There’s plenty that could be waxed poetic about.
The global situation.
The near-local tension between Venezuela and the United States.
The AI slop coating the internet.
RAM shortages because billionaires are having digital wet dreams.
I rolled my eyes while writing that.
The world is already a landfill of the garbage we produce, and civilization inherits it—directly or indirectly.
Instead, I’ll just give a small update on my life, for those interested.
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Every morning the world arrives in fragments. A flicker of headlines, alerts, and outrage masquerading as revelation. Each story claims to be the truth, but truth seems to have become a drowned thing, sinking quietly beneath the noise of the living.
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I’ve been playing one of these silly phone games. It’s a zombie survivor game and, predictably, it’s driven by real world money. They call it pay-to-win in the gamer shorthand (P2W), and that means the more you pay, the more advanced you get while you compete with other individuals and alliances for prizes, and battle with them over virtual items of one form or another. It’s all artificial scarcity.
This weekend, we had a war with another server – all, of course, orchestrated by the game developers. They create demand for virtual items to compete in a virtual world for… what, exactly? To ‘beat the other player’, which you could do by simply playing with dice. Effectively, these games are like that.
Why do I play them? Because I find it interesting to see how players go out of their way to pretend that they care about other people. Non-Aggression Pacts generally spring up (NAPs), which generally elevate some and cause the lowest levels to constantly be raided and losing the virtual resources they have gathered. Eventually the lower levels get upset, quit the game, and with a lack of new players, the server eats itself. Every single time.
What’s worse, any act of defiance to the higher levels is met with iron fists, not unlike the real world, but with virtual items.
The game developers then force the servers to battle each other because people spend money for that. And when that stops being the cash cow, they merge the servers, depending on the competitive nature for items you can’t park in front of your house to continue making money. Until that dies.
I play because I enjoy building things, really, and liking to see how the systems are built. For me, it’s a reverse engineering of the game and the players, and it generally leaves me with a particularly cynical view of humanity.
So we won that war, if there is any winning of a war, and I raise up to see that the issues with Israel and the United States and pretty much the entire Middle East, particularly Iran right now, have escalated again. You can have whatever side you want, I don’t care. The net result is the same.
And I think of the game. And I think of this. Because our planet – our capital on the planet – is not stored in banks. Our ability to breath and feed ourselves is our actual capital. That is diminishing.
The server, as it is, is beginning to die. Except we have no server to battle against, and no server to merge with. We’re playing musical chairs with an increasing population and less and less trees to make chairs.
A self-defeating species.
I’ll just toast marshmallows in the flames. We seem to have a surplus of marshmallows, for some reason.
A friend of mine passed away a while ago, having been battling a resurgence of cancer I was unaware of, and it impacted me because he and I had been corresponding about the value of Life, questions of mortality. He didn’t speak a word about his situation. He spoke a lot about mine.
Maybe it was a distraction for him. We weren’t close; a few times on a trip I had made, but we had become close in our own way. Sharing thoughts on mortality is a different sort of intimacy, but when people speak honestly – as we did – it is an intimacy. It’s subject is taboo. We’re all supposed to do anything to stay alive according to whoever started that tradition.
He did. He had a lot to live for and it showed in his battles with his health – a giant of a man physically and mentally and emotionally. All the while, we spoke about mortality, life, and a few other interests.
I need to get back to writing, but playing back those conversations in my head, rethought with his own situation as it must have happened, adds a depth to what he was saying that I didn’t understand then.
So I’m doing that, because the best thing you can do for a noteworthy person is revisit things that you shared with a new understanding of their perspective.
There’s a bright darkness outside.
I got some bad news this evening about a friend who I wish I had the time to get to know better. The person who delivered this news, another friend, filled me in and knew I wouldn’t give him cliches. Well, I believe he knew, now I’m sure he does.
Because of privacy and dignity of my friends, I’ll say no more, but it sets the mood. It’s dark. And it’s dark outside as I write this, though we humans and our fear of the dark makes the view a landscape of fear disguised as light. We don’t see as well at night, and rather than getting used to the dark, we used things to dispel the darkness.
Most of the time, what’s there in the dark is exactly what’s there in the light. We use light now out of fear of ourselves, mostly, because we’re our own worst predator second to time.
I’ve spent a few days away from the computer. It started without a plan, and suddenly I found myself outside, pen in hand with a sketchbook. I don’t draw, I just like completely blank pages to graffiti on with my thoughts. Away from the keyboard, away from the links, away from being constantly tracked and anticipated by algorithms who don’t know the warmth of a human body.
The phone rang, I ignored it. Off and on I checked social media, mainly to check and see if the world had ended yet and I hadn’t gotten the memo.
Spoiler: The world has not ended yet.
It’s not for lack of trying though. When I say the world, by the way, I don’t mean our species. I mean the planet. People with bad hairstyles doing crazy things is not that new, despite what people think.
The planet won’t end before I will. It will change, maybe, where the fluids of our planet try to make it into a perfect globe. The winds, the waves, they weaponize time against the solids of the surface. It’s all much more interesting than reading stories I don’t like about people I don’t like doing things I don’t like in places I don’t like.
So I scribbled instead. Not poems. Not plans. Just fragments—like fossils of thoughts coaxed from tar pit of time.
Sitting out there, with no notifications and no blinking cursors, things made a bit more sense. Not in the way of answers, but in the way a breeze makes sense when you stop fighting the heat. The days went by quietly, the sun eventually forcing me from my roost later in the afternoon.
Nothing got ‘done’.
The planet, for now, keeps turning. And I keep sketching things that aren’t pictures.
Maybe that’s what passes for wisdom these days: Not knowing what you’re doing, but doing it away from the noise.
A post from the Dull Men’s Club (Facebook) made itself into a glorious news story. ‘How did an Ayrshire bin end up in a German village?‘ was perhaps the most entertaining bit of news I had seen all week.
The group is full of people – men and women have separate groups, apparently, but people wander in regardless of gender. We find things, ask and answer questions about mundane things and have a pretty good sense of humor about it all.
There are, apparently, many of us that find joy in that. Through the group I get to see different parts of the world and even different ways of seeing the world through different cultures. It’s almost what the Internet should be.
Just a bunch of people solving everyday mysteries.
Wisdom.
A society that only shares headlines doesn’t read articles. Congratulations. You’re not a member of that society.
If the only value you have is liking and sharing a post, then your value is determined by those that control you, those that want you to like and share things so that they may gain something from it. The Internet works best when we all bring something to it. For those of you actually out there and doing things, thank you.
We say that’s how we like to spend our time, but is it more like a last resort? Daydreaming is more fun. We have books on our shelves to read, or if not, we have books to find. We have a second per person per second, which stacks up pretty big in the billions. We should be decorating time somehow. That might be wisdom.
These days they say AI will help with that.
Spoiler alert: It won’t, not by present systems anyway.
Before AI, it was the IoT (Internet of Things), before the IoT it was the mobile phone, before the mobile phone it was the Internet, before the Internet was the PC Revolution, all promising us better lives. More productivity implying more personal time. It’s not a new thing to say.
Interfacing with a kludgy digital ecosystem that others profit from doesn’t make us more human – it makes us less. It turns us into the batteries of the Matrix, fueling itself and not putting enough back.
Maybe we should be more than that. That might be wisdom.
When I view the world, I view systems, in motion, with rhythms that dance with other systems, dancing within other systems, just… maybe humming when things are working right. There’s always something out of balance, and a light touch is enough to change it when it’s caught early enough.
Where so many are attracted to the explosions, the failures of systems, I am attuned to the efficiency of systems – the purr of a well tuned engine, the multi-threading of a real time system, a well orchestrated bit of music, and nature that sustains itself.
It’s the rare person that doesn’t like to see green around them in some shape and form for as far as the eye can see, or the ocean through the experience of a sailboat – not without that man made sound, but that wind being harnessed, ruined only by the shouts of coordination. There’s an indescribable pull to these things.
It is the same pull I feel when I watch a machine do precisely what it was designed to do, no more and no less. Not with violence, but with grace. A quiet sorting algorithm moving through millions of decisions without hesitation. A beam balanced perfectly across tension points. The kind of elegance that does not announce itself but is undeniable when you witness it. These things remind me that perfection is not loud. It does not need to be.
It shouldn’t have to be.
And yet, we seem drawn to the noise. Drawn to the spectacle of failure, to the sparks flying off misaligned gears. We watch systems crash and call it entertainment. We turn dysfunction into a kind of art. Somewhere along the line, it became more interesting to watch a thing break than to understand why it ever worked at all. Simplicity and balance are dismissed as boring, even as they quietly keep the world from falling apart.
But I cannot look away from balance. I cannot ignore the beauty of something that hums just under the surface of awareness. The kind of beauty you only notice when you stop needing to be entertained and start needing to understand. And once you see it, really see it, you start to wonder why we spend so much time chasing chaos, when the world is full of things quietly getting it right.
I see it less and less now, that beauty. It is not me, of that I am sure, for I have looked at myself through lenses of skepticism that dismantled my countenance into biases and reasons for biases and… so on, deep into the abyss where, oddly, the only thing you lose is time.
But that the orchestra of the world around me has changed. I understood the rhythms, the changes in the rhythms. Now it’s that I see systems failing, I see things failing, because we have built with technology that which the people controlling it only understand to break, to profit from the distraction, to accumulate so much that they themselves couldn’t spend if they tried.
From forests of data meeting the technological chainsaws to forests meeting the real ones, we seem so out of balance from when I started noticing. When I started trying to understand instead of being entertained.
And so, when they ask me if I will have the surgery, I hear it as another question entirely. Not about survival, but about whether I believe this system – this world we have built -is still one worth extending time within. Whether more heartbeats should be purchased for the sole purpose of watching the same predictable failures repeat on loop. The thought of living longer just to witness more of it, that endless stream of systems breaking under the weight of their own contradictions, feels less like a gift and more like a sentence.
But then I wonder if it is precisely because I see it failing that I should stay. Not to mend the whole, no, that is beyond any one person. But to tune what little corners I can still reach. To teach those still willing to listen that not every machine needs to grind itself into dust. That there is still music beneath the static if you know where to listen. Maybe the work is not to outlive the collapse, but to place one stone of balance amid the wreckage before I go.
It’s not looking good. It seems everyone is intent on making the fire bigger, the system more out of tune, in creating as much discord as they can.
So I make my decision the only way I know how. Not by asking how much time the surgery will buy me, but by asking what systems I might still steady with whatever time remains, and whether those systems are enough to regain some balance. And if the answer is yes, I suppose that is reason enough to let the heart keep its rhythm a little longer. Quietly, without announcement. Simply doing what it was designed to do.
Meanwhile, I’m counting vultures and toasting marshmallows.
In viewing the angiogram, a few things snapped together, adding weight to the issue that most people would already have thought was heavy. I wasn’t in pain. I’m living a normal life. But having looked over the ECG and the echocardiogram findings, it was hard to reconcile in my mind these separate systems.
But the angiogram that I finally saw snapped it all together, sans lack of pain. I saw the full occlusion on one artery, the almost complete occlusions on the rest. I saw it all moving. Yet it bothered me that this was what added that weight? Why? This bothered me. I didn’t know why it had an effect.
I drilled down into it. Today it dawned on me that I was seeing 3 systems working in the video. That’s why.
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