No one knows when this happened. No one knows if it happened. Not really. There was some awareness they’d arrived. There. Where it happened. After it happened. After it changed. Of course, no one even knows what changed. Or how. Not in the long run. Not in any way from which any accumulated data could prove the assertion that it had changed, that everything was different. Some attributed it to aging. Some attributed it to climate change. Others were convinced that the sun had pulsed some otherwise unknown particles through the gloriously transparent armor the Earth wears, that the sun had ways to inject us with changes we would not even have awareness of. We would have feelings. Feelings we could not prove. And no one of any substance in this vast and growing hierarchy built up from the exponentially growing billions and billions put much credence into feelings. As nothing was the same (and I’m telling you, it is different, everything. Everything is different. Can you feel it? You are in your house and feel fine. You take your shower and have your little bowl of raisin bran; you comb your wet hair neatly. You look like you’ve always looked when you take a quick look in the mirror. But then you walk outside) the way we define how we live and how others perceive us and themselves is altered inexplicably. Behavior transmogrified into identity. And in spite of it or because of it people began not to know who or what they were. They thought a name or denomination or letter would solve their crises and the crises erupting all around them. They were wrong and they were even more lost. They could not go back. ‘Back’ was simply no longer there.
Genres changed. As if they had a life of their own, as if they’d evolved like animals and plants approaching extinction: too specified. Not general enough. The authors of their own oblivion. Genres we depended on to define our world and the boundaries between how we perceive the world and our place in it. No longer inclusive. Narrowing. Narrowing. We wanted acceptance and freedom for how we behaved, we wanted freedom from stigma and what we were handed was a kind of lostness in a vacuum of the endlessness of contrived superficial identities that were manufactured in the same way that new ways of doing what was always done were manufactured remanufactured and promoted as more perfect though they were never more perfect. We stopped knowing who we are and any attempt to define it was lost in the flux and Sturm and Drang of how and what the economy required of us to keep it alive and growing, regardless of the cost to us and to the world. There seems to be a puppetmaster or puppetmasters but any attempt to identify them is ultimately and rightfully derided and denied. Any attempt to become one is likewise made into a circus of attention seeking and profit taking. We elevate only to be ready to see the things we elevate crash and burn and become profit centers in their destruction. Our economic model became a highly profitized gambling casino in which only those who hold the entry price can lay bets on when and how and by how much the next disastrous collapse will occur. The gamblers' wagers become a large part of why the entire structure collapses and who makes the most from the process of rebuilding... with the exact same foibles and tripping points as before, only refined and marketed, codified or semi-secretly left open to be triggered or taken advantage of by the elite who designed and embedded them. For instance: is this a story or a memoir? Is this fiction or essay? Have these things actually occurred or are they being fictionalized and held in the tiny but, once entered, constantly swelling interminable space of someone’s imagination like mold or the world of a single cell of bacteria as it sees and wonders about its world in a Petrie dish? All I know is when I finally leave the house, I can feel the change. Ask for proof if you wish. All you will be left with is spectre, some barely graspable minutiae of possible outcomes, of how we have come to this point. The news is full of the signals of this change. The radio waves and video and what we call the internet. Full of a swelling mass of diversion that thunders in our tiny but completely enclosing web of invisible talk talk talk. Nothing really means anything and everything and everybody, every disembodied head on the screen that assumes meaning, that works hard just to fill space with the potential herd of likes and little emoji hearts, is attenuated by the possibility of attention-grabbing nonsense arguments that have little if any meaning other than to appeal to those individual centers of irritability and rage. All the little laugh faces. And books. Where have all the books come from? They seem to be self-replicating and reproducing ad nauseum until we are inundated by them, drowning in them. A sea of books constantly falling open saying nothing or so little that the few that are truly works that might save the world are lost. As if the worth of what is written shrinks in direct proportion to the numbers of books that are printed just to support an economy that is bent on self-destruction. I love books. I have a room full of them. The stacks are growing. I may smother in the musty yellowing pages. I may never find my way out of the chapters. The shelves might fall over on me. I once thought I might want to write books. I thought that was one did, one who wrote. But there is so much writing that the whole project seems terrifyingly hungry for readers, readers who may be there but who cannot find the words in the thick kelp forests of the sea of words. As if anything I wrote would be worthy of books. As if books are worthy of anything I could write. Where does one throw old books? What landfill accepts them when they are done? When they have been written enough? What is the thing that has been created merely to sustain the vast and impenetrable self-destruction of capital that might be promoted as better than books, more perfect than books? More books? Books on screens? The books are eating me. Any books I might write lack the teeth to chew a place in the rotting libraries. That scene in Wells’ “Time Machine”... you know? The future. The traveler is shown where the perfectly beautiful people keep their books. A dark place. The books crumble to dust in his hand. No one really believes anything. Do they?
Oh, they might cling to some specious and absurd notion of whatever it is they have come to understand as universality... some idea that they might call god, or the great Other, the all-embracing mother... but walk out the door of your house into the city, into your little town, drive into traffic. Can’t you feel it? This is no joke. I admit I have fallen behind. I admit I have lost track of my place in the alleged revolution of technology. I have lost interest in keeping up. I cannot see how it applies. I will be dead soon. I admit it. Not tomorrow. Not if I can help it. I still work hard to stay alive. I guard my health. But I have been left behind. It’s like I am in that Algebra III/Trigonometry class once more, fading into the impossibility of catching up with the rest of the class just because the latest Led Zeppelin LP holds more interest, more presence, meaning, for me than the brain-breaking absurd notions I am being entreated to ingest in class. I can see myself in the back row of the class, fading into the background while the rest of the class raises their hands and walks to the board to chalk out their proof, their steps toward the solution. Everyone else seems to have an answer... or hopes the teacher will be foolish enough to believe they have the answer. What is ‘n’? What is the multiple of ‘p’? Chalk: how quaint. See how far I have fallen into the past? Where am I exactly? Where is anyone? And, to tell you the truth, I am simply uninterested. To tell you the truth, at this juncture, I wish I had learned what was offered in that class, at least a little more. More like my father who, toward the end of his life, bought and completed an ongoing series of advanced mathematics workbooks. Just to keep his mind sharp. And it did. Like a recipe committed to memory. A special stew or a great and dependable way to bake a fish that I could go back to again and again when everything else has left me gasping like that fish in the lurch. I wish I had learned something as solid as that trigonometry now appears to be. I could have withstood this unadmitted, this possibly inadmissible, great alteration. This shift. When was it? When did I first opt to opt out? I am even going backwards. I fear I am going backwards. In the past year I found a secret shop full of old technology owned and operated by a chubby fellow with glasses who hoarded turntables and receivers and amplifiers. Stereo speakers... with wires. Wires I tell you! That should have been my first indication, my first clue. I bought a turntable. Back home I dug through a pile of old vinyl LPs. Why did I keep them? Why do I keep all these CDs? Why did I buy them in the first place? I should have known... those semi-eroticized forays into the now disappeared used book and CD shop where I could peruse shelves of used CDs. Eight bucks a pop. I was in heaven. I thought I was getting a deal. Oh... and did I come home with some or what? Each trip. Did I buy a specially designed shelf for them? Yes. Yes, I admit it. There it is, behind me as I type. I reject the cloud. I demand to stay unbeamed up into the cloud. What is the cloud anyway? Where is it? Who can see into it? Who can read my stuff as I write it and it is sucked up into this thing they have called the cloud. No cloud I have ever dreamed could ever look or appear to be like this one. Why must I be followed by it? How much shit has it crowded into its ethereal boundaries until it is ready to rain? Will there be storms of disconnected paragraphs and sentences? Hard as hail? I lay on my back as a child and watched animals and wizards and great blooming forests erupt in the sky over me. I dreamt into those clouds knowing I could never be in them; they would never support my weight or submit to my grasp. Like sand. Like water. Why now must I beam my thoughts, my loves and my disappointments, my successes and utter failures, into this thing named the cloud? Can’t I keep them close? Inside? Can’t I familiarize their impact and essence privately? Can I still imagine what they can become, up there, surrounded by the blue blue blue? I have flown above those clouds. I know what that world could be.
Is that what has been lost? Is that loss one of the primary features of this great alteration? Privacy? At least the sense of privacy? The ultimate privacy of dreams and imaginings? Am I doomed to share my 30 second comical tiktok tooth-brushing routine for a few inane but approving emojis? Or my dick? Must I display my organ? With no face? No legs or arms? Just dick after dick after dick? How is that even interesting? Is that what it has come to? Oh... I am truly lost. But I do not wish to become familiar with such vapid and falsely perfected “new” things; nor do I want to let go of the rituals of placing my various sized discs in the rarified and rapidly disappearing machines that play them. When did it happen? I do recall there was a point when I realized that all this so-called advancing technology was merely a kind of repackaging. That the dawning age of late-stage capitalism, or profitized supply and demand, had lived out its evolutionary purpose. That the way we packaged and consumed things, everything from music to cars to buildings, to the million varieties of breakfast cereal or potato snacks, had reached an endpoint of all possible ways of consumption. The only thing left to do was to repackage and resell old ideas. Rename. Call what was old new. Give it a new face. New circuitry. Surely everyone who was responsible for keeping this bizarre and obtuse process of consumption rolling along had some idea that it was sucking the life out of the systems that supplied it just to make it appear to still be growing and living. I mean, isn’t it clear that none of these new technologies are really any kind of improvement from the ones that came before? The problems may be different although surely we have all noted that many of the problems are outrageously worse than the problems that came before. Haven’t we all come to the obvious conclusion that these “new and improved” methods of washing dishes, of vacuuming floors, of watching who comes to our front door, of listening to music, of looking up, perusing, scrolling, paging through, information (do we even look up information anymore? and what about our ability to transfer directions to one another? where is that going? what part of the brain have we put on hold when we no longer have to direct someone to the local tire shop or our friend’s home where we will have dinner? Do we even have friends for dinner anymore... face to face? Or do we merely take pictures of what we eat and fail to remember what it was once like to have an evening of conversation and laughs? Without emojis? Without phones?), somehow merely became different combinations of identical ingredients and names put on the same absurd menu items? When did we simply tune out the realization that what we were being sold was just a system of artificial obsolescence entirely for the purpose of propping up a devolving economics that requires us to continue to suck the life out of the planet around us? When did we begin to fail to recognize that the new and improved was only a way to sustain an ailing, a failing, economic engine and that it was making us eat our home out from under us? Melting the ice that guards us from being inundated? This is insane. The manner in which I wake up in the morning greeting the glorious sun, feeling joyful when the little congregation of goldfinches mob my bird feeders out my kitchen window, when I pour my first cup of coffee out of (yes! I have truly fallen behind in class, Mr. Musk!) my percolator. And then the phone starts ringing. My landline is besieged by people who seem to want to communicate with me via text (because there is nothing but silence), or are bent on asking me from some faraway place whether or not my warranty is expired or my Medicare is supplemented (and how, oh how, are these poor schmucks made to depend on such absurd ways to keep from starving? Is this not a horrifying calamity of the loss of meaning through occupation, oh Lord? And all we can do is complain because of their lack of ultimate fluency in the language even though very very few of us have mastered even an inkling of any language but our own).
Crazy. Because of the new and improved ways being secretly and not so secretly infiltrated into systems that finance and support the lives of old people, if I live to be ninety, if I escape the vagaries of our vastly superior but hard to access medical system, more tyranny of the best new thing that only the rich can afford, I can expect to be making trips down to the food bank every week for my portion of stale pasta and old baked goods. Who will take me to the food bank? Who will get me a wheelchair or a walker? I walk out into a world that assures me of my own eventual poverty or threatens me with it at every turn and does it cheerily, manically, with surgically implanted smiles populated by teeth that are so white they are blue... Even bodies, bodies themselves, are rendered obsolete and persuaded to be altered into some bizarre otherworldly notion of perfection. Hard breasts as round as beach balls. Abs like a map of Utah. Faces that are immobilized by the easily detected and virtually identical features of what is supposed to be eternal youth, or at least the perverse notion that there is no beauty in aging, no worth. Replacing one imperfect ideal with another imperfect ideal. That we could promote this in our own bodies? The indispensable envelope of that sacred flame of our being? The home of our miracle of thought and longing and invention? Who could imagine such a phenomenon? Who has imagined it?
No matter. It matters not that I am lost in this world, that I have fallen behind and will continue to fall behind. I will manage. I will find places where I still belong and where catching up with the incessant ever-present and imperfect public relations mania, the morning shows, the panels of insanely self-assured and fascistic experts, the worship of everything that has brought the country and the world to this brink (what? are we so delusionally convinced of our own immortality that we believe a newer, more technologically savvy version of us, the AI of us, will survive the undoing we are so rabidly pursuing? Eating, aka consuming, our way ever closer to?) and the lucratively enforced divide between what has been called Left and Right, Red and Blue, a place, those places where catching up is not a requirement, where what I will call “decycling” is an absolute demand... not recycling or up-cycling. De-cycling... “to slow down and focus attentiveness in order to be absolutely eminently present in one’s surroundings.” Ear buds are forbidden. Iphones absolutely counterproductive. You must be where you are. You must attend to what is around you. Now. Now and now and now. I was out on a river yesterday. It was a perfect river. It is a perfect river. Its annual evolution rarely if ever proclaims that one season is better than the last. The floor of the river was decorated with the plumes of new and rising lily pads, red and green wavering skirts under the water, a few closed and very round green buds rising toward and even just above the still cool surface. In a month the evolving perfection of the river will be revealed in hundreds of yellow water lilies, white ones too... all along the ever-stirring water. Yesterday we noted the beaver den had new additions. The swallows swarmed over us in zig zag and soaring loops and ecstatic bursts and swings. Small tough birds fought off red-tailed hawks. A king bird challenged a pair or beautiful blue jays. The river moved and we moved with it. No need to catch up, we were merely asked to slow down to move with it. To de-cycle. There was magic in that. The craziness of what seems to be an interminable implosion/explosion of the human condition and its will to continue sucking the life out of these places and out of the ways and systems that we require to refrain from ultimate self-destruction. No way to reconstruct a better version of this river. There is no imperfect to the river. It moves and responds, swells and shrinks, is populated and depopulated as it must be according to the manner in which it and the world around it moves. We can either move with it or insist on wrecking it and our place in it by trying to make it better, by trying to make it just another way we can profit from its elemental being and its processes. We can continue to insist that our pipelines and our roads are harmless or that the harm they inevitably cause, the havoc they wreak to the way the river moves and to the beings that require a home along its banks and under and over its flux, is minimal, is part of a better “newer” way of being a river. Is the plastic surgery that will make the river feel better about itself.
Even as it dies, we take no note of its dying because we are diverted to the next and better way of seeing. Because its dying is slower, takes longer, than we have attention span to note. Each generation will note any remaining fish, or the remaining blue heron and will coo and sigh at the beauty... not missing the graylings or the passenger pigeons or the black ash trees or the or the or the.... Oh... I am not sure how any of this makes sense, or how it connects to the problem of finding someone who can fix my leaky windows without making be go broke and hungry when or if I live until 90, someone who arrives at my door all seductive blue smile and double talk, takes my money and disappears or makes me talk to every sales person in a society of salespeople in order to distribute my little forced contribution to assured and profitized obsolescence, the next and best new thing that is no more perfect and assuredly more destructive to the basic terms of human life on the planet, to as many of the desperately wealthy as possible. I don’t know. I do know, as much as I can predict such things, I’ll be back on the river. I’ll swim in it. I’ll dig the dirt of my little garden. I’ll find the small spaces where my idea of decycling is required and beneficial...before I venture out into the traffic again, before I go out into the marketplace and realize that the language being spoken is becoming completely unintelligible even if it is supposed to be my language. That I have willingly, with absolute awareness, fallen behind and no longer wish to participate. I’ll keep my crooked teeth and my imperfect penis. I am old enough. There is not much else out there for me. Other than the river which, I think, I believe, will still be there as long as I am here. It doesn’t need me but it welcomes me. The lilies and the reeds and the last of the rare turtles and the king birds and the kingfishers screeing over the water... I am happy enough. There is no new and improved version of this happiness, as variable and shifting as it can be. No newer or more improved version of me. And why would I replace it with something equally imperfect anyway? When imperfection is as close to perfect as I can get? There need be no replacement.