A Skeletal Dream of No Lasting Import

It's a warm summer evening somewhere in the Midwest.  Bright lights illuminate the parking lot of a highway rest stop.  A white Ford pick-up, an F-150 of late 60's vintage, is squeezed into a spot close to the pumps.  It carries a pretty heavy patina of rust all around.

The truck's owner/driver is tall and lanky, a real Sam Shepard type.  He wears a cowboy hat.  He is ready to begin a journey back home to Nebraska, more than 1000 miles west more or less.  Although we have only just met, he invites me to take the jump seat.  He must be more than a little starved for company.

Nebraska has no purchase for me; in fact, I've never been there.  But while I am not exactly on the lam, there are things here that I would just as well escape.  I find myself thinking of Kinky Friedman's best tune, and of its refrain -- "I hope to God she finds the good-bye letter that I wrote her, 'cuz the mail don't move too fast in Rapid City, South Dakota."

I hop aboard.  After a few coughs and stumbles, the big V-8 roars to life, and it sounds strong as my cowboy benefactor slips the truck into first gear.

A new chapter begins, as it often does in these parts, on the open road.

 

Retreating Back Into Plato's Cave

Maybe my late best friend was right.  Whenever I would lay out for him my latest enthusiasm for a topic more dark than light, he would say (in loose paraphrase) "I won't go there with you.  My prosaic demons, the demons of my childhood, are sufficient unto the day thank you very much."

And I myself have said elsewhere that once one goes down such a path, it is hard if not impossible to abandon it if it has perceived credibility.  In particular, the "Woo-Woo Choo-Choo" of what we now call "non-human intelligence" rolls on and on towards lands of high strangeness and of deep strangeness, with no gentle exit possible it seems.  Lately, intimations of:

• Bioengineering of the human race.
• "Hyperobjects" that are not only unknown to us, but essentially unknowable, fundamentally beyond our ken for the same reason that a spider, upon inspection, can't make out the scope and the function of a tennis shoe.
• "Other forms of life" in the words of one prominent former master of the US national security apparatus, hinting, I take it, at the reality of that very unknowability.
• An invasion of "sentient plasmoids," plasmoids that bring old myths to life, calling to mind as they do Moses and the burning bush, the tongues of fire that touched the heads of the apostles, the spinning sun of Fatima, and even the monster of the id that terrorized Leslie Nielsen and Anne Francis in the classic 1956 film "Forbidden Planet."  In raw description, maybe Jerry Lee Lewis, of all people, came closest to the mark, with his "Great Balls of Fire!"

More broadly, there is an overhang, a premonition, if not of Apocalypse, at least of a time of Great Tribulation, perhaps to be followed by a genuinely new age, but one from which everyone born before, say, 1980, is excluded as collateral damage.  Tant pis.

 

Can You Picture It?

You are just finishing up the dinner dishes, this coming Wednesday evening.  You hear voices in the street, a little muffled laughter.  You turn on the porch light to spy ten of your neighbors, flimsy red books in hand.  When you open the door, they serenade you with songs of the season that everyone knows -- "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen," "Joy to the World," "O Holy Night," and "Silent Night," of course.  The voices congeal and rise in a single column of condensation.

You invite everyone in, briefly, for a cup of eggnog (a little heavy on the nutmeg) to brace them against the cold before they head further up the hill.

Can I picture it?  No, I can't.  I can sooner picture ten of my neighbors conspiring to throw toilet paper over the branches of my favorite front-yard tree, then scurrying like roaches when I turn on that porch light.

The Steve Jobs Cultural Revolution marches on.

 

Will You Beg for Absolution?

Or, like Saddam Hussein, will you die defiant and unrepentant?

What, if anything, will turn on the outcome?  And is it only cowards who are finally repentant?