YEARS AGO I READ A book called The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart detailing that apostate psychotherapist’s efforts in totally random environments for everyone and/or destroying the self, depending which side you’re on. Stay in your own movie, taught the Merry Pranksters, i.e. don’t let anyone other than you be the star or director of your experience. I heard about Charles Fort’s platform of intermediatism, where every truth gets a say and a circle is measured beginning anywhere. I met Jim Morrison’s brother in law Alan Graham who wasn’t a cop or a spy or a priest but sometimes played those in real life. I learned the word zetetic, meaning proceed by inquiry, stop letting your attention be managed by consensus habituation. I can say I’ve made an amount of progress in self-governance I wouldn’t have without that conditioning. Lately I’m beginning to look at my life as an experiment in possibility in a more literal sense than previously, if that’s not too great a contradiction in terms.
Does science fiction serve the dual purpose of entertaining us and preparing us for future developments? The 20th century science fiction myth was about space travel. What’s the 21st century equivalent? I caught an article somewhere the other day about author Philip K. Dick’s fiction manifesting in his actual life, in particular a sequence in Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said about helping a stranded motorist drawn from life was cited (Dick consulted a priest named Father Rasch about the events he’d experienced, and the priest informed him the same dialogue and plot points had appeared in the Biblical Book of Acts). All this was being presented in a kind of amazed, sensational tone. But if you ask me, it’s logical/inevitable what you think about and write about manifests in your physical circumstances. Because feeling comes first. This belief is central to my experiment in avoidance of the political broadcast for the last several years. Because the less you think about anything, the less it matters (takes material form) and vice versa. In this sense, your attention to anything is an investment either paid or withheld. I didn’t enjoy how it felt in that chamber of managed attention and I didn’t want to make any of it truer than it already seemed, or even that much, less if possible. My experiment was an effort not to identify with any discontent related to the political broadcast insofar as it had not manifested in my life, to avoid its doing so, already to some extent unavoidable. All of this remains true. The other program’s just not interesting enough anymore. So I just wouldn’t join in those conversations or connect with that current at all in public. People wanted to know where I stood on society’s game-board and I started saying I was apolitical. When I said that, they might have assumed I was a Libertarian or Anarchist or something but really I’m all about alignment and enjoyment in an unregimented unclassifiable natural and personal way. For all we know, like Solomon said, nothing new is under the sun. Only change after change after change of the same essential design, endless permutations of the shape of our dimension. The same no progress only change idea is related to my belief in reincarnation, unlimited chances to solve yourself in contrast to the linear prospect of only one life going forward in time win or lose. It explains my first response to A.I. being use of the text-to-image generators as oracles rather than art robots. I’m not trying to cause any trouble, just an artist refusing to take reality on its own terms, that’s all. The experiment’s not over yet, but I’ve entered a new phase of it. Here I am watching a documentary about Q Anon and the events of January 6th where a multitude of devoted believers stormed the capitol and it makes me laugh now to think such a drastic event could possibly have happened without me taking much notice emotionally, but I didn’t. Here’s a Luke Rhinehart video promoting the idea of election by lottery which you’ve got to admit would be a far cry more democratic than the game going now, if entirely unpredictable.
I signed a contract with spontaneity somewhere deep in the void years ago, and I have been rewarded by my faith to that unspoken vow with weird fortunes. My life has been full of excitement, but I’m starting to understand the value and appeal of safe, warm comfort. Both of my parents are dead now. I’ve inherited enough money to start a small business here in Denver or anywhere else and elevate to the next level of attainment. I still don’t think politics is the only thing worth paying attention to, but if that’s the kind of thing that happens when you stop paying attention, racism and riots and dogged blind belief in mind control and talking points, I guess I’ll have to reexamine my disconnection there and come to terms with it. I’ll be voting again, who knows what that means anymore, but I always vote, especially the last few big ones. As far as the new life goes, I’ve got a few new writing projects on the stove and I’ve been thinking about which careers will outlive the advent of A.I., which careers require humanity as an essential, unreplaceable element, and coming up with new things to try all the time. So I’m watching this thing about Q Anon, and the blah blah rioters storming the blah blah blah Steve Bannon all this stuff, all these dried-out husks chattering, and it makes me want to change the channel cause that kind of program’s not refreshing or inspiring even slightly. Somehow it keeps you watching anyway because of its built-in tension and drama as if those machinations were the very most important ones in fact, but what else might be on? What’s the next experiment?
Camp Elasticity 