Author: foxtongue

when Ray asked what I would like for my birthday, I don’t think this is what he had in mind

A very nice man at Sacred Heart jabbed a new hole in my left ear today. He had short black hair and a kind smile and only made fun of me a little bit when I chickened out on the rest of the planned piercings. Part of it was the shock of the needle, (AND THE SOUND), but mostly I had reached my pain tolerance for the day, as I had been walking too much, and the blast of heat from my ear reached down to my broken toe and together they screamed until I said, “stop”. Soon I will get more, perhaps even finish the job in one go, adding new tiny rings until I get to my lucky number, all the way up to the top.

Honestly, I was hoping to have my right ear pierced in time for the wedding, the better to fit in, as I feel a bit like the odd one out, the overly unique creature tacked on to a traditional ceremony, vivid and different and possibly too bright. I wanted, at least, in the very least, to no longer be lopsided, especially given how together the people are who I’m standing with, as I help walk Kyle and Lisa up the aisle. Instead, I now have two holes in my left ear and zero in my right. Plan: excellent. Execution: could have gone better.

The new plan, which is, I admit, the old plan that I didn’t go through with, is to dope myself up with pain pills, then have them go through and give me a total row of six on the left side and two on the right. (There’s something about odd numbers I dislike.) Possibly, when I am so threaded with holes, I might finally get around to putting a small stud in my nose as well, though when I think about them all at once, I can’t help but think I’m crazy. Not as mad as planning a tattoo, but still, since when was this the sort of thing I craved?

light as a favourite song

I was reading when when the tiny, bright bird flew in through the window and attempted, I suppose, to drink from the bright colours of my hair. To my credit, though it nearly surprised me out of my skin, I did not give in to my initial impulse to swat whatever was thrashing, panicked, a few inches away from my head. Instead I froze. I froze, and very gently began to turn, hoping sincerely that it was not a mouse, while putting my hand up, the better to support the creature as it was lifted from the cushion, held only by the tangled net of my hair. Imagine my surprise as I gathered the mystery in the palm of my hand, still swaddled in threads of hair, only to discover a hummingbird!

It was a beautiful thing, vibrant, green and red and amazing. I was astonished. Not only by the random luck of it, but the pure shock of discovering hummingbirds can be so far north. To my mind, they are practically tropical, another reason to love California. To discover one here in Seattle, a block away from the I5, against the backdrop of a gray, middling day, was shocking. It looked like a creature escaped from a fairy story, too much like a living jewel for rain or brick buildings, yet there is was, bound in my hair, beak like a black pin, feathers gleaming, chest thrumming, a lucid dream in the palm of my hand.

Future Fatigue

Essential Reading: William Gibson’s Book Expo American Luncheon Talk.

An excerpt:

Say it’s midway through the final year of the first decade of the 21st Century. Say that, last week, two things happened: scientists in China announced successful quantum teleportation over a distance of ten miles, while other scientists, in Maryland, announced the creation of an artificial, self-replicating genome. In this particular version of the 21st Century, which happens to be the one you’re living in, neither of these stories attracted a very great deal of attention.

In quantum teleportation, no matter is transferred, but information may be conveyed across a distance, without resorting to a signal in any traditional sense. Still, it’s the word “teleportation”, used seriously, in a headline. My “no kidding” module was activated: “No kidding,” I said to myself, “teleportation.” A slight amazement.

The synthetic genome, arguably artificial life, was somehow less amazing. The sort of thing one feels might already have been achieved, somehow. Triggering the “Oh, yeah” module. “Artificial life? Oh, yeah.”

Though these scientists also inserted a line of James Joyce’s prose into their genome. That triggers a sense of the surreal, in me at least. They did it to incorporate a yardstick for the ongoing measurement of mutation. So James Joyce’s prose is now being very slowly pummelled into incoherence by cosmic rays.

Noting these two pieces of more or less simultaneous news, I also noted that my imagination, which grew up on countless popular imaginings of exactly this sort of thing, could produce nothing better in response than a tabloid headline: SYNTHETIC BACTERIA IN QUANTUM FREE-SPACE TELEPORTATION SHOCKER.

Alvin Toffler warned us about Future Shock, but is this Future Fatigue? For the past decade or so, the only critics of science fiction I pay any attention to, all three of them, have been slyly declaring that the Future is over. I wouldn’t blame anyone for assuming that this is akin to the declaration that history was over, and just as silly. But really I think they’re talking about the capital-F Future, which in my lifetime has been a cult, if not a religion. People my age are products of the culture of the capital-F Future. The younger you are, the less you are a product of that. If you’re fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don’t know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one’s own culture.

The Future, capital-F, be it crystalline city on the hill or radioactive post-nuclear wasteland, is gone. Ahead of us, there is merely…more stuff. Events. Some tending to the crystalline, some to the wasteland-y. Stuff: the mixed bag of the quotidian.

See Also:

  • Science (the future is now).
  • Plastic antibody works in first tests in living animals.

    • when hummingbirds attack!

    I just caught a freaking hummingbird in my hair!

    It’s been flying around in a panic since I got it untangled from my hair, so I put the cats in the washroom and put out a shallow cup of fruit juice. Not sure what else there is to do. I’d take a million photos if my camera wasn’t out of batteries. Now what?

    ps. I had no idea there were hummingbirds in Washington state. This is amazing and wonderful and strange.