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dystopia overload
Sunday, November 13 2016
This morning I installed sixteen additional gigabytes of DDR3 dynamic RAM into Woodchuck, my main computer. It now has 32 gigabytes of RAM, which is 512 times the amount of RAM my first "modern" PC (a 64 MB Windows 95 machine that I assembled from components in 1997). I'm hoping 32 gigs of RAM will make it so I can open Photoshop whenever I feel like it without wondering if it will actually work. I tend to run my computer with so many open windows and tabs (many of which I've forgotten about) that it needs a lot of memory. It would've been less expensive to just learn to shut windows when I am done with them, but that's not the way I work. In normal day-to-day usage, I won't notice the new memory at all, though the hope is that it will step in to help at precisely those moments when my computer is causing me the most stress. The danger, naturally, is that it will allow me to go much longer between bouts of window closing, and my computer will spend most of its time working about as well as it used to.
It's been hard to process the strange turn politics have taken in the United States, so I've been turning to television and film archives for an answer. This morning, having seen a reference to it somewhere, I watched the famous 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone entitled "It's a Good Life" (to get it, I'd had to download the entire 156 episodes using Bittorrent). In "It's a Good Life," a six year old boy named Anthony has somehow come to possess powers of omnipotence and the ability to read minds, though he otherwise remains a normal six year old boy. Consequently, when people displease him, he impulsively turns them into grotesques or casts them "into the cornfield" (whatever that means). Nobody will allow their children to play with him because inevitably bad things happen to them, so he's left to play by himself in the dirt, creating monstrosities and killing them when he tires of them. Those forced to interact with Anthony feel the need to smile and agree to all his desires, no matter how destructive or inane. You can see where I'm going with this. Donald Trump is an impetuous child trapped in a 70 year old body. Nobody around him ever tells him he is wrong or that bad things are coming his way. Not too long ago, of course, the damage Donald Trump could do was contained. Soon, though, he will become the most powerful man on Planet Earth. He will become Anthony. God help us all. I found it all so chilling that I made a cover photo for my main Facebook account featuring a repeating pattern of Anthony's face with two images overtop it: one, a frame from a television show Anthony "created" and forced his captive adult sycophants to watch (it featured two triceratops dinosaurs fighting to the death), and the other a lifeless head wearing a peaked cap, the result of Anthony turning someone who argued with him into a jack-in-the-box.
After Gretchen left for her shift at the Golden Notebook in Woodstock, I started wondering about what had happened to the dogs. [REDACTED] I wandered into the woods a short ways down the Stick Trail in hopes of finding them. While I was there, I admired the autumn calm of the forest, thinking it a fragile marvel in the face of the looming horror that was, in that area, known only to me. And in thinking that, the place felt somewhat sinister. I felt vaguely mocked by the falling of leaves and the waving of branches.
Back at the house, I got a call from Gretchen. It seems our dogs had found their way down to near Canary Hill Road and been barking at a treed bear cub. Some guy [REDACTED] had found them, brought them to his house (the one farthest northwest up Cantine Road), found Gretchen's cellphone number on one of their tags, and called her. This could've been bad, but apparently this guy likes dogs, and his wife had brushed off the ticks and fed them treats. Now they were tied to his pickup truck. Gretchen gave me his number, and I called to ask for directions. The guy seemed about as gruff and unpleasant as I expected. There is a certain amount of tension between people (like Gretchen) with city area codes and nondescript television accents and people who have lived around here for generations (especially the kind living at the end of a long dead-end road in a remote valley). There's a tendency to think that, with our city-slicker ways, we're hopelessly naïve about the ways of nature and the culture of people who hunt and chop wood.
I got in the Subaru and drove down to Hurley Mountain Road and then grabbed Canary Hill Road at its southern-most junction therewith (it's a loop around a spectacular series of cliffs just west of Hurley Mountain Road). Close as this is to home, I don't know if I'd ever been on this stretch of road. The terrain here is rough and rocky, though the population is denser than I'd expected. The houses tend to be makeshift and close to the road, and there is evidence of a lot of typically red-state behavior (hunting targets, piles of wood, old cars in states of disrepair, and trees that have been pruned without much knowledge of what a tree needs to survive). This is not Clinton country.
I passed what I'd been told would be a big "pine" tree (it was a Norway spruce) and at the end of the road came to a clearing. There was a red pickup truck with Ramona and Neville tied to its bumpers with a piece of yellow plastic rope. They seemed rather happy to see me. As I was approaching them, the guy whose place it was came walking up. He was maybe sixty years old, mustachioed, bald, and smelled of cigarettes. I was friendly, introducing Ramona and Neville and saying how much they (well, mostly Ramona) love to chase bears. I went on to say that the dogs rarely make it out this far. The guy told me about the ticks and the treats, and then said something horrifying about how some people shoot dogs if they seem them chasing bears or deer. He claimed that a local landowner named Hαrdenburgh (I think that was the name) shot two dogs this year already. I can't imagine it being an accepted practice in America for someone to shoot dogs just for the crime of being dogs, especially when they're chasing bears, which can easily climb the nearest tree, but if there's anything a Trump victory has taught me, we're living in a much grimmer, meaner America than I thought. If Trump's example is to be believed, we now live in a dystopia where going out of your way to make other people's lives miserable for the most selfish and trivial of reasons is tolerated and even encouraged. It's possible, though, that this guy was bullshitting me, hoping to make me (the stupid city slicker who can't control his own dogs), feel even more grateful for the big favor he clearly thought he'd performed. I thanked the guy as I was leaving, but the experience set further set me further on edge.
Back at the house, I started work on a crude little painting of Neville and Ramona using an old credit card as a canvas. I wouldn't complete it until later this evening, when it would look like so:
As always on a Sunday, I dropped Neville off at the bookstore in the mid-afternoon. [REDACTED] On the way home, I stopped by the thrift store at both Hurley Ridge Market (mostly for soy milk) and the Tibetan Center (which I'd told Gretchen that I feel is a "safe space" in these Trumpified times). The only things I could find to buy were some picture-hanging hardware and a simple silvery wall-mount lamp fixture, which were a bit more expensive than expected. I have to start coming during the week when the skinny guy is working there; the skinny woman who works on Sundays is mildly unpleasant and a bit of a gouger. While I was there poking around in that one corner I frequent (the northeast), a youngish mother was there with two incredibly bratty kids who kept whining and complaining in voices that suggested unseen swollen glands. The future is so broken.
Later in the day, I watched a several episodes of Black Mirror, the British show featuring one-hour episodes examining the harrowing consequences of current technological and social trends extrapolated into the not-too-distant future. The first season had started out rather weak, with that infamous episode in which the Prime Minister was forced by a hostage-taking terrorist to have sex on live television with a pig. But by the third episode of the first season ("The Entire History of You"), the show was feeling more nuanced and fully-realized. In that episode, we experience the inevitable problems that come with being able to rewind and review the recordings made by an electronic video recording device implanted inside one's head. We all have the problem of obsessing too much about experiences we've had, but just imagine how much worse it would be if you could go back and rewatch them, show them to others, and know that others have recordings that they could show you of things you haven't seen. But the show didn't really hit its stride until the second season. The first episode of that is called "Be Right Back," and it was some of the best television I'd seen in a very long time. The episode deals with how technology can help (and fail to help) when coping with loss. Technologies for preserving memories of the dead have existed for a long time, and we're introduced to a familiar one early in the episode: a photograph. Photographs are, on some level, a limited simulation of a human being, one that can stand in when the people they represent have died. But what if the simulation could be more robust? We're taken down that rabbit hole, and it's deliciously heartbreaking.
The world as depicted in "Be Right Back" isn't especially dystopic, but one presented in the next episode, "White Bear," was terrifyingly so. It showed a world where reality television and a revitalized medieval penchant for revenge and cruelty had made masses of humans indistinguishable (in at least one context) from zombies. Watching it left me emotionally damaged, and when I later woke in the middle of the night, I felt so anxious and depleted of serotonin that my body was in physical pain.
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