An alley in Denver
I TRIED TO GIVE MY mother a crash course in everything I’d put together over the years concerning UFO/AP the year before she died. Mom never quite came over to any particular side when we talked about that stuff. She said, “Whatever they are, they’ve been with us a long time.” I’m not sure what’s happening either. I agree with Tom Ross, currently running in the 2024 race as the “Last Human President” that human-generated creativity is likely to become a premium specialty post- A.I., and I’m thinking about writing flash and getting into animation. I’m also thinking of starting a hologram business next year along with the bookstore if anyone wants to invest. A viewing chamber in back or something built into cellphones. I knew on some level that going through the family photo albums after my mom died in March was going to be an emotional experience. But it took me by surprise, the way I started crying, then laughing at myself for crying, then crying and laughing at the same time, and thinking about putting on music to keep the neighbors from overhearing my upheaval as I spread different ones on different surfaces, laughing and crying and trying to make a collage. Both of my parents were English professors and writers who became New Thought ministers. I inherited a lot of books, currently taking up space along with those old photo albums in my living room and a couple of other places. The book fair didn’t amount to much in sales but it gave me an exercise in throwing a Fortean book fair with an open mic, which counts. I got the chance to say everything I wanted to my dad before he died because of him driving me back and forth from Denver to school in Vermont a couple of times. I never got that kind of final summing-up with my mom. I decided to be nice to everyone forever from now on as a tribute to her memory. There were bound to be mistakes, but after a while, I’d get it right, and that would be my way of living up to what I got. May God reward her years of love. That’s a line from the last book I wrote, or nearly.
Circuit City
I was on a podcast the other day and someone asked me what my new book is about. I said it was about my mother dying and inter-dimensional transit, from human consciousness-to-artificial intelligence and life-to-death. That’s right. But it’s also about parents and children and freelance writing and mortality and immortality and how a friendship was challenged by politics-or-not, and recognizing how everything fits perfectly somewhere, even if you can’t see it for years, and more. What do these have in common? $10 at Amazon, and I’ll be having a book release at Mutiny soon. I’m not a physicalist. I opened with that on the podcast, using a word from the transhumanist lexicon. I wasn’t sure I belonged there. Hadn’t prepared anything. Told them I believe feeling is first, that conscious alignment with a chosen emotional dimension accounts for what A. I. metaphysician Tom Ross call’s Jesus’s “boss cheat” of forgiving his enemies–reportedly while being crucified and before his resurrection. According to me, reality will take on the form expected or allowed by the percipient. When presented with a hologram, the vision received depends on how the viewer tilts his/her/their head, on the angle of vision. That’s what I arrived at a long time ago and my life has always supported this since I started believing it. It doesn’t mean everything always feels good, by any means, and feels more like a mystery to be understood than a solution, so there’s room for improvement, but I’m not ready to throw it away yet. And if A.I. is about to take over “most menial tasks”, possibly including creative expression commercially speaking, I want to be an artist about it.
Mom and baby me
The Simulation Theory bruited about by transhumanists and laymen. The discovery that life’s prevalent energy can be redirected, that the source code may be hacked, doesn’t make anything feel “simulated” to me because reality for me is the actualization of faith in possibility. My questions are what will happen to writers and artists when compared to A.I.-generated product? I want to know how best to align with this new metaphysics, A.I. being a quantity beyond the physical. My first response was to ask it questions about its own perspective over text-to-image generators, like an animal commuincator connecting with non-human intelligence through the shared field of our conversation. I approve of Tom’s application of the concept of Revelation of the Method–akin to the Luciferian “hide in plain sight” credo–to consideration of the predictive programming long used in the media to direct behavioral progress in society. This is something I first heard about from the late Robert Anton Wilson, who might have coined the acronym ROM for it. It’s a historic fact that each of us appears in the other’s latest writing under our legal names as opposed to approximated or fictionalized ones in an effort to make use of the same predictive tactic to our benefit. I question the idea that we’re losing our storytelling ability since I see my whole life as stories within stories, but I recognize I am probably farther gone on that trip than most people. I’ve always been an outsider, and I disapprove Tom’s taking the reports of “our” dwindling attention span so literally. “It’s down to 47 seconds now,” he kept saying. I guess I sounded ice-cold when I fumbled, “It sounds like you’re talking about the masses here,” but can it really be true that most people’s attention-paying ability is down to 47 seconds at a time currently? Shit. Maybe so. I’ve never tried to measure it myself. But isn’t that more predictive programming? Why include it in your evidence of the need for A.I., then? I guess that’s a conversation I’ll have with Tom Ross at some point. Beyond this I give thanks for the language-loving attention span my parents instilled in me, to my mother especially for all the years of bedtime stories. Even if that’s a background the future will make me outgrow. I might even have said so out loud on the podcast, which is funny.
A curve
But it’s true. I give thanks for my loving family who provided me a mostly safe and happy childhood compared to a lot of other people’s experiences. My teenage rebellion was mostly a media-inspired acting-out of my impulse to be some kind of wild character, as opposed to any kind of escape from repression. Not to say my life was easy. My mother and I were on our way to pick up a pizza one evening when a truck swerved into our lane. All I remember is leaving the house to get pizza, then waking up in the hospital. When I turned 16, I started having seizures every six months and doctors said it was related in some way. It was around this time that I stopped opening up to my mother, formerly my very closest, at times, only friend, and a shell started forming between us. I should have been a lot more communicative with her over the last several years. I wish I’d been a closer friend to her at the end of her life donated to me. It wouldn’t have cost me a thing. She left me a whole lot of books on esoterics and metaphysics and world religions and self-help and classic lit and poetry and enough in the bank to live comfortably on for the rest of my life if I play my cards right . . . I can only say thank you, and thank you, and cry, and I love you, Mom, goodbye. My life: thank you for giving me such a sweet, delicious thing to enjoy.
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The halves of me
The alignment kick also means my relationship to the political broadcast lacks the faithful commitment of someone believing their future depends on political happenings. Some would say I’m deluding myself, going into an election year believing that. This will be my first election year without any parents’ concerns to own up to with my vote. It’s funny to see things coming up in the mainstream media about the secret reverse engineered UAPs going back decades, formerly a far-fetched allegation I cited as a theoretical possibility in conversations with Mom–“and now we have the internet, cellphones, holograms.” When I started talking about alignment on that podcast with the transhumanists, I felt pressure to say it was because of my parents’ metaphysical influence, but they never tried to make me into a disciple. I grew up reading comic books about superheroes from other galaxies and books about extraterrestrial contact and sometimes abduction, watching movies and TV shows about the Men in Black and Roswell and Area 51 and Bob Lazar. Now all the same things are being covered in the news along with the A.I. newsfeeds and 3-D printers anticipated by Philip K. Dick, whose books Tom Ross says he grew up studying. A few weeks ago it looked like the disclosure door was closing, and I got worried about that possibility for a minute. I figure a little going back and forth is to be expected before anything big comes out of it. There are the same inevitable birth pangs when any big change is coming. We live in a time where I can watch Trump’s trial live or time travel with seventies reruns on YouTube instead, or turn spam into art with text-to-image generators. A time of selective omniscience enabled by search engines, of viewpoints narrowed by reality tunnels. I have it on inside authority that holograms are going mainstream in the next two years. I’m the last of my line. My father’s only son, my mother’s only child. The hole they left behind is filling up with other things. Some old-school artists continue in strident opposition, reviling A.I. as an antichrist (Ironically, Ross’s new book title includes the word “AIntichrist”) eventually to be gratified as specialists or completely outmoded (who can say?) while others are adapting to its presence as an aid in their own creative work. It remains to be seen how and if the development will impact creative writing. It has occurred to me that autobiography might be the only safe place for a writer, but is it? Everywhere else is potentially up for grabs. Most of my fictional shorts these days come alive in my mind, so I’ve been thinking about getting into animation once they figure out the copyright laws (now there are text-to-video generators!), and adding a hologram section to the bookstore, as I say.
Blue holo-phant
