I dreamt we went camping with the band. And in my dream I DEFINITELY conflated Heather and Kristen, as my wife does NOT have the camping savvy that my dream wife did. And for clarity, I merely mean the wife in my dream, not the wife that I’d dream of – cause I’m absolutely fine that Kristen wouldn’t know how to pitch those fancy tents that I saw in my mind last night.
I hate camping, but I must admit, we were doing it right. There were guitars and there was food. We’d brought all the Band Kids and Kristen had lit a fire outside every tent, and some inside too – but she had some special trick to making that work. She’d also brought our big beanbag chair and that was a pretty awesome “throne” for whoever was telling a story or leading a song.
It was dark, off in the woods with red sandy earth beneath us. Perfect temperature. I remember her lighting the fires, I remember being worried about the ones inside the tents, and then watching them gutter down to be “just right”.
I just remember it all being “just right”. More of a mood than a memory. A brief scene.
Nice to not be in a nightmare.
The waking world, of course, not so much.
Last night I chatted with a neighbour who sort of looped her story, talking quieter and quieter but repeating the same 4 – 6 sentences word for word about 5 times. It had the intensity of madness or of faulty programming. Over the course of the week watching people flailing as they communicate poorly, or stumble, watching myself forget and fail. Scrolling Facebook for a moment till I see people salivating over the Trump indictment forgetting that for every person who’s excited about how justice is “finally” coming for 45, there’s another who’d been fed an opposite narrative, horrified that fascism is coming down the pike sponsored by state prosecutors. Scrolling Instagram and finding a “history” channel going further and further down white supremacist, Nazi rabbit holes…. But couched in cute little memes so it takes a while to catch the them. A channel that I’ve happily followed for weeks for cute videos of rats suddenly makes some pretty nastily racist comments. Frank Ze peddling a video delivery service based on science and NATURE that, at least in the screenshots, is also doing a lot of pseudoscience, pseudohistory and alien visitation sensationalism.
Ron DeSantis running amok in Florida, dismantling liberal arts colleges, attacking Disney, banning classical Renaissance paintings because they’re “pornography” or because the Virgin Mary’s not smiling enough and is clearly pushing an anti-family values agenda. It wasn’t too long ago that banning religious art while saying “Now, I never read the Bible but she looks too much like a hooker” would get you BURNED by the right, and now he’s the second coming of the Christian Conservative right?
AGI is looming and Congress probably doesn’t even know what that IS. The disinformation potential for mere AI sans General is horrifying and present, and I’m amazed that we HAVEN’T been swamped by exponentially increasing videos of Biden spouting something INSANE (like the fake video of him announcing the draft).
The winds are rising outside, and it’s not a metaphor. Running outside last night to recapture spilled trash and inspired racing trash cans, historic weather events happening regularly. Record-breaking streaks of records being broken.
And the word “unprecedented” ought to be stricken from people’s tongues. We Live in unprecedented times, but no-one seems to know how to response in unprecedented ways. We are all just waiting for it all to go back to normal.
I fear for those Band Kids.