Dense 19

I knocked over a can of Ole’, a non alcoholic beverage, spilling a few tablespoons on the table. I had reached to take a drink, but misjudged the movement. Just clumsy, right?

Yesterday I tried to parallel park. Twice. Finally after multiple efforts, I parked. OK. It was still a bit crooked. You can walk to the curb.

My wife and daughter made many welcome suggestions, but once again, I didn’t, or rather couldn’t listen. I suffer from Male Listening Disorder. Can I be cured? What?

My depth perception betrays me. It mocks me. It laughs in my face. It coughs in my hand. My depth perception is a disembodied voice that whimpers,” Don’t make me humiliate myself again. Where is the valet? My bladder is so nervous.” Apparently, I may have Nervous Bladder Syndrome. Is there a pill I can take? Sober living is the silver lining.

What is going on, I ask myself? To put it simply, I am a bit on edge. Off kilter. My kilter has no filters. My nerves are shot. The stress is getting to me. My adrenalin reserves are critically low. How do I keep running, when “empty” was so many miles back?

Perhaps I should cut off social media — for my mental health. I should cut out sugar, yet the proof is in the sticky toffee pudding. Why does a grown man feed himself a steady diet of chaos, drama, outrage and sugar? What does it change? When will it stop? Make it stop.

In the echo chamber we know as social media, where the bells toll and the trolls thunder, we bell the cat, then throw up kittens in the communal bathwater.

My daughter and I went to the movies for distraction. Of course, this could turn out to be another afternoon of Cinematic Somnambulism. We went to see Mickey 17, the new dystopian film by the Korean director Bong Joon-Ho, the guy who wrote and directed the Oscar winning film, Parasite.

In a future where the collective “we” destroys the planet. (Again?) The People follow a disgraced media whore, who implores them to follow him to a new planet. Make New Planet Great Again. For those who have lost hope, whose options have run out, there is a program that gives you eternal life. Sign up and become an “expendable.”

Expendables are sent on missions that will almost certainly result in their death. But the story doesn’t end there; it is just beginning. The newly dead are reproduced. They slide naked out of the machine. Mickey 1 gives way to Mickey 2, who dies, and is replaced by Mickey 3, and so on, until one day, we reach Mickey 17.

Mickey 17 fucks up the New World Order by living, by not dying on a particularly dangerous mission. He is saved by a giant tardigrade like creature. What is it with tardigrades? All future creatures will be tardigrades. Except the part of their head that looks like the socket for the vacuum cleaner, will be rows of double and triple teeth—like the creature from Alien.

Since the powers that be are unaware of Mickey 17’s survival, they reproduce him and create Mickey 18.

Houston, we have a situation.

There are two Mickeys. This is not your father’s Parent Trap. This is Robert Pattinson, not Lindsay Lohan. “Multiples” are forbidden, and the penalty is real death, real death being an erasure of your data. Your hard drive and memories are wiped.

They don’t make dystopia like they used to. In the 70’s, I read a lot of Philip K. Dick. Dick wrote dystopia by the dime. His novels took place in a future that he invented in the early 1960’s.

We are living in his future. Today, our present has literally becoming the evil future he once envisioned.

How far are we from actually 3D printing humans? I don’t know and I am afraid to ask. Daily bombarded with lies, disinformation, and misinformation, the only formation that we can truly believe in, without a doubt, is that we are all being lined up in fast food fascist formation. Lined up, online, we are up all night trembling in the darkness.

Time still carries on with the same speed, yet morning cannot come soon enough. I go to bed late and get up early, waking every few hours to look at the red digital clock radio from the 70’s. Only 1:45. Only 2:43. Only 3:59.

It is after 4:00 am, which means 5:00 is almost here. Somewhere in the world it is daytime. Which means it is safe to “wake” and start the day. Careful not to wake the rental dog.

People are afraid that this company 23andme is going bankrupt, leaving all the dna they collected to be ransomed to the highest bidder, the fear being that a big insurance company will buy up their dna and data. Holy Ancestor Anxiety!!!

So life is getting weird. Weather is violent and mysterious. Is it any wonder we are feeling unmoored? I have subjected myself to apocalyptic thoughts since the 70’s.

I remember as a teenager, looking out my bedroom window in Richmond thinking, “This is it. The Big One has just dropped.” The Gipper suggested the bombing begins in five minutes. We laughed.

We have the luxury of laughter. No one is laughing in Gaza. In Washington. In Ukraine. But we must laugh like a bomb. Fill the world with laughter. A global laugh track.

It’s not gallow’s humour. It is the sound of survival.