Think About The Future

(Week 21: Write a speech for an intended audience.)

          There’s something I want to talk to all of you about today, and it’s the future. When you chart the progress of humanity, the highs and the lows, when you chart the direction life has been moving in this whole time, it becomes clear that we stand today at the precipice of two paths, if I may mix metaphors: total death or eternal life. Total death would mean the extinction of all humans and the devastation of the biosphere to the point where intelligent life cannot redevelop in the time left before the sun blows up. Eternal life would entail humanity transcending their physical location and physical selves, to grow and to become gods.
          If this sounds to you like rehashed rhetoric from the Old-Time Religions, you are not far off – this conflict, this crisis of choice, has been standing before us since before we were even humans. But it is only now, as humans, that we have the knowledge, the numbers, the technology, to bring about total death or eternal life. Today I’d like to talk more about the latter.
          What do we need to do to achieve eternal life? Well, the Old-Time Religions say all you have to do is live a virtuous life and obey God and you’re set. The Eastern Philosophers imply that all life is already eternal, already one, already timeless. The Techno-Futurists say we need to work on Life Extension. They’re all right, but I would like to suggest some practical baby steps to help achieve this goal a little faster, to immanentize the eschaton such as it were.
          First, I think it is crucially important that we get off this planet. For starters, one day the sun is going to blow up. So even if we have achieved some sort of physical immortality and developed a society that will never self-destruct, as long as we are here and only here we have all our eggs in one basket. Now, that is five billion years from now, I admit, but you don’t need to cite Unicron or Galactus to imagine the possibility of a cosmic-level threat demolishing the Earth well before the sun goes. In fact, I just read on Wikipedia this morning that we only have about a billion years before the sun heats up enough to boil off all liquid water. One billion years. To put it in perspective, life itself has only existed for about four billion years. So when you look at it that way, the Earth’s biosphere is about 80% of the way through its life cycle. We can’t stay here forever.
          Once we get off the planet it will be time to start working more on inventing the Life Extension techniques the Techno-Futurists are so enamored of. The end goal of course being physical immortality or some way of preserving coherent consciousness beyond the death of the body. Why do I say wait until we are off the Earth? Because the Earth is a finite and limited space, it is a bad place for an immortal species to be reproducing. See how bad we’ve wrecked stuff up with a life expectancy of 50-80 years? Imagine how much more catastrophic it would be to the planet if we stopped dying altogether!
          Now so far I have only spoken about technological solutions for thriving in the external world. This is very important. But just as important is the development of our inner spiritual selves. Because of some quirk of our nature, or for all I know any intelligent life develops along the same lines, our technological development is chiefly driven by war, by military means. So destructive technology is always at the crest of the wave. Technology to heal, to build, to create – they are usually reverse-engineered from war toys. Study your history. But now is different, the last sixty years or so I should say. Today we have the technology to wipe out all life on Earth a hundred times over. How did it come to this? It’s not a relevant question. The question is, how do we not use it? How do we learn to connect with one another on a more organic level and leave aside the violent tendencies we inherited from our animal forebears? Remember, the world was a dangerous place for us once. Even during our early days as humans it wasn’t safe at night away from the fire, there were giant cats and other predators lurking around all the time. Eventually we consumed the wilderness, tamed or exterminated the worst of the dangerous animals, paved paradise and put up a parking lot. Today the only real threat to the average human being is other human beings. Not forces of nature we cannot control. Not wild beasts we cannot overpower. Us. Only us. And so it is up to us, as a whole people, to come together. The Hippies knew it. Jesus knew it.
          How do we do this? How do we learn to love each other, to escape the Earth that birthed us and to live forever as Gods of the Cosmos? I have no idea. I only have some small pieces of the puzzle, and barely the dimmest outline of its final shape. I don’t consider this a failure; at this point in the tail-end of the Dark Ages it is necessary to talk about the changes that are necessary even if you cannot effect them yourself, to remind people that it doesn't always have to be like this, that there are greater stakes for us than financial security or social status or any other artifact of human-created society. That’s all they are, you know. Money, fame, the approval of others – none have any intrinsic worth of themselves and only have value as long as there are human minds to create them, to appreciate them, to strive for them.
          Anyway, I think I’ve said all I meant to say, except that the first step towards positive change is believing that it is possible. We have to believe that we can become gods or we are doomed to extinction. We have to rise above it all, or drown in our own shit.

The Other Sweet Science: The True History Of The Rubber Band Gun

          I was bored. That's how most of my stories begin. I was bored, so I started photoshopping word balloons onto pictures of my friends. I was bored, so I plotted a scenario to drive my girlfriend out of my life. I was bored, so I stopped going to class. In this case, I was bored, so I started shooting rubber-bands. This was at work, where the nature of the job dictates long periods of intense boredom punctuated by heavy bursts of frantic and desperate activity. This was the former. Hence the being bored, which I will keep hammering on until you are just as bored as I was.
           Shooting rubber-bands is all fine and good, but I am descended from a long line of clever tool-using monkeys and it quickly occurred to me that I could build a device to shoot them better. Based on the materials at hand I took two pens, hollowed them out and taped them together. On one end I taped down a small binder clip. With small pliers I pinched a paper-clip into a narrow s-shaped hook and I pushed it through the pen cap on the other end. Rubber-band goes here, stretches to there, clip, aim, squeeze. Thwish, snap, smack.
          The basic design was in place. The only problem was, no handle. I took stock of the items I had available to me, holding various office-supply items in my hand, squeezing them, juggling them, feeling them out. I eventually settled upon the common household tape-dispenser, the disposable plastic kind that comes with a roll of tape on it. Flip it upside down and it becomes a nice grip. I taped the shaft to it and my first rubber-band gun was born.
           That was September 1st. That night at home I took an old clothespin and replaced the binder clip. I attached a prescription bottle to the bottom of the shaft in such a way that it could be detached and rubber-bands stored inside. I wrapped the whole thing in duct tape as a finisher. I pointed, I aimed, I shot. The world felt right.
           The next day I built another one.
           The day after I built another one.
           By now I was hooked. I was experimenting with different designs, different materials. I went to Wal-Mart and bought a whole bunch of colored duct-tapes. I bought different size clothespins. I bought wooden dowels. I began scrounging around work for weird pieces of plastic, usually to be found on the floor in the back or on the ground by the dumpster. I decided that since I had built a gun a day so far for the month of September, that I would continue on that path and build at least one gun per day for the entire month. I decorated them in different colors. I gave them names: The Originator, Number Two, The Aardvark, The Assassin Pistol, Silver. I tried out different design novelties -- although I never went back to the detachable storage bottle of my first gun, I built double-shot guns (in both rifle and hand-gun variety) with Vitamin Water bottles and a dozen pen-tubes. I built one on a ruler and decorated it to look like a sword. I decorated another shaft-only model to look like the classic black and white magic wand. Abracadabra, shoot! By this point my bedroom floor was carpeted in a soft layer of rubber bands, a decor that extended to every reasonably flat surface in my room.
           In the end, I kept up to my project and didn't miss a day. Actually, by the end of September I had actually built fifty guns, ending on the 30th with the Ultimatum. Some of them were really good, a lot were mediocre -- the risk any creator faces when sticking to a given schedule -- but I had built fifty of the damn things and now I was done.
           I cleaned up the rubber bands.
           I boxed up the guns. Two boxes, one for the guns that were good shooters and aesthetically pleasing and one for the aforementioned mediocre ones.
           Then, a few months later, I built another one at work.
           Then another one. I had found a new hooking device to use, the "roundhead fastener". These were more reliable than the bent paperclip if not as easy to load.
           Then, just when it seemed I was beginning a second renaissance of rubber-band guns, I stopped.
           A similar thing had happened with the photoshopping word balloons.
           I was bored. That's also how most of my stories end.

I Am Not An American

I am not an American. I just live here. I live here because I was born here. I have never made any concerted effort to live anywhere else because I do not particularly care to give up the huge investment I have made in learning the cultural mores, dominant language and social structures of the society that I grew up in. In other words, I am lazy and indifferent to the whole damn shebang. Wherever you go, there's still people there.

I am not an American. I just live here. I do not have a problem with America. I am not anti-American. I am not pro-American, except inasmuch as I live here and American interests can coincide Venn diagram-like with my own. But I am not an American. I am not proud to be an American, not because I am ashamed of being an American but simply because I am not an American. I am proud of my accomplishments, my achievements -- not that I happen to have been born within these lines on this map. I do not believe in countries, I do not believe in nations. I do not believe in laws, borders, or governments. There might be clear delineations between different species (there aren't) or between the land and the sea (nor these) but everything else is some human-created nonsense. Including America. As a human myself I am free to toss out the rules and ideas that were laid down by those that came before me and build my own world from tabula rasa. You should try it sometime.

I pay American taxes. I follow American laws (or rather I follow my own code and am smart enough to not get caught where that happens to be illegal under local conditions). According to the records, I am an American citizen.

But, nonetheless, I am not an American. I just live here.

memoirs found in a pants pocket

"Through the protective barriers of my sunglasses, the tinted sun-roof and the thick gauzelike clouds, I stare directly at the sun."