Sunday, June 26
notes in the direction of a larger work
Centuries and decades are liars. All their temporal precision is a front.
If we were paying attention, we would realize that what happens, happens in
units like seasons and lifetimes, and happens in places. Nothing ever happened
in the 20th Century that didn't happen in New York in winter,
Berlin at New Years, Kansas during the wheat harvest.
No matter. The easiest insight available to modern historians and science fiction authors alike is that the last most recent span of history, however
delineated, has seen more change in the life of the human animal than any
comparable period. Take two centuries or half a dozen lifetimes, and try to
quantify the change. It literally defies imagination or calculation. How do
you quantify the contents of six billion lives?
My great grandfather went to school in an age of horses and steam driven
trains. He died years after men walked on the surface of the moon. In
between, he witnessed the proliferation of the automobile and the effective
death of the American railroad. He was around before widespread indoor plumbing,
the electrical grid, interstate highways, and nationwide telephone service.
This is a cheap insight, because it is easily repeated.
In wealthy, technologically advanced societies - in places with
infrastructure - every pattern of "normal" human life has been
altered in some way. Forget cable television or the Internet. The simple fact
that most of us no longer spend most of our time and energy producing food and
securing shelter is the embodiment and cause of more fundamental change than
those of us who have never tried to survive on the products of our own labor
can possibly grasp. The predominance of artificial light has probably changed
patterns that are nearly as old as life on Earth.
And yet, for most people, the basic problems of life are in a sense what
they have always been: Food, shelter, and fucking. These things are often
mediated by technological proxies for time, labor, or material wealth, but they remain. The poetic insight that tempers and humanizes a historical sense of
change is that much of the content of human experience is universal.
(A third, Science Fictional insight: This last might not always be true.
Human nature has been a constant for most of recorded history, and it's damn
hard to change - but we're getting there fast.)
2005
June
26
:: write in the margins
Sunday, June 19
i used to come home long
after everyone was in bed
sometimes drunk though just as often
only blasted out of my mind on fatigue
and wishful thinking
i'd stand there in the kitchen
reeking of smoke and cheap beer
drinking whatever cold liquid i could find
and usually my dad would come out of my parents' room
stand blinking in the light
and we'd talk in low tones —
there's roast beef in the fridge
he'd say
what'd you guys do tonight?
nothing much i'd answer
which was almost always true
somehow in all those years,
i never once felt judged by my father
though god knows he would have had grounds
(and still don't
though i'm guilty as hell
and most days not worth
the paper i'm printed on).
2005
June
19
:: write in the margins
Thursday, June 2
b.c.w.y.w.f.y.m.j.g.i., a work of allegorical fiction
So I'm sitting in a Denver apartment with the shades drawn to keep out the
heat, and this frog hops out from under the couch. He looks at me for a while
without saying much of anything, and I look at him, and then he makes me an
offer: He'll gladly give me "five time-tested themes for use in your next
major literary work, guaranteed to be both profitable and artistically
sound", in exchange for a bathtub full of cool water and half of my beef
& bean burrito. I suspect he might have me confused with someone else, but
it seems like a reasonable proposition.
I get out a notebook and make sure my pen is all inked up. I had this dream
last night where I just kept trying to fill up the pen, which is blue and leaky
and about 35 years old, and pretty soon my bottle of ink had run dry and the
pen still wouldn't write and it was snowing all around the helicopter that was
carrying me to hell. The dream has left me feeling like I ought to be more sure
of my writing utensils.
This is what the frog says to me, more or less:
- It's really hard to get what you want.
- You aren't going to get what you want.
- What you want doesn't exist.
- By the time you get what you want, you won't want it any more.
- You don't know what you want anyway.
After I've finished writing that last one down - it strikes me immediately
as the most true & relevant - I draw the frog a bath and leave the halved
burrito sitting on the soap dish. When I step back into the living room, the
frog has disappeared and I can hear it raining outside.
2005
June
2
:: write in the margins
All original content on p1k3, unless otherwise noted, is
released to the public domain.
