As a species, I often sit in awe of what we are able to do. As a NEW species, I am FLABBERGASTED by what computers can do – and though I’m a Lover of science fiction and, much to my own detriment, an enthusiastic first-adopter of those new technologies I can afford, this morning I find myself frightened by the world.
Mayhaps it’s my own recent brush with JUST HOW underpowered my own tech prowess is? The last several days have seen me struggling with my own little website, combing through PHP code line by line trying to understand Fatal Errors and missing modules. I think of the amazing things I’m able to do with this device in front of me, and I know that without it my forays into home recording and video making and communication would all be doomed, but sometimes – with the screen-induced migraine crashing in and the blurring lines of code in front of me – I wonder what the real cost of it all is.
And then on mornings like this, as I see frightening realistic “deepfakes” deployed to fool the most tech-savvy among us, and AI’s generating photo-realistic renderings of the never-was on the fly – I wonder what the real POINT of it all is.
A friend of mine is currently in an ICU, a thankfully-becoming-rarer COVID hospitalization statistic, incommunicado but I’m sure I’d hear SOMETHING if things turned to the worse, right? Someone would tell me something?
I dreamt she was drugged and assaulted by another friend of mine, and people SORT of believed her but she was a little flirty and he’s got such a good reputation and it was an ugly situation made uglier because ilyAIMY was opening for his band. I was stressed, tech, lines not run, sound wasn’t my problem except sound is ALWAYS my problem and no-one had written a setlist which, since there were so many other things going on, not least-of-which being me worrying about whether or not I should call out what I knew about the singer of the other band from the stage, I wanted to have a setlist written out.
And the other band wasn’t making it any easier. I saw them ushering in a huge swath of their fans through the wrong door to avoid the $5 cover. I saw on their setlist that they were covering Sublime’s “Date Rape” and they’d asked the bar to serve the drink that the singer had used to drug my friend… it was ugly and awful and Heather and I had a big fight about what we should do about it and I woke up feeling miserable…
But that misery slowly faded as I remembered I was 17 and I realized I’d gotten through that and I could get through ANYTHING. I gloried in the joy that comes from feeling young and free and healthy. I thought about how full of wonder and possibility Life looked, glowing in the mind’s eye, a long road stretching into the future. And I looked over at my calendar and thought “huh, my math’s off” and realized I wasn’t ANYTHING ending with a 7, I was something ending with a 9! I’d just lost two years! And then I realized my math was still off! I must be 29? Wait … no … 39? Holy crap! I’m 49 and almost 50!!??? (in reality, at least I know I’m 47 and not this slow at math) The visceral feeling of 30 years of my Life suddenly having already been Lived, ripped away from me in the instant of waking. My body aching and scarred and weakened by inactivity, fat and tired. All that feeling of youth and health inversed in a sudden, stabbing moment.
Today should be a good day. We’re getting on the road to drive north to Massachusetts for a couple of low-impact shows. It’s sunshiney and it’ll be five degrees cooler when we get out of the car tonight than if we were back home setting up the Lair. But I’m struggling back against these dream feelings of betrayal, of real feelings of worry, of the dream sense of loss.