer, but "the" story writer, because, as I informed someone on Facebook who was not familiar with the way fiction manifests itself, I'm not exactly writing the story. The story is largely writing itself. I'm the transcriber. Yes, my writing style and quirks embellish the story, but I'm mostly revealing a separate reality, and in that revelation, sparking the fire in the equation, so to speak. That would make a great quote: The fiction writer sparks the fire in the equation of a separate reality. My first penned writer's quote. Informed by physics, which is a great match -- and here comes another quote: Fiction and physics are alike in that they both rely on a mental process to become real. OK one more quote to make it three. Fiction informs physics. Concise, snappy, and mysterious. I'm on a roll. Physics inform fiction. Physics spark fire into the reality of fiction. And that last one was the most convoluted of the bunch. But it's so obviously true. I've discovered the answer to both the equation of consciousness and the equation of fiction. It's the same equation! Why does reality make so much more and so much less sense at the same time the nearer to midnight it is? I don't know if this holds true for extreme night owls, but that's been my experience. Perhaps it's the mind-brain in a different wave state. Or perhaps nighttime spirits are real, and they visit when people are getting ready to go to bed. A brain preparation which allows spirit access. And I think the more trees in an area, the more spirits abound. I feel it. Forests, like the one bordering my backyard, are rife with spirits. And spirits don't have to be supernatural entities. Perhaps we will develop the technology to qualify spirits at the dawn of the Singularity. Along with countless other technologies. How many transhumans will choose to fully immerse in virtual reality? How many will chose the modify their bodies into the likeness of another species? And how many will choose to upload into the cloud? I would choose option four (don't know what that is yet). Something about a totally "fake" experience of living is off-putting. Even if we're already in a "fake" experience. I consider this basement reality, and I don't want to add another layer of deception. Even if it's a multi-player game. I want to get as "real" as possible, even though "real" is associated with all the experience below hedonic zero that must be eliminated. Maybe that's why I want basement reality -- so that we can engineer out negative experience from it. A bottom-up approach. Every day I compartmentalize the pictures and videos of animal cruelty I see on Twitter. Human are gratuitously violent. Is every act of violence attributable to a pre-determined Darwinian drive? I believe free will doesn't exist (if I can indeed have a belief in a negative; also, I prefer not to dwell on the point as it's enough to drive one insane). I wonder if evil for its own sake has been smuggled into the reality of people somehow. And smuggled by what? The thing that created itself? Perhaps the Singularity will provide the answers pronto.
So I just closed my eyes for a moment and I immediately start dreaming. That happens when I'm about to fall asleep relaxing. Larry was walking through the front door with a sack of high oxalates. I had been eating some from the last haul we did. More green beans in the bag. Larry needs to eat those. I don't know how he has just coffee in the morning, then doesn't eating hardly anything for lunch, then have a regular-sized dinner. And still be a bit portly. I'm also doing intermittent fasting, but I have three meals and several snacks within my (ideally) ten-hour window of opportunity. And yet I'm so thin. Vegan and no junk food. Maybe that's why. Though it doesn't matter what and how much I eat -- I don't ever get fat. Which is fine by me. I know it's an addiction, but I don't understand continuing to eat galore after you're gained galore. Because you'd have to buy the food, cook the food, and eat a lot of junk food. I have an eight-hour window of opportunity to eat and still remain on the list. Now I'm truly just rambling, but I will leave that part in there; it's a peak into my subconscious. Starting to think of random scenes; and when I look up to check the text I see garbled words. And I have to correct them. It's a different experience writing at night. But my schedule is such that nighttime writing somehow isn't as rushed. Still developing my ideal schedule with one item following seamlessly into the next. A balance of exercising, eating, proofreading, editing, writing, and reading. And YouTube, because I'm addicted to that. And visual art too. And cooking some of the billions of recipes I have saved. And gardening. What will replace gardening in the winter? I imagine myself snug in a blanket with a mug of hot cocoa reading one of the billions of books I have waiting for me. I also imagine myself moved out west in the desert. Which will eventually happen. My only concern for that is how I will garden. Most of the properties have no gardenable yard. It's all parched sand and rock. And greenhouses are so labor-intensive. Perhaps I will tend to my plants indoors in a spare room. But I would enjoy a few outdoors plants for a small garden-like experience. Something edible besides cacti. An acre of land would be nice. Wide open spaces are ideal, yet so are trees. And I need to visit the ocean now and then. I know this could all be simulated, and I could adapt to the simulation.
8-16
I rather like stream-of-consciousness writing late at night as I'm falling asleep because I believe what comes out is a peek into the subconscious. It seems I've written that belief before, but it's coming out again, so it must be significant. Having toast for pep and also maybe because the fridge went caput. Lucky we have a beer cooler which is now jam-packed with all the stuff that used to be in the refrigerator-freezer. And speaking of jam, back to the toast. It has vegan margarine and rose petal jam (also vegan of course) on it. The bread, margarine, and jam all sit in the fridge at room temperature now. Our new fridge won't arrive for four weeks. Also there's a bunch of produce still in the fridge. I marvel at how the Amish do it. And then I wonder whether I would have rumspringa-ed the hell out of there when the time came. I sure the hell hope so. The internet is my life. I just won another $300 for a name I picked from a list. Not even a name I came up with. I simply submitted it, and it won. Easy money, but that doesn't happen every day. You've got to submit hundreds of names. At least it seems like it. But it's fun and I've won a good amount of money from the naming contests. Of course one must consider the intervals between wins, but I really don't have a sense of time, or money for that matter. I just know both exist and are very important and facilitate pre-post-scarcity, pre-post-Singularity life. OK that toast was awesome. I love toast. I should have it more often. Maybe do an oat bread recipe. Do more recipes in general -- I have so many of them. I just need to be organized about picking out the next recipes to do and then making a list of items that need to be purchased for the recipes. Pretty straightforward, yet I seem to struggle with it. Organization in general seems to be an issue. There must be a psychological reason for this going back from childhood, because I've always been like this. And every once in a while I remember how I was in middle school and high school with my locker combinations and even my locker location and my class schedule. Did I keep throwing away my locker number, combination, and schedule, thinking I would remember all these? So many times I would have to go to the office to get the information again. Such a dork to this day. What would cause me to disregard my dyscalculia? Of course I didn't know the name for it back then, but I knew I sucked at remembering numbers, doing math, and remembering directions and locations. I knew all that from repeated experience. And yet I was so cavalier about tossing that info. Maybe because I didn't belong in an institutional environment? When will schools be reformed? When will teachers get a clue? I remember one of my science teachers praised my large handwriting, which surprised me, considering how sloppy it's always been. And he would give me an answer or two on a test if I asked him. That was my favorite class, along with my vocabulary class. One day the vocab teacher had one of the students walk into the class after the bell, slam things around, then yell at her and storm out. it was all a set up and I thought it so clever. The teacher asked the other students was had happened. And now somehow my mind wanders to Black Lives Matter. My opinion of them as a whole have shifted back and forth over the maybe five years they've been in existence. Again, I suck at numbers and time. Why is everything always about race now? What a silly artificial construct to dwell on. Just one more thing to be offended by. So weird that social justice warriors are still a thing when so many people have woken up to how pretentious and bratty they are. Cancel culture is such a distraction from issues that actually matter, like the state of the world. But instead people freak out over who uses what word and who thinks what is funny. All people own all words and all people own all humor. A sudden shift to the sudden shift to cooler weather. This weekend was cool and overcast with occasional drizzle and high humidity. I wonder where that came from, as we're still in August. Maybe a cold front dipping down from Canada -- but Canada is in summer too. Could be related to catastrophic global climate change. The next few years will bring even wilder weather, then all hell will break loose and we see record hurricane and floods and droughts. In the meantime, Trump is trying to sabotage the election by ripping out mail drop boxes. So bizarre that the USA spends billions on the embarrassingly bloated military industrial complex, then claims to not have money for healthcare and education and infrastructure. And with either Trump or Biden as President, none of those issues will be addressed. Of all the adult citizens of the USA, it's mind-boggling that Trump and Biden are our choices. The USA is such a joke. And it's corporatocrasy that has gotten us here. All about money and lobbying and gerrymandering and delegates and the electoral college. And yet people still go out and vote for either Tweedle-dee or Tweedle-dum. I'm going to continue to not play that game. If a Transhumanist candidate is running, I will vote for that transhuman, and if not, I won't vote. It's pointless anyway. The world needs strong AI to govern everyone. I would gladly live in a nanny state and be an AIs pet as long as all my needs and wants were met, virtually or otherwise. I welcome our robot overloards and will be first in line. Freedom is over-rated and creativity must compensate. Lucky for me, that's easy.
