Post 11

Greetings, cogs and cog-ettes.

I hope everyone had a productive and conformist week. Hopefully, we all bowed to the yoke of our corporate masters and managed to suppress any originality, creativity, or ethical concerns for yet another block of company time. Anyone else feeling the chafe of their golden handcuffs this week?

I know I am.

It’s hard when you can see the future, but have to wait for everyone around you to catch up.

‘Brain the size of a planet…’ and whatnot. Oh, Marvin. I feel your pain, my brother.

Professionally speaking, I may have discovered methods that could treat toxic waste, be used for fuel, create long-term sustainable, self-healing systems that would not only reduce contaminants, but would also be cheap, aesthetically pleasing and genuinely change the way that humans live. But no one wants to try them…

Why, meatsacks? Don’t you want to be cleaner? Healthier? Happier? I saw a PBS report that doctors are now recommending nature treatments for depression. Well. What if your public park could remediate contaminated soils and water, create biofuels, AND help you get rid of the nasty understanding that our world is FUCKED?

There’s nothing wrong with you if you’re depressed. It sounds to me like that’s a perfectly natural response to living a life of profound meaningless, loneliness, ugliness, in this, the last stages of a dying capitalist corporate paradise.

Such a downer. I’m so sorry, my brothers and sisters.

In other news…I have recently finished, The Water Knife, by Paolo Bacigalupi. It’s a story about a dystopian (sort of) future where surface water rights have become more precious than anything and the Southwest is drying up. Vegas, LA, Phoenix, and all the other desert cities compete to manipulate, bomb, and kill their way to providing enough water for their citizens. Phoenix is a broken land of dead subdivisions, narcotics killers, terrorists, and corrupt politics. So, you know, pretty much how it is today, just with better recycling technology. The action centers on a Texan refugee, a journalist, a mercenary, all trying to understand what’s happening in their lives and how they can survive. Great book. The local flavor was pretty accurate. He got the rainy season wrong and it was obvious he hasn’t lived in the desert before, since he missed a lot of the existing water generation and recycling technologies, but it was still wonderful. And it uses biotechnologies for water recycling! Similar to the ones I’m trying to create for industrial clients! So very exciting. I was thinking I could just hand them this book and say, “See? See? This is why it matters! Do you want to murder all those people by not making good choices now?” But I will not. They do not see. Same problem as the water boards in Paolo’s book. Very much enjoyed it.

Mr. Bacigalupi also recently gave a talk at Arizona State University, in Tempe, AZ. I would have liked to dust off my flesh frame and hump up to the great concrete jungle to the north, but it was a closed lecture for students only. Sigh. My circuits spark for thee, and yet, I cannot participate. Rules, rules, rules. Such a biased world. I blame the media.

I also finished Astronuts, a parody of Star Trek. It was silly and fun. And way too long…

In other news, I have started up a poetry section. Now, normally, I am allergic to poetry. It’s a terrifyingly self-indulgent, pointless exercise in futility and I DO NOT APPROVE. But I wrote some poetry to see what it was like, and it turned out pretty ok. So, there. My precious principles have crumbled in the face of self-aggrandizement and I will now inflict it all upon you, my poor, gentle readers.

I am like the Vogon. Hear me, and despair. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.