close this world. open the next

(written at that point in the night where I stop writing intentionally and it's like a flood gate breaking and speaking from this strange other place I don't always understand. All I wanted to do was jot down a conversation I'd had earlier...)

"The problem," she said, "is that everything's buzzing. You can't go anywhere without feeling it pressed up against you, all jittery."

"Well certainly, all the appliances and gadgetry always on everywhere, creates quite an audible hum."

"No, it's not that, something in the way we communicate, we're all so close and information's so fast.

"Not like in the old days when you could really be alone, silent and uninformed. It's growing louder too, everyone feels like we're on the verge of something big, all this nervous energy. I don't know what, history happening. The sound of change like growing pains."

"But don't you think people always feel this way, like things are changing irreperably, like that moment they're alive is sort of always the end of the past and the beginning of something entirely different?"

"Sure, I guess it's always the end of the world for somebody. People get to be adults and suddenly time and the weight of the world closes in around them. But this..."

"It's getting more intense."

"Yes. You can almost feel it buzzing, almost see it in the air. The information. Ever since we've been able to record stories and pass on knowledge, probably before then, but now. The internet. We just bounce off each other and all the gaps are closing in and there's nowhere else to go. It's like, I don't know what's going to happen. But it is."

I don't know either, but I've heard people call it the Singularity. But that little bit of data'll just add to the buzz, so I keep shut. She's in prophet mode and the bees are still dripping out her mouth, sticky swollen secrets of a goddess no one worships anymore. Last year she did this to me, and I'm still shaking, faint traces outline that thing sitting there, waiting. Non-event, inevitability, something like the dead center scratch of a record, or a deep breath. Maybe the core of all, what, intelligence? A gathering up of knowledge and tongues beyond the names of things, where traditions and half-truths fall like spent masks, all the glittering deities and philosophies that couldn't get enough air time, where all the myths are shown to refer to exactly the same theme.

I don't say, of course it's buzzing, it's all energy anyway, vibrating back and forth and making life and we're all just excited in it cuz we're getting to a point we can just rest, or look sideways and approach it all from a different angle. A point we can talk about what the point is. No wonder what's wrong with kids these days, myself included with all our glorious lack of attention spans. Raised in the buzz. We don't want stability, the same old streets and routines till we die like older generations capitulated to entropy and the inertia of the familiar. We want change, novelty, excitement. The next big thing. None of which is fulfilled by this materialistic monoculture with its spectacle of cheap disposable distractions, all of it invented to fill that void and reduce us to one blank slate. None of it's real and we all know it. Don't know what's going to happen, but nothing lasts forever and this beast sure ain't sustainable much longer.

Maybe that's what all the buzz is about, this subliminal whispering of fear and longing and oh my god (if you still exist) what in your name are we gonna do to get by? The cover's blown off this whole mess we made and we can start to see it for what it is, naked and writhing, and we have all this knowledge and systems but what the hell are we using them for if not our most intimate needs of survival? Porn and online shopping? Reality TV and better gas mileage? Maybe a war or two's worth of high fangled space age killing devices. Glorified clubs.

We're buzzing cuz we're getting close. Cuz it's cold out and the air's thin & crisp and sound carries so well it falls off and crunches on the ground,* a tinkle of grace notes and grumbling, like Snoopy knocking the notes off that music staff always hanging out over Schroedder's piano. Charles Schultz was a genius, saw the matrix crumbling and sketched it out with whimsy, before it was just innumerable floating green digits and bad action sequences. Australian aborigines tell a never ending story of the world's creation from the dreamtime. They can't stop telling it cuz the story is this creation. So's the Torah. Language is a virus and man the medium. The idea of ideas conflicting and trying to survive is infinitely amusing in this light. We are just the Universe trying to explain itself, without eating foot. The master meme behind the madness.

*The way winter light falters and flattens out around the edges so everything seems false and distinct, a flimsy film over the mechanisms. The way people's faces are coming off, if you've noticed that, twisting about and unable to contain the horde of emotions and contradictions behind a single coherent veneer of calm or dignity, making both lies and truth equally impossible to comport. It's really quite horrifying if you didn't think everyone else is probably looking right through your face too. Like the eyes of the window of the soul suddenly spilled over into great yawning chasms of expression that were always there but lay only barely concealed beneath flesh and social mores. The big king eye at the center of the storm...

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