14.1
Certainly he’d filed his briefs, had arguments prepared. Another time they might have swayed her, but naught was in his overhead projector to inspire her now. To everything he said, her inner voice replied, I’d rather something else.
A home that she had longed to leave now called her back. California had been magical — also crowded, hot, and pricey. She had the feeling of more space back near her parents. Whichever way she went she met a line of people waiting there already, when she was out West. They must have badly wanted Californ, the way they were behaving. She could compete, but without their mania, success would come down more to luck, be further out of reach. Men her age with looks and money had behaved abysmally. They texted her their crude demands. In meeting IRL they cut right through the flirting. Their anxiousness was crippling, which sent them in a run, the sort of run that drives young men across the country with no fall-back plan.
Our hero’d never planned to be a terminus for anyone. He had ordered up a high-school sweetheart — she’d not appeared then either. Somehow he kept expecting that she would, even into middle age, when variation glows laughingly with the utmost value.
Both were sure that everything they thought was true, while knowing (without considering) that something was left out. When US drones bomb foreign weddings, innocents are killed, and anguished injured children cry out in terror and confusion why, the answer is perception based on feeling based on drives. In the highest offices of government where elected leaders vote against anything that restricts the ones who gave them money to campaign, the reason is perception based on feeling based on drives. You get rid of the drives, you get rid of the problem.
14.2
Blockchain will be the record of our history. To combat false reporting, when an event occurs we enter its provable information in the blockchain. On this date and time the US invaded a non-Western country. The attackers reported this, the victims something else, both entered on the blockchain. And so on. Then as long as there is electricity, we have stored historic fact for four hundred years and more. Future historians will have a remarkable, value base of information from which to draw. This first-person witness and original contemporary source will be such a boon to future critics of governance. The years of videos of presidents saying convincingly things they never said will be verifiably false thanks to the non-monetary blockchain. Our hero will enter the story of his relationship into the chain. His former partner, living in the present, will neither know nor care.
Panacea is our greatest longing. It takes on different forms depending on the individual. Most would wish to raise their parents from the dead. And then bend these mindless zombies to their will, to do their bidding, bring justice to their enemies, forage for fresh food, bring it home, cook it with a culinary expertise and serve it up with love, grunt with understanding when the children share their problems, hold them without hunger and temptation to bite when they have a broken heart, get the phone within three rings whenever they call, not cajole them into attending church or getting married, most definitely not ask them for immediate grandchildren, not watch corporate propa-g as news, manage their superstitions, not get too dramatic with their friendships so they are maintained and all their needs are not inflicted on their living children, can perform their own hygiene (not necessary) while they’re still above this earth, stay indoors on Halloween, that they do not becomes hoarders, gamblers, or fall victim to a fraud that wipes out their life savings, that they love their grandchild if she comes and do not put their racism and neuroses in her, or be impatient whatsoever, or lash into psyches unprepared for spitting dressing-downs, and are not introduced to switches cut from saplings (a meme derived from slavery), or be found wandering miles from home dehydrated and scared because they don’t remember where their home is. It’s in George Romero’s ill-lit garden, just behind the shed. All provided we can coax them back to transform into flowers, that is, otherwise we’ll struggle with our grief at having lost them good, with unmet conditions in their place.
The strained resolve was palpable. He’d seen her will when our heroine was determined to get somebody back for a real or perceived slight. When she flirted with other guys right in front of him. When she asked his friends if they’d like to see her belly-chain, and the lifted up her blouse. Nevertheless it shocked him when he saw the scarlet laser on his chest. He never thought he’d be the target after love. He saw her as exceptional and up til now he thought that he was too. It was bewildering — his exceptionalism had been taken from him by the very one who loved him. He blamed her friends who pressured her to ghost him, but of course he sought a patsy, somebody he could point to other than himself. Both suspected that the other had been crazy all along, choosing now to show it. All the surliness they disliked in each other was brought out and used to justify their negative reactions, when really it was a surly feedback loop that both built up and maintained. She got out of her head by being sparkling to all. Pronouncements flew and justice was demanded. They brought up fights that had gone unresolved. They called upon their legions to defend their final hill.
Discrepancy is maddening. Fervent lunacy can be traced back to ongoing contradiction. Reason’s veritably begging for a mess. A Saharan storm is less disorienting. Cables have been strung up to let us quickly know how bad it is. Blood is dear but cheap. Heaving stones cause accidents. It’s little wonder then that fire becomes beguiling. Primal forces cause us primal feeling. All the trees are waiting to be cut for better uses. Every creek is actualized when it becomes a sewage pipe. Wildlife is improved by superfunds. Air pollution toughens up the lungs. Workplace conflict is the price of earning bread. Extinction is our legacy. We extend this to relationships, thinking they will lessen the preceding, instead of re-enacting it tout suite.
The next big thing: artisanal pollution! Polluters working in their home communities will devise new molecules. They will be quite destructive. They will be praised for patenting new ways to stink up the air and water. Their goal will be to make sure that every idea’s taken. They’ll have their own award show. Corporate mouthpieces we admire from TV will be the dear presenters. The toxic chemicals will have an authenticity that goes deeper than a smokestack foundry. They will benefit the ecosystem! Yes they will! Disaster tours will contrast one place’s scarring with another’s unput-outable fire. Names of great polluters will go into an ebook. The calls for exportation will be piercing and insistent. Other lands have got to get the new pollution down their throats. Refusing is straight racist. Foreigners deserve the nouveau just the same. Petulance on this will only attract bored billionaires. They’ll send their money for the new existence. Foreigners won’t sit by in a passé life.
Good’s defined by the good for the system. Application is our wealth. If we can dream it, we can dream a way to make it pay. This goes for earnings and revenge. Courtesy must be employed to stave off blowback later. The pieces fit the pattern. We’ll pass on our suggestions. Everything will rise up all at once before it splinters in the evening acid rain.
14.3
The relationship went and reconciled itself to their way of being without asking for their input. It became a living thing outside them. Despite protection paid for by her parents, they had reproduced. But then they felt left out. It was up to them, then, to put the new relationship in the glove box and take it with them everywhere they went. They had to find the space to account for it as though they had a choice. It was like a proof shuffled in with East Berliner papers.
The new program in this horrid evolving system inflicted itself on million-member cultures. This was what we have in common with scary white pursuits like weapons and religion — we are a million-member group as well, of educated people. We had science, math, and social studies — more to the point, they had an effect on us. We remember what we learned without any effort. It isn’t perfect memory, rather sharp recall. We can note when happenstance relates to big ideas. System stakeholders can note when something irrigates their touchstone and they will get swarming mad. But check out inside our glove box, we say, we have proof we’re current with relationships. The target is not us, or at least it shouldn’t be. We need someone who has made it and who looks or talks like us to let us know we have great potential. Preferably someone broadcast by corporate propa-g, otherwise we hardly see the tries in other people.
Our job in scouting is to discover surface beauty. The rest of what we seek out can barely be determined without a thorough hearing, and even courts do not have the time for that. We know our secret thoughts echo in other people but would prefer not to be there, in the details of their lifetime surgeries. We call upon the things we think will answer us. All the blubbering can barely reach us. Everyone can read, can sing, can tune each other out. This is our expertise, along with judgment, and the primacy of our importance. We can go for days, by which we mean millennia. Everyone’s a sculptor of other people’s skin. Meat and bones are limited inherently, and then we pour on top our words. We are the stymiers. We load our chambers with bon mots and then await the pattern that will allow their firing. Billionaires will pay the people who can do this copaceticly.
There’s no simpler act than disbelief. We learn it on the schoolyard the first time someone asks us to a group and we say yes enthusiastically. Then they yell psyche into our fallen faces. They laugh at our embarrassment. They teach us we are credulous (we had not known before). All the castigations that will come derive from such a lesson. Oh, not this again, we plead silently, but it’s already done. Soon not only our faces stop reacting. We don the hardness plain in their set faces. They’ve done well to pass behavior onto to us. They feel that they exist. They did not recognize us as we were — now that we look like them they see us just fine. They get to feel accomplished too. Of course someone had done them just the same and someone else had done that person just the same, far back past the brimstone to pre-language instinct, way earlier than dexterous tongues.
14.4
We are in the wild as sponsored by Nebraska’s denying insurers. The woods are beautiful with feathers plucked from wings that only executed so that they could eat. But they sure regrow them redder than before.
Terror’s the poison of inventors. It is the motor of the worker though. The last fools turn the crank.
Women toughen to the public. So often other people let her know she had to hide her puberty. Ignore, ignore — react — it goes worse than playing deaf and dumb — harden and ignore. As soon as men get mad, they stay mad. When they start out speaking nice to her, and anger when she does not show them favor, she could never switch back to an amiable bearing without collecting their abuse. She was their garbage dump. She learned to shut it down with looks, words, and energy. She had lessons from the predators that less desirable women hardly saw.
Men felt it in sports and business bullying. But they were more able in some way to think F you and operate according to their drives, once they reached maturity. Asps don’t know what that is and so they never do.
Dragging slights through days after they happen is an unintended consequence of making memory. Remembering what a snake does when it’s about to strike is different from the easy recall of an ever-present bullying from long ago. That would be a useful upgrade, to parse the memory into “hurtful but still can be learned from” from the hurtful that’s repetitive and can be flushed. There’d be less neuroses and we’d all feel a little lighter, with that less to schlep around. The implication is if he had that upgrade, he’d be better off than he is today.
What ifs are a comfort where there is none. Someday our expectations will be met no matter who nor where we are. Then peace will reign for all time. There will be nothing left to be argued over, no barbèd memories in need of sifting through. Everyone will live in her own perfect world and it will happen on this earth in conscious lifetime. A criterion is total freedom from restrictions and enforced obligations. Foundation is enlightenment. Now ready her carriage. The team is right in its timidity — she will feel confident to drive them. She can shoe a horse herself. She will be thankful for their water and pay for oats and hay. There will be no highwaymen to rob her. All that’s best shall follow from their ear. The weight of tombs shall not distract her. Variety in social gatherings will be her support. She’ll never sleep alone — she’ll have a pet beside her in her bed, at least. She’ll let a human there when she is ready. She’d go back to when she could sleep platonically beside a treasured friend, should some genie ever ask — not an era she’d select if she were asked when she was older.
The good ol’ days change as much as our bodies. They are not static and they never were. She’ll be too distracted much to miss him, until she goes to bed with someone else, and this man loses interest in her after, having been a prince before. Then she’ll long for our hero, or her idea of him. This will do him heaps of good. She’ll want to resurrect it with him. She’ll reach out obliquely through social media, but find that she’s been blocked (our man is petulant). He’ll have robbed himself of one last night with her. In the morning she’d have ghosted him again, passing on the meme that she was handed, without awareness that was why.
There is the one who begins to lower himself in response to agitated stimulii. At some point they will snap. It’s best that they receive a wide berth and perhaps self-limit the births that they contribute to until they have the patience to be a decent parent. This is the level to which we wish to raise them, just up to decency, before they are allowed to increase the population. This is a moral point — just as effective altruism is not merely a moral argument, instead its conclusions and sound footing makes it just about compulsory, so the evidence of misery and harm that maladaptive rearing inflicts on the individual, their friends and family, society, and the environment is double-checked and clear that it (bad rearing) should not be allowed. Even if it prevents our right to reproduction, the evidence of a lifetime of harm is overwhelming. The world doesn’t need more people, much less more to grow up and vote against their own self-interest, or join police forms, &c. No, we must not pursue eugenics, sterilize people, or worse. But we must find another path to make our existence better — another underpinning of the moral that causes us to act. We are over burdened but won’t be overrun.
14.5
With most people it’s easy but there are those like our heroine whom it’s impossible to look at without imagining their thighs are shaven, washed, and scented. With our hero, his musculature got attention from women, gays, and straight men into fitness, which made up for his average face. That was the boundary that strangers erected between them, the difference in their facial beauty. She had not fathomed this — the hidden-from-her green light had been his vague resemblance to her father, a sprig of chance that did not go as far as a filthy mind would wish. Familiar but just a trace unique seems to be the G spot when it comes to the partner of the beautiful who do not seek fame and luxury, while the other spark is common membership in their preferred tribe. Behavior can go either way — young ladies may want a man with their father’s character, or his opposite, while also weighing what her mother has versus what she really wanted. There are those who come to love the disparity between their expectations and what actually occurred. They are well suited to live out an optimistic life. If they made it through their upbringing without excessive scarring, they are good for marrying. If they have the same neuroses a partner also absorbed in his home, they are a likely match.
Prosody combines with life together. Health that remains constant is an indicator it will last. How they see their partners will not entirely match the way their partners are themselves. This is a disconnect that can be overlooked but never fixed. It’s not a problem in the partner but in the perspective of the one deluded — they’re the one unwilling to remedy their expectations because in this world a fantasy is superior to reality.
Life is the magnificence of sleep. It controls the coming of our allies. Waking is so hard there’s cultures fetishizing sleep. One of our couple saw their relationship’s demise as part of their personal path — it hurt now but the good things would be fond oases in the mind, when some time had passed. The other saw it as a death that would sit on his brow shitting in his eyes until the big one came.
In a desert sun, every door had a veranda. There were countless places that would shade her. This was not the same for him. But he had fewer places that would try to scam him than she did by her looks. For her each new door could have someone to take advantage of her if they saw the chance. Not all would but that was the potential. Trade-offs could be banished by excitement, but they would still rear up. They would get noisier progressively until they had to make concessions. Some occasions go unpunished — there is chance inside absurdity, especially if you’re rich. We’ll be harmed but we’ll also get an opportunity to improve the world. Up with humanism within the limits of sustainability.