I have been living in two very different worlds lately.
The world I share with you has been full of violence, protest, nonsensical conflations and corporations taking advantage of individuals. It’s dystopian, and the only real commodity worth trading in a species that likes trading everything else is hope. Yet hope is often weaponized as a way to get the mob to do as others wish. I’ve lived long enough to see the fruition of false promises, and I’ve lived short enough to still be seduced by hope sometimes.
The world that I will share with you when I get done with it views our humble little blue dot from a distance, through many different lenses. It’s been hard to get there over the past week, but when I get there I stay longer. Everything is better there, because everything is different there. In writing this fiction, this world that I enjoy creating and manipulating, maybe it will allow the readers respite from the world we share. It’s certainly big enough for everyone, I made sure of that.
Our universe is really, really big and we forget that too often, that we actually do have larger issues to contend with as a species than who called who what name, what boundaries dead people set on flat maps of a round world, and why someone farting in court should be newsworthy. From that other world, we’re all raving lunatics, watching people who get dressed up to go to events escaping reality in their own way and then imposing it upon them and then complaining that they did go and didn’t say things we agree with.
I simply don’t understand why people gave them the platform in the first place, but I expect it’s about the same escapism, living vicariously through people we put on pedestals. Fortunately, just about all the people I have on pedestals are dead and every year the pedestals have gotten shorter. Manipulating them to do what we want seems more democratic than the insults to democracy that we call democracy in all these countries. By all means, take your attention away from them – but don’t blame them for the attention you gave them in the first place. Maybe you grew a little and their pedestals have simply become shorter. That’s not their fault. You’ve simply outgrown them – maybe – because if the intent is to hurt them, you still have them on your mind.
From a distance, we all seem silly. Even me.
Between A Rock…
Yesterday I found a nice rock. I’m not kidding. I liked the rock. In front of people who respect me, I picked up the rock because I had plans for the rock. A rock. It’s silly. I saw some potential in it, the handful of quartz with sedimentary sandstone in parts of it.
I soaked it in water overnight after teasing some of the sediment out with a bit of wire. People are generating crappy content all this time with generative AIs, and here I was working on a rock. I went to the hardware store and bought small diamond files and tools for scraping out the sandstone from the rock, giving me holes that I will someday run roots from a bonsai through. I saw that in the rock yesterday before I picked it up, and this morning I banged that rock against another rock to break it along the sandstone fault lines, so that the rock will fit in one of the bonsai pots.
It certainly beat looking at the news. The news is definitely a hard place right now, and there’s not much I can do where I can see a tangible difference. Thus, it seems, I went back to humanity’s roots and was banging rocks together.
That’s a little insane. I do hope the nebari of the tree I pick will work with this stone. It will be the hard place from which the tree seems to grow. Like me. Like you. Like everything else on this wonderful blue dot I enjoy more and more from a distance than I do through the windows of technology.
We Need To…
the world around us, even when it’s painful, even when we have an escape, because to grok the world around us is to grok the need for escape – and what better than escape than to make the world into a place we want to escape to? Why can’t we do that instead?
I wish I knew the answer, though it seems so many don’t understand that there is a question in the first place.