Apr 20, 2020

us

‪some days I remember the lies you told me and i laugh at both of us‬

‪at me, for wanting so badly to believe you‬

‪at you, for having the audacity to try them on me in the first place‬

‪later you asked me if i wanted to talk about it, the lies‬

‪i laugh about that too‬

it was probably all a mistake

Dec 22, 2019

ABW

Bernard was awake. He glanced at the time -- 4:33. His flight wasn't for another few hours. Awake twenty-seven minutes before his first alarm, regardless. He didn't need much time to get ready; his villa in the Bahamas was a twenty minute ride to the airport. He did want to be first on the plane, though. It was a busy time of year for trips to the Southern hemisphere; this he knew.

This *everyone* knew. The spring equinox had passed just three days ago, in another week the island would be largely deserted. Again. The sun is hot. The sand gets warm. The water won't cool you off.

The alarm went off. Bernard sat up and reached for his earbuds, silencing the alarm with his decisive movements. The lights dimmed, then shifted to a warm glow, matching the tone the sunlight would make, when it first stikes the house.

Bernard was wealthy. He owned the local e-bike exchange. His villa was outfitted with the latest in sun capture technology, with enough capacity to allow his A/C to run 24/7, all through the winter. The molten salt battery backup being the largest indulgence, and mostly an indulgence, he had allowed himself here. In the off-season, like most of his solar capture peers, the excess energy he harvested from the sun went to securing his digital assets with the bootleg crypto miners he had bought from a dark exchange a few years ago. That was before miners became hard to come by, before the heat waves and off-season fires decimtaed the factory work forces. Before the national powers consolidated their grip on production, and bought up all excess stock. Before they consolidated their grip on the internet; the exchanges were all incredibly had to get access to these days.

Bernard knew he, like his neighbors, was lucky.

The 5:10 delivery of croissants, dried jerky, and finely chonked pineapple squares arrived, the electric motor hum of the drone passing overhead pulled him out of his shower reverie. He toweled off and started a last minute check of his luggage, prepping the bike for his short ride to the airport.

Bernard traveled light these days -- just his keyboard, headphones, and monitors. He needed it all to log online, to keep track of the production schedules and time lines for his mostly automated machine parts supply company. His contacts in Thailand were particularly good at keeping up with his erratic hours and requests for new prototypes.

Bag packed and breakfast largely eaten, Bernard pulled the concrete barricades down over the villa windows, double checked the electrical connections for the mining gear, and puttered off down the clay-paved road to the airport.

The island was awake -- a few other cars were on the road already this morning. South, that's where they were headed, every single human would be gone, and soon.

ABW was the joke -- "Always Be Wintering". Weird to think that just a century ago summering had been not only possible but fashionable. Bernard preferred the winter days though -- the early sunsets and long nights were without end. He didn't really get credit for it, but Bernard had been the one to coin the phrase, in the late twenties. A blogpost he had written had gone viral. He had written as a wry commentary on his own personal lifestyle, since he'd been a winter nomad for a years already at that point. Not because of the heat, but for the eternal sweater game he could pull. At least, could, then. It was getting a bit too warm these days, at least in the few spots he spent most of his time. His investment in relocating the cotton trade had paid off pretty well in the meantime.

The islands really weren't what they used to be. Bernard owed some of the highest land on the place, but his models showed it all going underwater in the next two years. He was pretty sure a hurricane this summer would wash away another good portion before then. He had already made plans to put his villa up for sale at the end of the summer, the legions of winterers grew every year. He assauged his conscience about selling soon-to-be damaged goods by planning to only sell it at cost, more or less. Minus the miners, of course. These he was moving to his most recent toehold in Greenland, which should be finished at summer's end. He wasn't sure yet how Greenland fit into the ABW lifestyle, the daylight swings weren't something he was sure he could handle for long periods of time.

He had just celebrated his 53rd birthday, happy Aires season. His model showed Greenland was a long game play, for his retirement in twenty years or so. By then, he calculated, he wouldn't care about the daylight patterns affecting his focus cycles so deeply. That was the plan, at any rate.

The plan had been working out so well so far.

At the airport, he checked his electric-bike into the elevated concrete bunker, originally built by JUMP bikes; he had taken over the e-bike's rental system for the island a few years back, when he first moved to the island. The automated attendant refunded his seasonal deposit and swang down the metal rolling door behind him.

Bernard strolled across the clay road, into the rounded, concrete structure that served as the waiting lounge. It had been rebuilt a few decades ago to withstand the high wind storms that were an almost daily occurrence now, in the late fall.

Out the open gateway, he could see the Redontor, erected ages ago by the re-colonizers, as they called themselves. The indigent population had been wiped out in a large storm cycle, an unpredicted week of daily hurricane landings that had decimated most islands in the Caribbean and surrounding Gulf Coast states. There wasn't enough catastrophic aid hands or funds available to reach every island -- a fever broke out and the potable water dried up. Everyone died. A few Bahamanian expats, mostly from the NYC community, came together in the aftermath to rebuild some parts of what was left of the islands. They had erected the state in tribute to their dead past, an echo of the marvelous one still standing down in Rio. Bernard had bought his villa land from one of the original re-colonizers, who moved to the Swiss Alps a few years ago to start another communal movement. This was before ABW came into vogue, when the summer heat had just started claiming full-timers. They got out while they could.

There weren't any full-timers left now. Some had become ABWs, others had followed Chad to the Alps, still more had simply died. People died from heatstroke, from starvation. It was just how things worked themselves out now.

The flight was full, as Bernard had expected. He settled into his window seat and switched his devices to Airplane Mode, which would connect directly to the SatNet once in the air instead of using the local relays.

The plane launched silently into the early morning air, its electric turbines whirring up to cruising altitude through a low, southward breeze. Bernard could see the large storm his models had predicted springing up that afternoon gathering steam on the eastern horizon, as they made their way southwards.

Bernard hoped his neighbors would ge tout in time, before the heat became truly deadly. The storm had small yet significant chance of knocking flights down for a bit if took too much of the electricity grid offline. They needed the sun to recharge the plane, to get off the island.

The ABW lifestyle had its ironies -- the sun was both the enabler of your globe trotting lifestyle; it was also the sum of your ever-threatened demise.

May 20, 2019

procrastinate

i'm really struggling with confronting work today. i've told myself that it's ok to run away. i can run away as long as i'd like to, but there are certain places that are off limits for that running, one of which is twitter. writing is okay though -- this blog is a safe space.

i make mistakes.

one of which seems to be not opening up my terminal getting to typing first thing this morning. the sooner i do it, the better off i'll be.

ok here goes.

May 5, 2019

moar to say

i don't actually want to type any more. i just want to emote. that feeling of finding myself through an attempt to digitize it. to write it. to feel it out.

so much anxiety about the destination. about the meaning. about the being understood. about liking this when i go back to read it, not just now but two three four years from now. forever. the forever book.



is that what this is? my forever book.

having read other popular blogs i think i know finally why this isn't a popular blog. why it's not something that you share or tell people about. it's not the kind of discourse that you popup a forum for.

i could try moving it to a new format. i could make this into a newsletter.


there's nothing wrong with trying new, weird things. may be i can merge some of the disparate identities, slowly draw them together into the real.


album pages don't make sense for singles.  maybe this outpost doesn't make sense for this output. what does it mean to build community online? hard to say huh.

ok, it's bedtime.

Apr 27, 2019

expellsion

my brain doesn't work like others do. i think that this is true of all of us. for a while i used to worry about typing and talking in weird, convoluted sentences and phrases but i think it's just a way of being. in the end of things, there is a brightness here. that's what matters, i think, truly.

do they said, what it is that you need to do. what you would do if the revolution was won. what would i be doing when the revolution is  won?

it's worth considering. all modes of being involve living. that's the hard part, i think. living, in the tickled sense, is a lot of being in my brain. moving out of it is hard.

i dreamed deep a few days ago about you and the things that you've told me. it's genuine, i need to embrace that. to trust my thoughts on these things. it didn't make me sad to see your future. i don't think it's a sad thing, i think it's perfectly normal. why do none of you remind me of me? or was seeing your future a bit like looking into my own? if not in this singular example, but as a hope that i will soon be able to reach as deeply into my own and see it, fully, in one singular prophesy.

i don't know if i write this way with the intention to hide, to not explain. this feels like the actual display of my interior thoughts, but composed in form. that seems hard to run from. that this is my idea, not so much of fun, but at least of being. this kind of writing is a way of being. it is a mental space that i can crawl into. i do worry about it being legible. i worry a lot. it is a deep stress that i feel as i write these words it's leaving me, leaving my body. or is it sinking even more deeply into the pit of my stomach.

this is something i don't talk or write about. that i'm afraid to. that's how i imagine the person reading these will feel about them. will they be comprehensible? is it possible to see?


there's two foreigners visiting town this week. both of them are natives of their own countries, yet they speak and express themselves fluently in english. they are a part of our world and our culture. have they always been online? is this what the future looks like? i worry for us, for this flattening. it flattens in some corners and hides itself in others, the culture does. what will happen to french on the internet? will it forever have its corner? how big is the 'french on the internet' corner, really? what about the japanese on the internet? or mandarin on the internet?

there are a lot of things i am curious about.

i do want to know what the web looks like. it's funny, when you call it a crawler because it's not actually crawling anywhere. it doesn't run or live or exist anywhere other than on your computer. rather than crawling the web it sends out http requests to every domain number that it finds.

there's actually multiple ways to crawl the internet, you know. i mean, none of them live on anywhere other than your computer, as far as i know.

the other way to crawl the internet would be to iterate through the entire public IP address space. you can just probe every single IP address and it's port at 80. i wonder if this is one thing that the new IPv6 space will make practically impossible. to what extent was the expansion driven by this need for deep internet surface.

it's incredible to think that the internet, the http port 80 world, is so large, really. the sheer amount of landscape that you can see buried in just port 80. there's 65 thousand ports per machine. the biggest one lives at 80 (though increasingly moving to 443).

it's weird to think that the bitcoin network exists as a set of nodes that are reachable through the internet, the DNS network. is there anything connected that isn't on the DNS network?

to some extent that's what the blockstream boys are working on. building out a portion of the internet that is outside of DNS, somewhat. or does it all, at its core, resolve to DNS?

i think it all resolves to DNS. which is absolutely bonkers when you think about it, how locked in to DNS we are. absolutely bonkers.



i wonder a lot what it'd be like to go back and learn about what the internet is now. these days. i have this really strong desire to go out and teach school children about the internet. this like, permanent camp or after school program that is all about unix and the internet. networking for children. we'd build spider nets and domain crawlers. we'd talk about how computers experience the world. we'd build ships and sail them into ports, like port 80. we'd learn about the diffie hellman key exchange and we'd build fortified 443's.

networking for children.

maybe they'd make friends in class. maybe they'd learn what it is to be a citizen on the internet. we'd learn about anonymity and the dark web and digital money. we'd learn about them as things should be learned, experienced.



there was culture then, back before the internet but it was shared and scoped in a much different fashion. what does that culture then, the kenny g's of the past, tell us to expect for our own future? what about boomer pain is a reflection of all of their fantasies? how does the old fantasy build itself into the pain and desires that they all feel now?

at what point is it our responsibility, as the adults of the now, to stop and put to rest the dreams of our old parents. we let them get away with more than they should. they've learned how to enslave us, have they not? bound to them for how long.

bound to them for how long.

back in the past your family was yours forever. you lived near them they were a part and parcel of your being. how much of belonging and being of the family is not being of your parents?

did the destruction of the clan serve to boost the patriarch, to the doubt and declination of all wider family as family. i'll, we'll, never know. my family wasn't bigger than my father, really for a long time.

i need to let these things go. just. let them go. stand up for myself and walk away from these other's dreams.



is kamasi washington just our generation's kenny g?  i thought we were more and different and that those things would die but now i don't know any more.





god i really have to get out of here. more than i know but as every bit as much as i feel. this place is... bad.

Forgetting.

What I want to know is how it came to be like this. With mother, without father. We started together, a state that none of us have known for far too long now. What was life like, back then before the Internet bound us together in an untouchable, unseeable certainty?

What kind of lives were they all living, back then before the Internet? How did it all come together, if at all? Did it come together? What is together, if anything at all?

Why is there so much pain there for us, for all of us?

Juanes plays on the radio and we dance, together. When's the last time that we danced?

What kind of life is it that to live, not knowing the last time that there was common music and common togetherness and just common dancing. Dancing friends. Friends out dancing and loving and moving and breathing pasos.

Performance.

Que se corres, carita.

Nem quero sobrevivir ainda. Ainda eh a morte que danca pra frente, paso por paso. Sultry, coming, advancing paso a paso, pra frente.

O que voce sabe, ja

Que se vive, ja.

Feb 14, 2019

it was easy

it was easy to make the transformation. i just blew you up into a real human. i took the caricature that i had of you in mind and proceeded to cast it out via eviction by lack of space. there's too many corners and extent to you now to fit behind the cardboard copy that i had had. it is useless now. it served its purpose as a place marker, one of the many that i have held in mind over the years.

did yesterday actually happen? i'm kind of proud of myself for walking forward with it, anyway, you know. the walk into your fears and all of that.

this could be good

... (*real*) ...

us

‪some days I remember the lies you told me and i laugh at both of us‬ ‪at me, for wanting so badly to believe you‬ ‪at you, for having t...