Category: The Future

We’re just buggin’ the shit out of each other

It started out with stopping by, droppin’ in and poppin’ over. Cave to cave. Cabin to cabin.

Then we learned to write with letters and along came letters written to drop in the box and on to whomever.

The telegraph turned letters into tweets – instantaneous and terse.

The telephone turned everything else upside down, inside everywhere – voices over lines of metal – spoken in Spokane heard in Japan. Conversations across the universe. There was nothing more to say. And when they got into homes, there was nowhere to hide. They had you in your house. The perfect crime.

Then phones divided into cellphones and proliferated. Popping up everywhere, public spaces, intimate places. Joined at the hip. Cool shit. The crime perfected.

Emails hail down upon your desktop, your laptop, iPad and cellphone. Damage occurs.

But that was not enough – we’ve rebuilt the telegraph from man to man, phone to phone. Tweeting everything. Leaving out nothing.

We’re dropping by all the time.

We’re just buggin’ the shit out of each other.

Thoughts for October 6

Follicle Law

Why are there so many men with square-staches and bald heads? They’ve been proliferating exponentially for the last decade. Where did all that hair go? Why not beards? It’s as if a rule were decreed by the king of these things making it illegal or immoral for a man to have some hair but not all hair, and that upper lips and chins must be covered by a thin layer of whisker.

The Mother Ship

What has happened to Uptown? When Prince wrote about it, quite frankly, it was still rather a dump, but the arrival of the much-maligned Calhoun Square kicked off a renaissance that ushered in the unique, chic and local boutiques. Now there’s an LA Fitness. An LA Fitness. And somehow, like a fleet of alien spaceships, great big blocky condominium buildings with silly names are moored all around the place. I can’t see the sense in any of this. Who, at one point, looked around and thought, “Congestion. This place needs more residents.”

Skinny Little Lovers

Prisons provide weights – apparently so the hardened criminals can develop even more hardened physiques, making them stronger and more dangerous upon release. I propose we remove all the weights, limit the caloric intake to reduce the physical mass, encourage long distance running (within the confines of the yard), broadcast only Lifetime movies with the likes of Valerie Bertinelli and Marcia Gay Harden, serve up 19th century romantic poetry if anyone wants to read, and drip a steady stream of ecstasy into the water supply.

Big History

This is really important – funny to say considering he’s talking essentially about everything – everything we can (or think we) know through all of history – Big Bang to now. Big History.

Mr. Christian both illuminates our tiny, tiny, tiny place in Big History; but also shows us how vitally important our place is in it – at least in regards to our own survival – that being the survival of the most complex, learned, and learning organisms we know to have existed. It’s not simply hubris to say we’re crazy amazing!

It reminds us that our obliteration would be both the saddest thing we could know, and ultimately, just an infinitesimally small blip in Big History. Humbling, to say the least.

Every kid should watch this every year, at least, as a reminder to just how simultaneously small, yet hugely important, a person they are in Big History.