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environmental protection
Sep. 14th, 2004 03:35 pmI woke up at 4 am, dreaming that I was in fourth grade. Steve Workman and Steve Riley were trying to stuff me into a wrapping paper box so that they could roll me down the hall. We had to sell wrapping paper for our trip to Washington DC. There was a prize that I didn't win, but I tried, going door to door at the family housing for the National Radio Observatory. In my dream, the Steves were laughing as my arm bent the wrong way and the bones broke, radius and ulna, as easy as cracking candy canes in their wrapper. This never happened, but the dream was as real as fourth grade seemed at the time, because in the night, I could still hear their thoughtless stuttering laughter.
After a bleary moment, I come to grips. My next door neighbor is laughing at some flash movie he found on the internet. "Dude! Look." He says to his clone. (Stupid sounding laughter ending in phlegmy liquid coughing.) I can hear all this like the clones are next to me, because our two apartments are separated by what can only be called a wall, but in reality, is a semi-permeable membrane. Diffusion is taking place. Some tympanic layer of tissue that allows the mindless strains of internet cartoon to pound my ears. The labored laughing-cum-coughing continues, off-and-on for an hour, punctuated by 30 second bursts of flash cartoon exuberance. We live together, the clones and I, by virtue of sub-standard construction, cut-rate sheetrock and spray-fiber insulation that dissolves and blows away in a decade or so. Find the sympathetic frequencies, and you can play a tune on the building's resonant frame. My new neighbor seems always to be sick, or is afflicted with a very premature smoker's hack. Lying in bed, I think about what smoking must be doing to our genes. Probably good in the long run, that we be able to process and utilize these carcinogens, these Chloro-Fluorocarbons, these poisons and tars. Cancer is purity. The strains that can't be bothered to adapt will die of the black plague, and those left behind will have leather lungs, and guts, and minds. In a few thousand short generations, science will wonder if the smoke was always part of our atmosphere.
Actually, when I say "our atmosphere," I mean "my atmosphere," or "your atmosphere." It is the way things are going. Everyone is already collapsing into fetal chambers, carrying around ambient music, ambient technology, ambient community. Why not ambient air? Filled with the smoke I desire? I can always breathe what I want to breathe, and I can shut out the noxious defensive toxins of the other environments I encounter. Clinging as I bop from place to place, like PigPen, my cloud trailing along. And why not ambient reality? That is almost what we have now. I hate my neighbor, but only because his sphere is impinging upon mine. And he is too selfish ... Not even selfish, oblivious of other entities to care. Unless I can load some module into his preferred list. Append myself to his bookmarks. I'm just a commercial, a pop-up. Something that came up as an unwanted byproduct of the latest search. Dismiss without acknowledgment. We pound on the wall, but nothing changes one way or the other, because all they do is wonder over there, briefly, what has happened amongst their media to make such a noise (skipping CD, perhaps? Improper shielding on the gold-plated RCA connectors?) And then on they go. Another rock-block of the Doors, Bob Marley, and Hoobastank. All rock, no talk, 10 hours a day. Traffic and Weather, every 10 minutes. No need for a redline on the volume knob. Not even a knob, number on a readout, controlled by a remote, either too soft, or too loud. But it doesn't matter. No need for control limits. Not for the Omega Man, waiting for the next processor upgrade.
My hand is numb under my pillow. My lead head has cut off the circulation as I lay on my wrist. It's a couple of pounds of meat. I am surprised at how much it weighs. I am reminded of an NPR interview a few days ago, as I sat in traffic with the air-conditioner on. I listen to NPR because the radio has become an incredible annoyance. An immortal insect that isn't sane even when the commercials stop. Flaking the same twenty songs off of the decrepit Classic rock. Even the new things sound toothless and fruitless. The latest clone of Debbie Harry dancing with the latest clone of Grandmaster Flash. I keep the vent on recirculate, because people tend to smoke cigars in traffic, because New Jersey has its own atmosphere, because the coal dust is everywhere and a tenth of the people I work with have some unidentified tumescent growth behind the ear. Evolution isn't fast enough. We are improving on it everyday. A quest to isolate ourselves through consumption, makes it simple to disregard the consequences, and easy to ignore, as long as we can block it out. Tint the windows. We don't realize how potentially harmful this quest for cloisterization is. We are solitary targets, and slow.
On NPR a young hiker talked about his harrowing adventure. He'd gone out alone, assured of his skill, told no-one where he was, had fallen and trapped his arm under a large rock. Six days after his fall he realized the terrible course before him. He had a leatherman but the blade had no serration to saw through radius and ulna. He described the moment that he realized that he could complete the job of amputating his own arm if he used the rock he was trapped under as a fulcrum to snap his bones. Archimedes said he could move the world if he only had a place to stand ...
"It was like a miracle." The hiker finished, and I can only agree.
After a bleary moment, I come to grips. My next door neighbor is laughing at some flash movie he found on the internet. "Dude! Look." He says to his clone. (Stupid sounding laughter ending in phlegmy liquid coughing.) I can hear all this like the clones are next to me, because our two apartments are separated by what can only be called a wall, but in reality, is a semi-permeable membrane. Diffusion is taking place. Some tympanic layer of tissue that allows the mindless strains of internet cartoon to pound my ears. The labored laughing-cum-coughing continues, off-and-on for an hour, punctuated by 30 second bursts of flash cartoon exuberance. We live together, the clones and I, by virtue of sub-standard construction, cut-rate sheetrock and spray-fiber insulation that dissolves and blows away in a decade or so. Find the sympathetic frequencies, and you can play a tune on the building's resonant frame. My new neighbor seems always to be sick, or is afflicted with a very premature smoker's hack. Lying in bed, I think about what smoking must be doing to our genes. Probably good in the long run, that we be able to process and utilize these carcinogens, these Chloro-Fluorocarbons, these poisons and tars. Cancer is purity. The strains that can't be bothered to adapt will die of the black plague, and those left behind will have leather lungs, and guts, and minds. In a few thousand short generations, science will wonder if the smoke was always part of our atmosphere.
Actually, when I say "our atmosphere," I mean "my atmosphere," or "your atmosphere." It is the way things are going. Everyone is already collapsing into fetal chambers, carrying around ambient music, ambient technology, ambient community. Why not ambient air? Filled with the smoke I desire? I can always breathe what I want to breathe, and I can shut out the noxious defensive toxins of the other environments I encounter. Clinging as I bop from place to place, like PigPen, my cloud trailing along. And why not ambient reality? That is almost what we have now. I hate my neighbor, but only because his sphere is impinging upon mine. And he is too selfish ... Not even selfish, oblivious of other entities to care. Unless I can load some module into his preferred list. Append myself to his bookmarks. I'm just a commercial, a pop-up. Something that came up as an unwanted byproduct of the latest search. Dismiss without acknowledgment. We pound on the wall, but nothing changes one way or the other, because all they do is wonder over there, briefly, what has happened amongst their media to make such a noise (skipping CD, perhaps? Improper shielding on the gold-plated RCA connectors?) And then on they go. Another rock-block of the Doors, Bob Marley, and Hoobastank. All rock, no talk, 10 hours a day. Traffic and Weather, every 10 minutes. No need for a redline on the volume knob. Not even a knob, number on a readout, controlled by a remote, either too soft, or too loud. But it doesn't matter. No need for control limits. Not for the Omega Man, waiting for the next processor upgrade.
My hand is numb under my pillow. My lead head has cut off the circulation as I lay on my wrist. It's a couple of pounds of meat. I am surprised at how much it weighs. I am reminded of an NPR interview a few days ago, as I sat in traffic with the air-conditioner on. I listen to NPR because the radio has become an incredible annoyance. An immortal insect that isn't sane even when the commercials stop. Flaking the same twenty songs off of the decrepit Classic rock. Even the new things sound toothless and fruitless. The latest clone of Debbie Harry dancing with the latest clone of Grandmaster Flash. I keep the vent on recirculate, because people tend to smoke cigars in traffic, because New Jersey has its own atmosphere, because the coal dust is everywhere and a tenth of the people I work with have some unidentified tumescent growth behind the ear. Evolution isn't fast enough. We are improving on it everyday. A quest to isolate ourselves through consumption, makes it simple to disregard the consequences, and easy to ignore, as long as we can block it out. Tint the windows. We don't realize how potentially harmful this quest for cloisterization is. We are solitary targets, and slow.
On NPR a young hiker talked about his harrowing adventure. He'd gone out alone, assured of his skill, told no-one where he was, had fallen and trapped his arm under a large rock. Six days after his fall he realized the terrible course before him. He had a leatherman but the blade had no serration to saw through radius and ulna. He described the moment that he realized that he could complete the job of amputating his own arm if he used the rock he was trapped under as a fulcrum to snap his bones. Archimedes said he could move the world if he only had a place to stand ...
"It was like a miracle." The hiker finished, and I can only agree.
