future passed

dreamimager

Cray 1 supercomputers, the round ones.  The other ones those guys are leaning over--those could be a row of washing machines!  They're not.  That guy in blue could be a Best Buy sales associate, making a sale on a computer washing machine.  The brown-haired guy in the white stripy shirt just got a divorce and a settlement from his business partner.  He doesn't need marriage to get his laundry washed.  He doesn't need marriage for anything.  In the absolute back row you've got cabinets filled with floppy discs and fireproof safes filled with papers and patents and film slides of pornography.  This is all when they live in an atomic tomorrow in Florida.  There's high-rises in the swamps of public Florida.  They all sit and stew angrily in cramped people-movers when they have to get around, so mostly they stay put.  Some people hallucinate from tiny trace amounts of swamp gasses that routinely leak into the sub-surface people-mover capsules that travel to and fro beneath the swamps.  For these unlucky few, the dangers are manifold.  You don't ever want to go swamp crazy.  That's what they say.  Local news station got its license suspended for reporting on the effects of long-term swamp poisoning.  Nobody talks about where the radiation goes, you know, from the atomic power that runs everything.  But that gets crowded out by the sheer volume of the paranoia related to swamp gas.

Been doing a little freeform, you know, freestyle...  Snow angels in sand.  Nothin too much needs to me's worth worryin about.  Just issues forth.  For every issue.  Like...  A heavy hipster hugger my holster: the gun fires confetti.  The copilot wasn't briefed and now he is dead!  A tragedy in 3-act graffiti.

A mural by BODE; 90 Clarion Alley, San Francisco, California, United States, via Mural Locator.

--So tell me a little about yourself, Nathaniel.
__Okay, doc.  Should I talk about my past?  Start with my past?
--That's entirely up to you now.
__Of course.  Of course.  I guess you're looking for the broad stuff, right?  Like place of birth, parents' names, general stuff?
--Would it help you to start by telling me where you were born?
__...Yeah, I spose it would.  Midwest.  ...  Nowhere.  (laughs).  I moved all over as a kid.  Shuttled between my uncles and aunts and great-aunts and, you know, for god knows how many years.  I guess I could do the math on that...  But honestly I don't like to think about it any more than I have to.
--And why is that?
__Oh...   I've never really been much of a head at math.  That's all.  I'm actually proud to say it, too.  It's a trap, obsessing over calculations like that.
--You say a trap?
__Yes sir.  Robbing Peter to pay Paul, if you ask me.  You're robbing the moment to deface what's passed with artificial notches and gridlines.  It's a whole, huge, unnecessary bureaucracy, with its own culture, its own behavior--its own evolutionary mandate.  Doc, I would go so far as to call it self-aware.  It's as much in the mix to win it as America or al Qaeda.  Or the NFL.  At least as much, you know, if not more so.  Math.
--Ah, of course.  And so I am to understand you experience pain when you recollect those childhood memories?
__It's a pain to calculate, doc.  Only when I calculate.  I'd rather that span of time you're calling my childhood be remembered as it was, which is...  Really more a flavor of a bleakness of timespace than a calendar could do it any justice, right?
--I think I'm following that.
__Right.
--Well, Nathaniel; I do think it is a very good sign to hear you acknowledging this pain.
__Sure.  Difficulty.  ...  Yeah.
--Yes indeed.  In whatever forms it may take, through whatever normalization processes your chain of consciousness will negotiate for itself...  Yes, Nathaniel.  We have made some remarkable progress today.
__You know, that's a relief to hear?
--I can imagine.  It was a pleasure meeting you.  Good luck on your voyage.
__Say what?

<fffff-SHHHHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!!!!!!>

Carlsbad Dance, 1954