The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of paraheliotropic trees

Mass psychology. Group rights. The Rule of the Mob, and the Individual, the Unit, as a deficient organism in our 2nd Level Biosphere. Memes, and Ideas, and spheres, and the Ego shrinks as the Superego grows, the Superego being the Mediator, the Filter, the Frame, the Master of the Face, the Eater and the Disgorger of our Social Selves.

Think of all these non-famous people — aware of the wider world but unable to effect — a certain powerlessness there — an anxiety and fear that history will eat us up and chew us out with none the wiser — fed back into the soylent green machines quicker and quicker —

And even now — we live in this digital soup — where all information is quickly going flat — horizontal — and vertical history just becomes one more component of horizontal culture — the shared living space (cultural lebensraum) of All Now Living, with the Ghosts having a derivative say as well through their descendants, biological and spiritual. Or are Ghosts now simply also funneled down into the great Culturepool, the Well of Mimir, from which god-children seeking wisdom go drink and gamble limbs.

It’s going faster now. Accelerating. The 2nd Derivative — the Rate of Change of the Rate of Change. Faster. Blinking. Miss it. Business plans. Projections. White hospital rooms, and hospices, and then the new class, mewling and squealing are the words used to describe it.

Sharing this world. This space. The Sharespace. The Set. The Possibility Set. Possible Worlds. All Possible Worlds. Heterotopia. What is this blog? A Whiteboard? A Mindmap? Thought, Extrusion.

I am an individual, with a small amount of individual thoughts and ideas, my private space that is still left to me, but most most most of me has been mortgaged off and sold to Civilization, which has allowed me to even be here. What do I owe Civilization for life? What is the term of my servitude? At what point can I go back to being an animal, scratching for my own food? (well, would I want that? Seems like a shitty job — though its nice to walk beneath the trees)

“What is it like — to have a baby in your belly?” I ask my mother. “Isn’t is really strange?”

“Well I knew you — I felt like I knew you. I would play with you — feel you kicking. I knew your name — either Josh or Sarah — and I knew you were a boy.”

“You mean you guessed it.”

“I knew it.”

“Ok.”

“So, it was a relationship. With a person. Not with a ghost, or a spirit, or some potentiality.”

“No, right, you were a person, real, a baby, not imaginary or artificial at all.”

“Hmm. That makes it even weirder, and grosser, slippery and living.”

“Sure. There’s a little bit that Alien thing” (which clearly is a devilish yanked-from-the-subconscious attempt to tap into those anxieties of growth and good growth/bad growth — baby v. cancer) “but then you get to know the person and you’re sort of anxious to meet them already.”

——
Later my father tells me that he has told his childhood (youngadulthood) friend about this blog, and that the friend likes it.

I think about my father then and my father now and me now and me later and me then (the twinkle, as it were) and say to him:

“It must be crazy to have children.”

“You have no idea,” he says.