A Thousand Plays

I have worked hard over the years to get over my doomer self. I think that the systole and diastole of civilizations and cultures is a real thing. Simply put, "Laissez le bon temps rouler" isn't a way to run your life 24/7.

But you see, here in the West, we have come to the point where the party is over and the taps have run dry and it is time to go home, sleep it off, and go back to work tomorrow.

It isn't the end of the world. Your individual opinion of what we should be doing isn't particularly important to the folks running the show who have bet their already fractured reputations on the idea that the party can and will go on. These folks are in the process of losing their bet, but that process isn't one amenable to a news cycle, so be patient and watch whatever peculiar haruspicy works best for you to try to stay a little ahead of the curve.

Myself, my methods for adapting to the world and predicting what is heading our way involves reading headlines and maybe the first paragraph of things out there on the nascent nervious system of the world (the internet) and try to stop as soon as they stop reporting facts and start telling me what the facts mean.

This is, at very best, a stupid and low-accuracy means of getting into the bottom of things. But if I am careful, and watch things from 30,000 feet, I can sometimes see outlines that have a slightly better chance of occurrence than not paying attention. Right now these, at least to my readings, show that the downhill slope of this particular cycle is starting to steepen. It doesn't signify the end of the world, it just means that the party is over and it is time to go home.

I thought the picture below fit this piece very well.

[Two leaves.jpg]

I have been stuck at home for a couple of days now. The current buzzword for "lots of rain" in the Pacific Northwest is "atmospheric river". It has been dumping rain here. I suppose that if I were a real Pacific Northwesterner, I would "damn the torpedoes" and don layers of raingear and savor those rainy moments.

Fuck that!

So I am inside more than is my preference. So lets talk about isolation in the modern world.

At my age, isolation is not the huge deal that it was in my salad days. Truth be told, isolation is preferred about ninety percent of the time. So there is an approximate 2 hour window every day where I do enjoy human interaction. It doesn't have to be much, a phone call or a greeting during a walk or a conversation with a neighbor while getting the mail does me just fine. But serious rain does limit the opportunities for these interactions.

I still kind of wonder about the place of conversations in settings like the one we are reading. I am enough of a geezer to remember sending and receiving physical mail and how important that was in maintaining connection. In the infantry, "mail call" was an important time and letters were cherished (or feared, depending on the correspondent). But they were always an important tie to the outside.

I was (am?) a science fiction junkie. But the sheer number of wannabe science fiction writers. I have been pondering an old Isaac Asimov tale "The Naked Sun". How much of the semi-isolation of communication via the internet is "good" for a person? This simple question then expands into something that was brought to my attention: What are the implications of folks using what is laughably referred to as "artificial intelligence" as a cope for lack of interpersonal communication?

Big can of worms there, I think that it might even require a formal sit down and ponder month.

In the morning following my wake up and my body slowly and a little painfully getting up to speed (and that speed is slow) my process consists of drinking coffee and trying to kick-start my cranial neurons. While the caffeine is taking effect, I usually peruse what is referred to as "the news".

Today was no different. But for some odd reason, a not particularly good song from the '80's wandered unwelcome into my brain while I was perusing the antics that constitute "the news". I think that this trite little title is the core of the matter. While everyone does, they usually want change in order to cement what they feel is their rightful privilege. You see, that is the root cause of the problem.

I am going to ponder this for a bit. In the end, it all comes down to what you feel is the critical core of human society. I tend to think that the vast majority of folks out there feel their individual needs are that core.

[last bit of fall.jpg]